In 2026 terming yourself a racing ‘fan’ is fraught with danger.

Between animal cruelty activists (who could rightly point to last week’s Caulfield Cup) and anti-gambling advocates, the idea that someone could enjoy horse racing without some kind of deep character flaw is rejected by a significant part of the population.

I do not have the inclination to try to diffuse those arguments in the horse racing context, they are not black and white.

Yet what I can say, with experience, is that it is possible to be completely enchanted by horse racing without being motivated by the gambling dollar.

I was five years old and being babysat by my grandmother, my dad’s mother Sheila.

Perhaps options to be keep my brother and I amused were low, and the afternoon saw the races from Moonee Valley switched on the telly.

It was Cox Plate Day 1986. The race dubbed before, after and forty years later as ‘the race of the century’. Two New Zealand horses, Bonecrusher and Our Waverley Star in a virtual match race.

Tony Bourke wrote in the morning’s The Age that “seldom have two horses and connections received such popular acclaim.”

“Of course, it is possible that another horse will win, but that would be an anti-climax after the huge build-up.”

Being a toddler, I was oblivious to all this. I doubt I had watched a full horse race before.

Can you have a life-changing moment in front of a television at age five? In all the rock docos and books I have consumed you hear about the kid who saw Bowie perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in 1972 (or for the next generation The Smiths and ‘This Charming Man’ in 1983) and how it changed their life, inspiring them to their own rock career.

Bonecrusher and Our Waverley Star was my Bowie.

I loved the idea the idea of footy, had been to a few games and had started collecting footy cards. But did I understand what was happening on the field apart from the idea of kicking the ball? At kinder age, not at all.

This 1986 Cox Plate was different. With 800 metres to go the two champions took off, horse versus horse towards a finish line. It was simple. I understood it all as a contest.

History says it lived up to its billing as the race of the century as for those 800 metres two horses matched each other stride-for-stride just as the experts had tipped.

I was transfixed.

No doubt the thrilling call of Bill Collins added to it all. His voice nearly gave way as he called Bonecrusher the winner and racing “into equine immortality.” I saw something visually incredible, and I heard the urgency from ‘The Accurate One’. It told me this was important.

Years later I spoke to Collins’ colleagues Bryan Martin and Peter Donegan for a story on the caller, where understandably I steered part of the conversation and story towards the magic of that October day in 1986:

“They were coming to face off for the heavyweight title, and it just went to script,” says Martin.

Collins rose to the occasion.

“It was so good, because the call married the moment, and the moment was extraordinary.”

Collins understood the gravity of the race and the level of media hype it had generated; he took the experience of watching a great race to a higher level.

“Here it was the defining moment, and he played his role perfectly, because he said, ‘Here come the New Zealanders, have they gone too early?’”

The riders of Bonecrusher and Our Waverley Star went for broke 800 metres from home to create a thrilling and elongated climax.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bigger roar at a racetrack than that day when Bonecrusher and Our Waverley Star came around the turn,” says Donegan, who by that stage was working with Collins on the Channel 7 broadcast.

“They took off at the 800, and so did Bill!

“He was up there from the 800 and did an amazing job to keep going at that level of excitement for almost a minute.”

On the post Collins exclaimed, “Bonecrusher races into equine immortality!” as it grabbed the lead, a line that Martin still admires today.

“Bill captured it beautifully. It needed the right words at the right time to make it even better and that‘s what we got.”

Donegan and Collins’ colleagues beamed when they checked the video post-race.

“To listen to it back later on, his call was unbelievable.”

It’s a race that stirs the emotions of fans 36 years on, but it wouldn’t be the same without the Collins soundtrack.

“He got it right so many times, but that one was the defining one,” Martin says.

And for the five-year-old it was defining too. I became obsessed with horse racing for the next 18 months.

It probably looked like parental malpractice. Racing was not in my family; my dad was no more than a once-a-year Melbourne Cup punter.

Yet the form guide in The Sun became my constant companion. I read it every morning and of course studied it for Saturdays and then followed the day on radio. I most likely accelerated my reading skills by poring through racing fields.

There was no gambling, I just loved the idea that there were these races happening and winner crowned. And I could learn the names of the horses, jockeys and the colours.

At night when I went to bed, I would pack a form guide and a radio and listen to the trots and the greyhounds because that just seemed logical.

When I started primary school and we were asked to write a storybook, it could only be one thing. My own picture book of the previous year’s 1986 Cox Plate. I can assure you that my first bit of sports writing was not particularly good, but it exists and I have the valid excuse that I had yet to turn six.

I am surprised that we never got a call from the school after that materialised. By then I had cajoled my dad into taking me to Flemington where I saw the Perth sprinter Placid Ark win the Newmarket Handicap. He became my favourite, and another book ensued.

Placid Ark would be involved in controversy and would tragically break down and be euthanised. The ‘book’ was written posthumously, so I had learned there was a dark side to it all.

The highlight though was being entered into a racing tipping competition at my dad’s work. For ten weeks I would wake early on Friday mornings study the form guide, mark my selection for each Melbourne race on the Saturday and send it with dad to work.

It was three points for a win, two for second and one for third. Clearly there was luck involved, but I did have some sense of what horses had beaten other horses, and from what I know I did not just pick the bookies’ favourites - I had my own favourites. At the end of the ten weeks, I had beaten the adults and earned $275 dollars for first prize. I never saw that money (my parents had bills to pay), but for the next few years I did use that money as guilt trip whenever I desperately wanted something from the shops.

***

It was all spawned by that Cox Plate 40 years ago.

Looking back at the newspapers of the time, the racing writers got it right in the immediate aftermath.

Glenn Lester’s piece in Monday’s Age was a beauty. He spoke of sprinkles of rain in the lead-up to the race and how “someone smartly suggest it was ‘to cool the excitement’.” There was the presence of mind to detail Collins’ last 700 metre monologue and how he and the broadcasters “were in marvellous form.” Then there were the little details of going to see Bonecrusher the next day and finding him “nibbling among the tea-tree.”

There was a grandeur far beyond the punt.

The two horses would both live to be old men. They were born months apart in 1982, and both died in 2015.

Their legacy goes beyond this ‘race of the century’. There is the terminology of ‘Bonecrusher/Our Waverley Star’ which continues to be used in a non-racing context; an epic sporting battle that goes down to the wire. Or when trying to compare two greats in their chosen field: “It’s Bonecrusher/Our Waverley Star, trying to pick the best”.

Eventually, footy and cricket took over for me. You can’t run a Melbourne Cup in the playground at lunchtime; you can run a daily Grand Final or Test Match with classmates.

Horse racing faded into the background, but it was the gateway plunge into sport fandom. I do not keep up with the sport today, but I understand it. I always found the spring carnival special and still get butterflies in the stomach as they jump in the Melbourne Cup.

I say all this, because to me you can love horse racing in the pure sense without the gambling part.

I will not argue against racing critics who have legitimate views, all I can say with hand on heart is that racehorses were my heroes for a time.

