AFL fans prove parasite to footballers' hosts in social media era
In Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, David Shields observes that for some of us, adulthood doesn’t turn out to have quite as much glory as we thought it would, and going to a game for a couple of hours puts us in touch with something majestic.
Majestic, that is, until a fan thinks the game needs to feature his own odious personality as the central attraction.
To disobey the elementary moral rule that we should be hard on ourselves and as understanding as possible about everyone else, it is wise to assume the Essendon supporter who abused Max Gawn is eleven different kinds of stupid.
The obnoxious incident occurred late in the third quarter of Sunday afternoon’s game between Essendon and Melbourne when Gawn was awarded a free kick near the boundary line. Calling the game for Fox, Jason Dunstall said: “I’d like to see security grab him [the spectator] and chuck him out… it doesn’t matter what he said.”
Gawn then went back and kicked his second goal of the quarter to put Melbourne 23-points up, turned to the Bombers fan and stared him down. By game’s end, Gawn was best afield, and reminded us that the gulf between an angry, opinionated fan and an AFL footballer is as vast as the one between a banker and benevolence.
In any given year, an AFL team is doomed to disappoint its supporters in more than 94% of cases. Clubs sell us hope (there’s always next year), but it’s disappointment we buy – and soaring club memberships suggest we can’t get enough of it. The more disappointed we get, the more demanding and angry it appears we become.
The irascible idiot at Etihad on Sunday afternoon is emblematic of thousands – the Essendon fan who calls talkback radio to beat Joe Daniher about the head; the trolls that hounded the Bulldogs’ Tom Boyd, and the game’s gormless whom AFL media’s Matt Thompson tries so hard to connect with as he stares down the camera and earnestly suggests that Brendon Bolton’s coaching career is on the brink, just three years into a monumental Carlton rebuild.
We are bemused by the incidents such as the one at Etihad on Sunday as they (thankfully) are rare (or at least, less visible) in comparison to the racist and misogynist beery yahoos of an earlier era. Today, you are more likely to find the supporter with an impetuous tongue and a ham-hock intellect retching abuse at their own from a cloistered bunker (or parents’ basement) through social media.
American moral philosopher Eric Hoffer says: “It is an evil thing to expect too much either from ourselves or from others. Disappointment with ourselves does not moderate our expectations from others: on the contrary, it raises them. It is as if we wish to be disappointed in our fellow men.” It goes without saying – Sunday afternoon’s six-goal win aside – that there are a lot of Demon fans disappointed with their lot.
On Saturday, Melbourne defender and former Crow, Jake Lever, revealed that he had deleted his Twitter account following a barrage of abuse after a slow start with his new club.
“It got too much. Footy is so scrutinised now that if you stuff up one thing it’s all over Twitter [and] it’s all over a news article,” Lever told News Corp on the weekend. “I think players need to deal with it in a way where they almost get off it [social media]. Just eliminate it — it does more harm than good.”
Responding to the article, Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin revealed that the club had to tackle the ills of social media with its players. “I think it was a really brave decision by Jake to put that out there and clearly he’s making a stance… [in] the last two years we’ve had a number of players in a similar position and I think that’s a concern industry-wide around social media and the effects that it can have,” said Goodwin.
Online, where truth be not so much damned as not bothered with, the player/fan dynamic is an unequal partnership between parasite and host. It is a relationship perpetually fouled by the sense that although the fans – and if we’re honest, certain elements of the football media – cannot live without the players, players such as Lever are finding themselves “a bit more refreshed” after deleting their Twitter account. “I thought that he was back to his trademark play,” Goodwin said of Lever’s first performance after exiling himself from Twitter.
The fan from the outer’s cult of personal celebrity is nurtured by “football Twitter”. The resources for exposure used to be limited to the broadcaster’s commentary booth or the sport opinion pages. Social media – as it has across all forms of media – has punched a few cracks in the wall. While some diverse, intelligent and interesting voices have pushed through, most of it is weeds.