I asked my mate, and great sportswriter, Paul Amy about the 1986 Cox Plate once and he told me that he still gets emotional when he thinks about it.

When I watch it back on You Tube I do too. It was the day I fell in love with sport.

Watch:

Grand Final week magnifies how AFL discourse has evolved into a collective masochistic streak. There is the ‘winner’ (the one club that lifts the cup on Grand Final day), and the ‘losers’ (everybody else), and it erases all the moments of glory we have across a season if there’s not a premiership to show off at the end.

Most Hawthorn supporters will not see it for another six months, six years, or 60 years, yet last week’s loser in the greatest game I have ever watched should be afforded prestige as well as pain.

For a lot on the other side of the Preliminary Final result, this year marks 30 seasons since Fitzroy Football Club disappeared as a VFL/AFL club.

A few weeks back was the anniversary of their last AFL game before being absorbed by Brisbane.

In today’s terms Fitzroy were losers for generations.

In 1996 they were as big a loser as any club in living memory. For their last decade they did not play a final.

That is the tragic tale of the dying Lion days. Yet that’s just one way of looking at it.

There was glory. Not end of the year glory that the Brisbane Lions of this century specialise in, but days of glory. It’s all relative.

To mark the occasion, I focused my ‘Know Your History’ SEN Radio segment on five days of Fitzroy glory from those sad years.

Afterwards I had a text from an old Lions supporter, broadcaster Adam White, who told me he was in tears listening. It was in a mixed emotions way, I think. Sad about the ending but glad to hear that the good, the moments he lived for, were remembered.

In choosing to remember the glory, I revisited the stars that eventually had to go; Paul Roos, Alastair Lynch et al. Yet the research kept coming back to Mark Zanotti. Nicknamed the ‘Wild man of Borneo’ by Sandy Roberts, he was the long haired, renaissance man of footy.

A cover band of AFL footballers named ‘Trial by Video’ was playing the Melbourne pub scene during the era, and after the mercurial Allen Jakovich was sacked as lead singer for being a little too unreliable, Zanotti was drafted in as the only man who could fill the void.

“It was like-for-like, really,” band keyboardist Tony Woods once told me.

Never the most polished player, in some ways he was the symbol of the last Fitzroy years that I choose to remember. Wholehearted, throwback, rustic.

As talent dissolved, the Lions were not taking a knife to a gunfight, they were playing with bare knuckles. Yet it was the way you imagine Zanotti liked it.

Most weeks talent dictates the result, whatever level you play. But on some rare, crazy days, effort, emotion, and momentum defeats talent. These wins provide football moments that stay with you, whether AFL or suburban Under 15s, and are the next best thing to premierships.

And occasionally it worked for Fitzroy and the likes of Zanotti. Glory with real honour.

1992 Round 11 vs Collingwood

If there is one match that defines the loyal, talismanic stardom of Paul Roos as a Lion it is this one.

His best mate Gary Pert had left the Lions for Collingwood for the 1992 season, the first domino of Roos and many others that would fall. In Round 11 the Magpies were second, hosting the seventh placed Lions.

For three quarters Roos and his team silenced Victoria Park and Pert was having a dirty day, before the Magpies inevitably shook their funk to motor home.

Pert was shifted forward as the comeback took shape, and with less than 2 minutes on the clock played the fairytale spoiler, finding himself all alone as a ball cleared the pack and strolled in for the would-be matchwinner.

“For a brief but chilling moment, this was a story with an unhappy ending,” wrote Richard Hinds in The Age.

“It was a tale of the prodigal son but the X-rated version. The one where the prodigal son comes home beats up the party guests, throws up in the swimming pool, refuses to eat the fatted lamb, and sends out for pizza. That is pretty much how things would have ended for Fitzroy yesterday, if its loyal son was not such a good boy.”

Some poetic license was at play, Pert himself had been left high and dry by Fitzroy after wrecking his ACL in 1990. The Lions couldn’t afford to keep him around on the sidelines. It was rumoured that Collingwood stepped in and ‘paid’ him for the rehabilitation season of 1991 on the proviso that he would be traded the next year (something both clubs denied).

Yet the ‘loyal son,’ Roos, was not ready to concede.

Fitzroy pushed the ball deep into a crowded forward line, with Roos diving into the mass and emerging with the ball as if retrieving treasure from the bottom of the ocean. He danced away and snapped the ball across his body head with 15 seconds left to snatch back the win.

The Lions vaulted into the Final Six. “We haven’t got an inferiority complex at the club,” said coach Robert Shaw. We believe that on any given day, when Fitzroy plays their brand of football, we won’t be beaten.”

1993 Round 8 v West Coast

Maybe the first national journeyman, after stops at West Coast and Brisbane, Zanotti joined the cash-strapped Lions for the 1993 season.

According to coach Robert Shaw, the Lions raised the money for Zanotti by selling raffle tickets on wharves. It’s a story too bizarre to make up (and one he told brilliantly to Dan Brettig, Adam Collins, and I in podcast form).

When he moved to Melbourne, in keeping with character, Zanotti moved to the one-time counter-culture capital of outer suburban Melbourne, Eltham.

The poets and hippies were in the minority by the 1990s, but the notion of Zanotti being the one AFL player living out there fit like a beret on a beatnik.

Zanotti lived at 1 Valonia Drive, the street that was the route to Eltham East Primary School for me and many others. It was big news when Zanotti moved in.

In that 1993 season Fitzroy again opened with a spirit that was beyond their man for man talent.

In Round 8 they travelled to Perth for a Friday night game against the reigning premier West Coast Eagles.

On the field it was the most daunting trip in football, off the field it was a greater mismatch; West Coast quickly a financial behemoth, Fitzroy destitute.

Do you think Zanotti and his ilk cared?

The Lions opened strongly and then defended the Eagle fightbacks grimly. Alastair Lynch kicked six goals, though Zanotti, back in his hometown of Perth, was the consensus star.

On the boundary post-game Zanotti talked with love about his new surroundings.

“The troubles we’ve had at the club, and everything that’s gone on down at Fitzroy has really pulled the place together. We’re really playing on heart at the moment.”

It was suggested that Zanotti’s eyes were “ablaze” with intensity all night, and in keeping with the throwback attitude, he spoke of being desperate to impress because “Oh, y’know the state game’s just around the corner mate, and I wouldn’t mind being part of that.”

During the week, the Perth media had speculated that Fitzroy could be relocated to Fremantle as a new Western Australian team.

“We’re not coming here,” Shaw barked back at them post-game.

That week Channel Nine sent Lou Richards out to Eltham to interview Mark Zanotti. When Lou was seen by the kids at Eltham East Primary it caused a playground sensation.

The ‘Roys moved into fourth spot, then beat top-placed Collingwood the next week. Alas the magic run ended, but they finished a respectable 10-10 for the season.

1994 Round 13 v Hawthorn

By 1994 the talent well was running dry. Lynch along with Paul Broderick, Michael Gale and a host of others cleared out after the 1993 season.

In the two previous seasons a mixture of talent and spirit could lift it to heights for a prolonged period of the season. That was no longer possible.

Yet there were moments like Round 13 and Mike Sheahan had the scoop the next week.

“When Robert Shaw’s forward scout, Steve McCrystal, said he had a plan to neutralise the Dunstall factor, Shaw invited him to put it to paper and give him a look,” Sheahan wrote.

In the Sheahan story a rudimentary graphic explained the effect of the Stop Dunstall tactic.

Hawthorn’s diamond formation forward setup would contain a Fitzroy back defending space rather than a player.

“Simon Hawking and Stephen Paxman were to form the tag team, with Hawking the regular full back, playing the more conventional role, and Paxman floating about 15 metres in front of the pair, on the angle necessary to negate Dunstall’s characteristic habit of sprinting 2-30 metres into space,” Sheahan wrote.

If Hawthorn threw players forward to even up, Fitzroy would counter with another player. The more players, the less space for Dunstall to beat them.

The day after the plan was decided on, Paxman reported with chicken pox. Plan B was Hawking promoted to floater, and that man Zanotti to the man-to-man Dunstall slot. “When I told him he said, ‘yep, that’s me,” Shaw told Sheahan.

As a one-week effort it worked. Dunstall did not kick a goal, only the second time he’d completed a game without a goal for seven years.

Scrapping their way to a 5 points deficit at three quarter time, the Lions countered with the breeze in the last to boot five goals and take a thirteen-point win.

At the time, the Sheahan article, apart from being revelatory in a club disclosing blow-by-blow its carefully constructed radical tactic, was of huge interest to me.

Steve McCrystal was a teacher at my Eltham High School. That a teacher at my school could be responsible for a tactic that curbed the legendary Jason Dunstall blew my little Year 7 mind.

Mr. McCrystal was my politics teacher, along with some time footy coach, right through high school. He influenced many of us.

In relation to this story, we like to say it was he, not Rodney Eade or Terry Wallace, who invented defensive flooding and changed footy forever.

Later he worked for the Adelaide crows for two decades. We badgered him for the inside story of his forward scouting that contributed to their back-to-back flags, he’d just tell that he had a beanie for every team in his boot and tonight he was off to secretly take notes as an ‘anonymous fan’ at our team’s training session.

He also used to say to us at school that Shaw’s Fitzroy team might not have had the talent, but on days where they got a sniff of an unlikely win, they were suddenly unstoppable.

That happened on Stop Dunstall day.

1995 Round 8 v Adelaide

Paul Roos’ departure to Sydney in the summer of 1994-95 removed the last symbolic illusion of hope.

The Lions’ list was now a ragtag bunch of kids, second chancers, and recycled cast offs.

Zanotti fit into the third group.

The most curious though was Doug Hawkins. Retired by Footscray after 1994, he was revived by Fitzroy in 1995.

Hawkins had been the breakout star of Channel 9’s The Footy Show the year before. Always popular, he turned into a national treasure off the back of his cackling laughter and mangling of the language.

Critics could have labelled it desperation, but here was the people’s hero signing with Fitzroy.

It was desperation to install favourite son Bernie Quinlan as coach. Yet in a desperately unhappy year, Bernie and Dougie teamed up for one last Lion giant kill.

Shaw had also left that summer to coach the talented but underachieving Adelaide Crows.

Despite the Crows’ mental frailties, going to Football Park was still a feared trip that this Fitzroy team had no right to win.

Typical of those years, the Crows seemed to play with the expectations of 40,000 fans stuffed into a saddle on their back. They couldn’t lose to this mob, could they?

The Lions sniffed it and took the running. Yet with eight minutes left in the last quarter, logic had taken hold. The Crows had regained the lead and opened an eight-point buffer.

Then Doug Hawkins turned the forward pocket at Football Park in 1995 into the outer wing at the Western Oval in 1985.

The kids kept running and Dancing Dougie kept finding the ball and farming it out to them. He kicked one and had a hand in three others as the Lions burned past the Crows.

They kicked the last seven goals of the game in the last eight minutes, and the trainers ran an old Fitzroy flag onto the ground to celebrate.

Quinlan was optimistic, “I feel Saturday night’s win gives us respect, and that’s important…. we are playing with much more confidence now.”

It was not to be for Quinlan, he was out of the job before the end of the season, yet it ranks as one of the greatest AFL upsets of the 1990s.

1996 Round 8 v Fremantle

If 1995 was unhappy, 1996 was a football tragedy. The end of Fitzroy as we knew it.

Mick Nunan came in to coach and before the season even started it seemed highly likely the Lions might not last the season, such were the cash flow issues.

As for Zanotti, he toyed with retirement after Nunan disapproved of him touring Western Australia with Trial by Video during the opening weeks of pre-season training. A truce was reached, but Zanotti was listed as ‘indefinite’ due to a foot injury, before retiring mid-year without playing a game.

The chaotic and sad final year can be explored through Russell Holmesby’s excellent oral history of the club’s final decades ‘The Death of Fitzroy Football Club.’ I won’t go into all the gory details here.

Yet there was one final moment of glory.

It may have been in an incongruous place (the Western Oval) against a club that had played for less than 18 months (Fremantle) but to the 5083 attending it may as well have been a Grand Final at the MCG.

“Fitzroy was supposed to be simply the worst,” wrote Jake Niall in The Age.

“Some observers wondered whether it was the worst combination in the competition’s history, but yesterday they were left to wonder if it was even the worst in the league.

“Of one thing we can be sure, its supporters were certainly the happiest last night.”

The team sheet reads like the best names for those Footy Grid games we were all playing a while back.

The non-Backstreet Boy Nick Carter had 31 touches. Brad Cassidy two goals. Anthony Mellington six goals, and a place in history.

The continuity to what would come was Chris Johnson with 24 touches, three goals and three Brownlow votes.

Truth be told, that game itself was a blowout that Fitzroy dominated before the Dockers kicked late goals to get some respectability.

A brilliant blow-by-blow of the day was reconstructed by Dylan Leach in the AFL Record earlier this year:

That week news had broken that a merger with North Melbourne was on, and there was still doubt whether the team would even see out the year. Niall made the point that “those of us who had selected composite north Melbourne-Fitzroy teams with only four or five Fitzroy players were also forced to re-assess those judgements.”

Of course that didn’t eventuate, but the effort to win a game in those chaotic circumstances should never be forgotten.

Luckily, Dennis Cometti was on hand in the commentary box that day. We talk about his humour, but he got the serious stuff righter than most.

“Now it’s celebration time,” he began as the team mixed with the fans post-game.

“I’m not sure what it means in the overall, you get the feeling a deal perhaps has been done. But if these players had to make a statement, they’ve stood up this afternoon at the Whitten Oval and said what they had to say with their actions.”

****

30 years on, as much as the memory of 1996 feels completely disconnected to the AFL of today, we are left with a set of circumstances that eerily come back to the final days of Fitzroy.

Those Lions fans that followed to Brisbane have been rewarded for those years of pain, with an incredible 25 years and a potential sixth premiership. This year for the first time in a Grand Final Brisbane will wear a guernsey that is a virtual replica of those worn in 1996 and through those difficult times of the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Their Grand Final opponent is Fremantle. Starved of the ultimate glory in their history, their two years of AFL crossover with Fitzroy is surprisingly connected.

Fremantle’s first AFL win against Fitzroy was in 1995. Fitzroy’s last AFL win was against Fremantle in 1996. Fitzroy’s last AFL game was hosted by Fremantle in 1996.

That was the day Fremantle gained more credibility in the AFL than they had in the previous two years for the way they treated the Roys with a deference and sensitivity that the AFL had not.

“Fremantle, the youngest club in the AFL, went to both trouble and the expense to try and see that Fitzroy’s last appearance was occasioned with due respect,” wrote Martin Flanagan.

“Schoolkids danced, a band played .... the Fitzroy club song was played and then Fremantle produced its finest touch. Sandra McIvor, who is with the west Australian opera company sang auld lang syne, unaccompanied, from the roof of the round and country stand on the southern side of the ground. Her voice was pure and clear and true.”

Fitzroy supporters have not forgotten it, and it should be a little sideline element remembered by all on Saturday.

****

After the radio segment, an email was forwarded to me.

“...loved hearing the conversation on Fitzroy’s best wins towards the end,” wrote the one and only Mark Zanotti to SEN.

“Man ya made me laugh, the primary school comments and Lou Richards coming around my house, my daughters loved it.”

There was mention of “the hippy era” and an invitation to see his band ‘The Two Bob Millionaires’ play.

In a parallel, slightly oddball, universe that I would like to spend time in, Mark Zanotti, holder of dual Bears and Lions citizenships, would present the cup if the Lions win on Saturday.

A symbol of a different, yet still worthy, version of glory.

You can buy a Mark Zanotti T-shirt here from League Tees here

Last week’s AFL Record had a feature that involved talking to Malcolm Blight and Adam Simpson about the paths between commentary and coaching.

Both chats were fun.

Simpson was honest in his current situation; he’s uncomfortable with the spotlight and how that is a challenge in both his former and current vocations.

True to their personalities, Blight likened his commentary days to the next best thing. It was his ‘footy club’ without the day-to-day pressures. You can imagine the gregarious Blight holding court among Bruce, Dennis and Sandy. It had camaraderie and match-day performance, just like his footy career.

Blighty also happily chatted about his first night hosting an AFL broadcast when the lights failed at Waverley. It’s at the foot of the feature below, but you can also listen to the Know Your History pod about that night here.

This is also a reminder to buy your AFL Record at matches. is putting together some seriously good reads in it each week, the sorts that are hard to find anywhere else in footy media today.

You can read this feature below but also have a listen to the spin-off radio segment - ‘Know Your History: Special Comments’ examining the evolution of the genre.

🎧:

(which had some nice feedback from media/calling legend Steve Quartermain)

AFL RECORD FEATURE

BONUS CONTENT

A few weeks back Know Your History revisited the 1990 State of Origin Game between Victoria and New South Wales.

If you get the time, take a watch of the video:

https://youtu.be/98Am4Rp0pDI?si=y8druII4455h3I4k

And then listen to our Know Your History recap (borrowing from Bill Simmons’ Rewatchables) here:

A collection of newspaper reports is below, most from the great :

Watching the game, I was intrigued at the elaborate stage set-up on the camera-facing half forward flank. This was not a Meatloaf-style stage tucked in an alcove of the stand; it was more like a Big Day Out stage plonked on top of a bay of seating.

This Rohan piece below reveals that it was Paul Kelly and the Messengers that played in the pouring rain pre-game. Kelly’s lead guitarist was of course Rohan’s brother Steve.

And for an extra bit of colour, I’ll leave you with some Lou Richards and his traditional ‘Kiss of Death’ preview:

Catching up on the last fortnight, we go back to 1996 and the infamous ‘Lights Out at Waverley’ match.

It was a festival of botch: the power failures, the security failures, the brain failures (of fans who rioted), the bizarre Don Scott defence of said brain failures, and the logical failures of the half-cocked solution.

If you can live with bonfires and vandalism, the whole thing is also bloody hilarious thirty years on.

To mark the occasion of its 30th anniversary, we covered all of its ludicrous detail on SEN Radio, listen here:

KNOW YOUR HISTORY SEN RADIO: Lights Out at Waverley

After listening, be sure to check out the full video of the great debate between Don Scott, Andy Maher and Ross Glendinning (with Special Guest Referee Sandy Roberts) here:

DON vs ANDY AND ROSS

Or Ross Oakley filling time with Malcolm Blight in the commentary box:

OAKLEY AND BLIGHTY

KNOW YOUR HISTORY: The Hall of Fame

The second of our double features is 30th anniversary of the Australian Football Hall of Fame. If you drag yourself away from state v state and the VFA debate, the institution of the HOF has been one of the great developments in recent decades.

We tracked its development form Ross Oakley’s dream to the more subtle changes of recent years.

Listen to the full pod here:

KNOW YOUR HISTORY: The Hall of Fame

Interestingly within a few years the acclaim for the concept was universal.

What is also interesting is how hard the push was, ultimately to fail, to get footy’s own version of baseball’s Cooperstown - a spiritual home that doubles as its Hall of Fame.

Even down to the impassioned plea by Garry Lyon.

As I mention in the pod, have a think about what your fantasy physical Australian Football Hall of Fame would look like.

KNOW YOUR HISTORY: The Hall of Fame

Happy weekend listening.

Listen to KNOW YOUR HISTORY - The Four Extraordinary Acts of Neal Daniher’s playing and coaching career

Most weeks getting on the radio to talk about sport, it’s all about making sure the story is told in a way that makes the hour fun for the listener (and the host).

But when you get the chance to talk about someone like Neale Daniher there is an extra gravity. A privilege that should not be frittered away with the frivolous.

I was a 16-year-old Melbourne supporter when Daniher was appointed, so there was a connection with his Demon days that was ripe for getting in the weeds with. That schizophrenic, patchwork team that would struggle one year then come out and shock the league with a run of games the next, before falling in finals.

Frustrating? At times. Entertaining? Always.

In retrospect he got more out of that team than anybody else could have. It’s why the players loved him. He became ‘The Reverend’ and everybody loved him. Until he was sacked.

Talking about that time would be easy. Just as it would be about his Boy Genius era. Growing up; he was the poster boy of ‘what could have been’; what David Schwarz would become in the 1990s.

Ironically Daniher helped rehabilitate the player and the club so shattered by his three knee reconstructions. He was the only person in football who truly knew what that feeling was.

What I was most interested in getting right was the wilderness years.

The comebacks. The shattering setbacks.

Then there was the retirement, and the idea that he could have coached Geelong in 1989 instead of Malcom Blight. At the age of 27.

Blight, Daniher and Sam Newman as candidates - what a Choose your Adventure story that becomes.

In the radio segment we spoke about the Four Acts of his football life:

*The Boy Genius

*The Comeback (1 and 2)

*The Coaching Miracle

*The Reverend

The fifth act was, of course, his fight against MND and the figurehead he became. What I hoped to put across was the four football acts all displayed the qualities of the fifth act.

There was pure genius as a player.

The incredible bravery in mounting comebacks.

The laser focus and granite resolve that started his coaching career (often forgotten, that is why I used this image above - who’s messing with him?).

The Reverend period, when a force of personality and a dash of country charm united a community (his team) behind him.

He then went and slapped those together and multiplied it by ten for his last act.

Have a listen. Hopefully Gerard and I did Neale justice.

Vale Neale Daniher, one of a kind.

Listen to KNOW YOUR HISTORY - The Four Extraordinary Acts of Neal Daniher’s playing and coaching career

*Originally this week’s discussion was going to centre on Fitzroy and the anniversary of their last AFL win, something vital that we may revisit later in the year.

John Kennedy, he of towering presence and booming voice, uncharacteristically sat with head in hands admonishing himself in silence.

How could the man whose force of personality and relentless attention to detail turned Hawthorn from perennial also-rans to power have forgotten this, albeit trivial, matter?

Across the desk Dave Barham stayed respectfully silent, but inside he was celebrating a premiership.

Barham and his documentary-making crew had come across thirty-six canisters of rusted out and water-damaged film tucked away in a garage.

Thirty-four of them were useless as they spooled through films. The thirty fifth looked the same before a home movie flickered to life momentarily before more darkness and then Kennedy’s voice.

Barham thought it amazing, but on the phone the the-then AFL Chairman Kennedy assured them it was not him.

“No, no, I would never have done that,” Kennedy said.

When it was eventually played to Kennedy in Barham’s office, 20 years on from the recording, he could only shake his head and confirm that it was indeed him bellowing “Don’t think Mick, do!”

“I can’t believe I did that,” was all Kennedy could offer.

The AFL’s centenary documentary Barham had been commissioned to make had gathered the league’s most iconic moments, but this unknown discovery was striking gold.

****

30 years on from the release of ‘100 Years of Australian Football’ the title rankles with some given it was a documentary on the league rather than the code, yet the acclaim for the film itself is universal.

The story behind its making is a reminder of why we need to preserve the past and the present for future generations. It is also an art versus commerce lesson in why success does not necessarily equal monetary riches.

A sports producer across networks, Barham had also been packaging up the AFL’s highlights programs for overseas markets in the early 1990s when he unofficially started archiving his work.

He then successfully pitched the idea of the AFL setting up its own visual archive to league boss Ross Oakley, and with a $30,000 contribution from the AFL started building the league’s visual history in 1993.

Two years later when the league decided to commission a film for its upcoming centenary celebration Barham was the man on the spot.

A deal was struck with the AFL and its broadcaster Channel Seven, paying him $285,000 for the film.

“We didn’t make any money out of it,” he says today.

“We got carried away; we spent the lot…I think I made $7000 on it.”

Unquestionably the best investment he made was hiring reporter and writer Neil Kearney.

“He’s the best storyteller in the country by a long way. It was a love job; Neil and I did it together.”

The concept began to take shape, in part prescribed by the lack of film pre-television in Australia.

A record of who won in what year could be found in the history books, instead this was going to be a film that brought to life the people and the stories.

“We didn’t have a lot of early vision, so we had to get to the stuff we had pictures of,” he remembers.

Barham remains disappointed that there is little footage of Essendon legend John Coleman taking marks, but what he did have was Tony Charlton so eloquently describing Coleman.

That was human and emotive and gave the film a different depth to what had constituted football history prior.

Kearney’s great skill was engaging his interview subjects in a way that had the legends all speaking as fans of the game rather than from their lofty status as ‘greats of the game.’

Having those talking heads superimposed over footage, photos or clippings was a new technique for Australian documentaries at the time, yet it helped overcome the shortcomings of footage.

Kearney’s writing then tied it all together.

“The storytelling bit was the genius of Neil,” Barham says.

“I think he set a real standard to what we could do in the game.”

****

Barham had put out a public alert via the AFL Record searching for any film that might be lying around. It unearthed the Kennedy audio, along with similarly powerful audio of Tom Hafey and Ron Barassi all captured during the 1975 finals series.

They also found film closer to home, like the league’s official broadcaster. Disappointingly there was only two hours’ worth of reels of Seven’s iconic World of Sport, but then they picked up a reel labelled ‘1989 Grand Final’.

“It had been shot by John Bowring, who was the best cinematographer in the country. It had been left on the shelf, and nobody had ever looked at.”

When they played it, that indelible close-up vision of Dermott Brereton getting to his feet after being collected at the opening bounce materialised.

“It was all shot in slow motion, and then we watched him throw up - oh my god this is unbelievable.”

The audio of Kennedy and the film of Brereton are Barham’s favourites parts of the finished product but might also be the single greatest historical representations of these two major football figures.

To a lesser extent the Hafey and Barassi audio have become canon too, yet none of these (nor their legacy as football catchphrases) were known before the project.

While Kennedy’s “Don’t think, do!” is the hero of the film, his mentioning of not selecting Peter Crimmins, battling a fight against cancer he would lose 12 months later, in the same address is the one that truly shook the Hawthorn godfather,

“John didn’t show his emotions much but sitting in the office that day, he was affected listening back to that.”

And while that was a lesson of what should always be kept, tantalisingly, Barham says much of their original film was left on the cutting room floor.

“The first version was about five hours long. I said to Gary Fenton (Channel 7 Sport boss) that this could be two two-and-a-half hour shows.”

“He probably thought I was getting carried away. Now it would be a five-part, hour an episode, series.”

Sadly, there is no director’s cut in existence.

What was on the floor was swept up and dispensed with, proving that even those who wished previous generations had kept more, did not realise the importance of their own work in real time.

Barham cannot recall everything left out, but he does remember the last segment deleted.

“We had to make really hard decisions, and the Jimmy Stynes story didn’t make the cut. I loved Jimmy and had a lot to do with him, but that was the quality of the stories we couldn’t get in.”

“I regret it now, because it was such an amazing story.”

Despite what it could have been, the two-hour finished product is titanic.

On the night that it screened on Channel Seven, Barham, Kearney and the crew held a premiere of sorts with AFL boss Ross Oakley and a bunch of interviewees watching the broadcast at the Geebung Polo Club Hotel in Hawthorn.

They were not the only ones tuning in.

The TV ratings reported in The Age the next week confirmed a peak audience of 741,000 Melburnians did the same, shocking Seven.

“They didn’t know how well it would rate, so they sent me a bunch of flowers the next morning!”

While the financial rewards were not great, the success turbo-charged Barham’s career in sports media. The finished product was worth much more than the $7000 he had to show a year on from meetings with Fenton and Oakley.

“I was incredibly grateful to both of them,” he says.

“I was a young producer and to be given that responsibility was an enormous show of faith by them.”

*****

Barham remains a student of the game’s history.

He is a believer that the archive that he started in 1993 could be broadened and bring together all the great historical vision, once thought lost, that has popped up on YouTube channels over the last 15 years.

“There is an obligation on the commission, the league, and the game to keep our history and protect it. It has got to be part of any great sporting body, but you’ve got to put money into it.”

Watching Gary Ablett Senior at his best informs Barham’s practical reasoning.

“I promised to myself ‘I am going to keep everything I can find of Ablett,’ because I kept thinking ‘how are you going to explain to someone in 100 years’ time what Gary Ablett was like as a footballer’?”

Not having the Coleman vision while he made the film reiterated that.

“It made me think how important it is that we keep all this stuff.”

What we have kept is the film that Barham and the AFL released. That scores of people have since uploaded it to YouTube is testament to that. It reminds us just how much it resonated.

“It didn’t matter whether we made money on it, we were all so proud of it.”

“It was a real thrill to be involved and one of the highlights of my career. It was bigger than yourself and bigger than everything else, it was important for the game.”

“And it stands up.”

CLICK TO LISTEN TO FULL SEN RADIO ‘KNOW YOUR HISTORY’ SEGMENT ON THE FILM

Watch the film on YouTube

Scoring is up at levels not seen in a decade, so has the AFL turned the tide on dour defence?

And is the much maligned stand rule that key driver?

For ESPN Australia / NZ

Read: https://www.espn.com.au/afl/story/_/id/48699690/afl-news-2026-stats-record-high-scores-stand-rule-working

The father nudged his Metallica t-shirt-wearing tweener and pointed at my hoodie.

“See…The Strokes.”

The disinterested kid went back to his screen, I nodded.

For a band that had such a cultural impact on music upon arrival and can still headline festivals 25 years after their arrival, proper Strokes fandom in 2026 can be a little like a secret society.

That is not to say there are not a large number of Strokes fans, nor are they anonymous to the casual music fan.

Yet for them, or the 12-year-old child, their absolute veneration may be, well, a little hard to explain.

For a segment of the music loving population, they will forever loom over an era, crown atop tousled hair, and skinny jeans.

Twenty-five years ago, they were the perfect band at the perfect time.

*********

The Strokes were the first band I rode the elevator with from the ground floor.

No, I was not hanging out in East Village bars at the turn of the millennium, but I was doing the suburban Australian teen equivalent; fan-boying from the moment Triple J played their debut EP The Modern Age.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a barren time for alternative rock.

The salad days of grunge were over, and we were left with the nu-metal horror of Limp Bizkit and a bunch of watered-down grunge facsimiles.

When the original versions of The Modern Age and Last Nite first crackled out of the radio in my 1984 Ford Meteor it was like a cool drink on a sweltering day.[1]

“That band that kind of sounds old, but they’re new,” was the way my brother and I described it in those magical weeks where we heard the sound but did not know their name.

The only reference point I could find in my still limited musical palette was Australian 1960s icons The Loved Ones and their eponymous hit.

No real music critic ever made this connection, but it was something about the Loved One’s handclap and guitar stabs and the staccato opening riffs of both Last Nite and The Modern Age that meshed in my mind.

It echoed the rawness of rock and roll from that bygone era, but it sounded fresher than anything else in 2001.

Famously they soon toured Australian as a support for You Am I[2] which saw their debut LP Is This It rush-released here months ahead of the world[3].

I had just turned twenty when it dropped. They were the first ever band I bought the first record of on the first day it was released.

I got a new car, and it became the most-played CD in its stereo as I delivered pizzas around Eltham most nights.

My life was diametrically opposed to that of the nepo baby privileged members of The Strokes, but they became my guys.

The look and the cool, yes. But most importantly, the songs.

There was not a dud on the album.

The title track might have occasionally been skipped, but only because you just could not wait to get into the best stuff.

Last Nite and The Modern Age were already classics in my mind by the time I had the CD.

The propulsive chug of Hard to Explain, the optimism of Someday and the drama of Alone, together soon joined them.

The drawled delivery of “but like my sister; don’t give a fuck” in Barely Legal was something entire personalities could be built on.

And New York City Cops was the complete rock and roll fantasy I had been searching for all wrapped up in three and a half minutes[4].

***

I was not the only one.

They became the global ‘saviours of rock’ that year.[5]

If you really loved indie music from 2001-2006 there is a good chance the Strokes are still your favourite band of the era.

When someone mentions the decade of 2000s music, until the day I die my first thought will be of Julian Casablancas’ gang. That is the way my music-loving friends thought and continue to think too - our gang adopted their gang as a design for life.

We were not art school hipsters, we were just suburban kids playing footy and cricket and battling to get into nightclubs[6] - Strokes by day, electro by night[7].

Vintage t-shirts, denim jackets, just-been-fucked hair and all the more colourful fashion and musical mutations of that over the ensuing decade (indie sleaze, electro clash, funk punk, nu-rave et al) can be traced back to The Strokes.

We tried them all, even if we were more Montmorency than Manhattan.

That was the power of their cultural impact, completely outsized with their status today.

Coldplay[8] may have graduated as the stadium selling act of the era, but they never had the influence on true music believers like The Strokes did.

They straddled the millennium uniquely.

There were a winking and smirking insouciance that was far removed to the right-on despair and humourlessness of grunge prior and the angry misogyny of nu-metal that had ascended.

The same insouciance is completely out of step where music went. The earnest saccharine in mainstream indie growing from the 2010s onwards may as well be speaking another language to Casablancas and co.

The cynicism and humour were made for people like us, who wanted to go somewhere but, like that New York icon of another age, wanted to do it their way.

If you want evidence, just go back and revisit their lyrics. Behind the haircuts and hypes, they were laugh-out loud.

The second album Room on Fire may have lost some of the bandwagon but it deepened our love and has aged well as something much more than an Is This It 2.0.

I will defend the next one, First Impressions of Earth fiercely as another great album with some necessary, if not slightly unhinged, exploration into space rock on side two[9].

The next three albums could never match the first three, and the crushing expectations from the most rabid of us have contributed to a narrative that The Strokes fumbled greatness and have been stumbling around like a drunk in the dark for the last 20 years.

That disregards the fact that each album has housed great singles and great songs, far superior to a lot of favoured indies of the time.

Casablancas’ solo stuff and collaborations have also flirted with his band’s early 2000s imperial phase[10].

The sheer bloody-mindedness to continue to be the Stokes in the face of that narrative is a pay-off their biggest fans still admire.

There is a segment of us Australian fans that will never be 100% happy with the AFL’s Grand Final entertainment each year because it is not The Strokes.

It is sheer madness to think this way, and to think that is possible, yet that is the shadow they cast on those who lived it.

******

Over the last two weekends the Strokes played Coachella again.

The absurdity of them playing the second to last slot prior to Justin Bieber in 2026 is one thing.

That they are playing to a crowd full of wannabe Insta-influencers is highly amusing.

The Strokes were framed as rich-kid fashion-conscious posers by their critics back in 2001.

Those critics did not know how good they had it.

If only the vacuous influencers of today had the Velvet Underground and Television as their heroes.

When Casablancas deadpanned, they were “fulfilling our lifelong dream” to open for Bieber you were not sure how many in the crowd got the joke.

After my interaction with the father and his 12-year-old I went home and watched their Coachella performance on the live You Tube stream.

The show itself was a fan-pleaser, as opposed to a crowd pleaser.

The linear progression of ‘The Rock Band’ dictates sweeping histrionics and anthemic mobile phone lighting moments, that date back to the first wave of 70s arena rock

This is the tried and tested playbook for a heritage rock at Coachella.

But the Strokes? They don’t do stadium[11].

At least not that way.

This is still The Strokes of 2001, just resized with a bigger backdrop and bigger sound.

They are in great form.

It is loud and urgent and exposes how bloody good these tunes are. It is harnessed power - they possess the chops to go all Coldplay on us, but it is their choice to remain The Strokes.

It is never more evident in the stage patter. Coachella headline slots are valedictory victory laps with thanks and gratitude given to the wannabe masses busily framing in their pics and tagging in their collabs.

Casablancas, dressed in a t-shirt where the Amazon prime logo was rephrased as ‘Crime’ (a very 20001 fashion move), gave his own insincere version.

“You guys excited about the draft?” he said.

Silence.

“Oh, wait, not the NFL draft,”

“In six months, I think everyone who’s eligible for the military has to register. You guys excited?”

The joke is on you, this place is a zoo.

Twenty-five years on from their debut, Coachella just confirmed that The Strokes remain who they were in the best possible way.

[1] 20 years later we heard someone else introduced to the Strokes in real time. Cricket icon Ian Chappell did a season of radio commentary on the ABC before retiring. One day a short blast of Last Nite was played on air as a breaker between overs when the-then late-70s Chappell was asked about what was happening on field. “Forget that for a minute, I want to hear more of whatever that was.” Respect for Chappelli who is quite a music fan.

[2] One of the great regrets of my life is not going to this gig. I sweated for weeks on it, but eventually pizza delivery driving didn’t pay well, and I decided to hold out for the CD. A terrible decision. The You Am I album of 2001 Dress Me Slowly is also a beauty and perhaps the most underrated of their career.

[3] The later release in the US not only saw the cover changed (that had run into trouble in the UK, but not here strangely) but saw New York City Cops removed from the album because of September 11
sensitivities. Questioning the intelligence of New York law enforcement wasn’t
going to cut it in that environment. It was restored onto the album in later
pressings.

[4] I defy anyone to find a better three- song-tun on an album in my lifetime than Last Nite - Hard to Explain - New York City Cops.

[5] The White Stripes, The Hives, The Vines and every ‘The’ band found fame in the Strokes’ wake. As Lizzy Goldman’s book Meet
in the Bathroom explains, the
same can be said for The Killers, Kings of Leon and the next wave of indie
stars in the UK (Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party et al).

[6] Bizarrely the only nightclub in Melbourne which we never used to get knocked back from was its historically best - the legendary Honkytonks. It was so good you could only go there every two
months or so, it had to be special.

[7] The 2000s was truly a great musical decade where everything collided.

[8] I harbour no ill-will towards Coldplay. I loved their debut Australian single Shiver
when it came out and A Rush of
Blood to the Head was a great
album. They just followed the conventional, and totally understable, rock
anthem path

[9] In my opinion Ize of the World was the best of these explorations and remains
one of my favourites.

[10] See 11th Dimension and the Converse collaboration with Pharrell, the Neptunes and
Santigold, My Drive Thru.

[11] Kings of Leon were billed as ‘The Southern Strokes’ on their first album and toured as a little brother support act to our heroes. When they released Use Somebody in 2008
they became a stadium act leaving The Strokes behind who would not take the
stadium path. They won thousands of new fans, while a few existing ones lost
interest (ie me).

Everyone has talked about the one-liners, and I get that.

Describing good commentary is like that old quote that likens music writing to dancing to architecture.

Dennis’ ‘Cometti-isms’ are an accessible way to latch on to his greatness.

Yet it should never overshadow the technical brilliance of his day job: calling the play.

The honeyed voice, the measured pace, the vocabulary, and the underrated ability to convey excitement without resorting to yelling.

Not many can do that.

With Dennis the essential elements of calling flowed like caramel.

When he vaulted onto the national scene in 1987, time would eventually reveal that he changed the way football was presented.

Bombast, bluster and biffo were the prevailing way pre-Cometti.

It was not always a terrible thing, but it cannot be overstated how different the Cometti approach was.

Not everyone was enamoured with it, initially.

A letter to the editor in The Age summed up some of the scepticism, Peter in Box Hill wrote “with Cometti’s commentary referring to ‘Laidley on the overlap’ and ‘Rance on the assist,’ I yearn for the World of Sport days of Jack and Lou*.”

The critics had a different view.

Peter McFarline in the same paper wrote “Cometti is a definite acquisition; he has a controlled, even understated manner of calling which sits well with fans.”

It was one of those wonderful victories for aesthetes where the critically lauded eventually win over the masses.

Yet revisionist history can hide that Cometti only became genuinely universally appreciated when he was the continuation of the past for the years that Channel Nine held rights.

While his style took some inspiration from the more professional elements of American sportscasting, Cometti synthesised it for our game.

Calling Australian Rules Football is significantly different from calling American Sports or cricket which, at one point, was the path Cometti was once anointed for**.

The Cometti playbook created a style that has been the gold standard ever since.

His greatest moment? Go back and watch the 1989 Grand Final, where Cometti lifts the entire experience without histrionics.

There was no time for one-liners.

In the chaos he was like the best news reporter from a warzone. Unflustered, accurate, and at times poetic, as metaphorical bullets whizzed around him.

His call of Gary Ablett recovering from a mark as “finds it on the ground...his eighth goal” may be the most rhythmical bit of commentary ever in footy.

I rate it the best single match call in footy commentary history, and it has a personal relevance.

I truly fell in love with footy that day and Cometti was significant to it.

He calmly conducted the orchestra believing we were seeing a classic long before it dawned on everyone else.

The first bit of sports writing I ever published*** was dedicated to a want to give Dennis his due for that famous day.

He never stopped impressing.

Whether it be a friendly nature buying a Footy Record from me as a teen or never stooping to mudslinging in any footy media wars over his time, he had class****.

When he did the media and podcast rounds before his television retirement, he was more interested in speaking about his love of current indie music acts that I was fanboying on, The War on Drugs and Father John Misty.

That kind of cool extended through to his whole public persona.

As prepared as he most certainly was, he never appeared too earnest and never took what he was doing too seriously. It was a cool that kept a degree of mystery and fell on the right side of insouciance.

Yet the sense of humour that produced all those great lines being recited over the last few days would have fallen flatter than a punctured Sherrin if he were not exceptionally good at calling.

We know how it looks and sounds when it is all icing and no cake, a short shelf life.

The Cometti quality never dropped off over 30 years.

Dennis Cometti was a funny bugger, but he was also better than anybody at playing the straight man who excelled at all the calling mechanics.

That is the part the next wave of footy callers should be mimicking.

*Lou Richards and Dennis Cometti called the 1986 State of Origin game together; it was hilarious and culminated with Lou calling Dennis ‘Dessie’ twice in the dying minutes. Gerard Whateley and I had a lot of fun with this when we rewatched it for radio.

**Cometti’s cricket dalliances are a wonderful curiosity

1. After years of calling cricket, an Ashes winter shadowing the legendary Alan McGilvray and the associated social engagements put paid to the ABC plan to make Cometti the heir to McGilvray’s throne. Cometti, as well as holding footy as his true love, wanted to be a great caller, not be part of a months-long piss up that the Ashes series could be in those days. In another world he could be the doyen of cricket commentary.

2. When he left the ABC, he did not completely let go of cricket. For a few seasons in the late eighties, he called cricket on commercial radio when 2UE and 3AK were part of the sale of Channel Nine by Kerry packer to Alan Bond. Cometti would call ball-by-ball talent while the Nine TV talent of Richie, Bill, Tony, and Ian would cycle through alongside him.

3. When Channel Seven picked up the rights to the 1997 Australian tour of South Africa Cometti stepped in lol a pro as the man ball-by-ball caller

4. The most curious of the lot. With Cometti at Nine for the AFL, he would very occasionally be rostered to call domestic one day games on television. At the same time, the ABC Radio cult status of Kerry O’Keeffe was at its apex, and he would also occasionally do these matches on Nine too. It led to a few, barely recalled, Sunday afternoon passages where Cometti and O’Keeffe shared the box together.

***That piece from the possibly departed The Roar (which was incidentally written under a pseudonym as I was still employed at the AFL) is a little cringe to look back on today. I regret the line about the Bruce/Dennis combination not being the sum of its parts. They were very good, I think I just loved their work with inferior teams so much where they could shine as ‘solo’ stars that the two-man team was a little discombobulating for a while. Rohan Connolly called me on Wednesday to say he was referencing this piece in his ESPN tribute to Dennis, which was nice to see. Rohan reading that article and mentioning it on radio was unbelievably encouraging at the time. I still passionately believe Dennis’ role in the legend of 1989 is underrated.

****Adam Collins and I got to interview Dennis for a later series of The Greatest Season That Was podcast. He was a thorough gentleman.

Ron Vincent was Carlton’s much-loved trainer through the 1960s and 1970s, immortalised in countless highlight tapes for throwing a footy at Richmond ruckman Mike Patterson in 1969 that earned hm a 12-week suspension.

Aside from his unique approach to that role, Ronny was also an avid photographer.

And it’s his images of a long-forgotten Carlton overseas jaunt that has uncovered the sort of promotional gem the AFL would kill for today – the Blues playing as the warm-up act for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers all the way back in 1977.

With Super Bowl LX in San Francisco and SEN Radio’s Gerard Whateley travelling over to broadcast it, an email came through to the ‘Know Your History’ SEN radio segment from Ron’s grandson Trent Mayne.

Attached were photos of the Blues marked ‘Candlestick Park,’ presumably referring to the 49ers home field from 1971 to 2013, along with a bunch of other happy snaps of an American tour.

Beyond that, Trent said he only had vague memories his grandfather had passed on.

It immediately set off a search down the rabbit hole of footy history.

They say you can find answers to everything on the internet, but when it came to this photo and the supposed tour, there was a black hole bereft of information.

Google had nothing.

It did not rate a mention in the Football Record from 1977 and 1978.

The MCC Library’s collection of Inside Football newspapers from period? Zilch.

Was it, as the Arctic Monkeys would sing almost 30 years later, a “fake tale of San Francisco’?

Was AI duping us?

Information in historical newspapers was almost as scarce, but what was found, further confused and intrigued.

In The Age on 24 May,1977 Stephen Phillips’ byline appeared under the headline ‘Blues,

Tigers to tackle the US.’

“Carlton and Richmond will launch a $100,000 promotional attack on the USA and Canada later this year,” Phillips reported. “Carlton General Manager Keith McKenzie and Richmond Secretary Max Scales will leave for the west coast of the USA in a fortnight to book grounds for exhibition matches.”

It would go on to grandiosely announce that a 17-day tour was planned with a series of matches that would take in Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Vancouver.

It also ambitiously stated that there would be a 200-strong Australian presence of players and supporters attending.

Richmond has secured sponsorship for the tour with its major sponsor CUB, and Carlton was in the throes of doing the same with its main benefactor Avco Insurance.

And then…. silence.

Nothing more was mentioned in The Age for the rest of 1977 about the fact-finding mission by the clubs, nor the proposed tour.

The great plan to showcase Australian Rules to the US disappeared into the ether as far The Age was concerned.

Calling upon each club’s historians revealed little more.

Rhett Bartlett confirmed that Richmond never went on a US tour at this time to his understanding and had only seen a passing reference to a proposal in board meeting minutes.

Carlton’s historian Tony De Bolfo knew that there was a tour, but details were minimal.

Even the club’s annual report only referred to Avco contributing $5000 to the trip, rather than any information about what went on and why.

What happened between The Age’s breaking story and a plane full of Blues heading to the States is hard to piece together, but it can be assumed that Richmond had cold feet and/or finances pulled from it to continue.

Carlton had possibly sold the supporters packages and promised a group of excited players a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the United States.

Too far down with planning they must have decided to go ahead solo.

All we are left with is Ronny Vincent’s photos.

Two stick out.

The brilliant colour shot of the Carlton team in full playing kit running in a huddle on what is labelled Candlestick Park. There is a crowd of sorts in attendance, and the ground is unmistakeably set up for American Football.

And then there is another of Carlton legends Robert Walls and Mark Maclure on the plane flanking their teammate Ray Byrne, beer in hand, who looks to be enthusiastically embracing the festivities.

This left only one way to solve this mystery: speak to someone who experienced it themselves.

Byrne, the man who presented Richmond legend Kevin Bartlett with a toothless comb at his 400^th game, seemed like the type with a sense of humour that would be ideal to dredge up a quirky memory or two.

A 219 VFL game veteran (81 at Carlton, 121 at Collingwood, 17 at Geelong) affectionately known as ‘Rugged’ to his Blues teammates, he not only remembers it, but the tour would be the lead-in to a seminal moment in his life (more on that later).

Byrne had never seen the photos previously, but memories came flooding back.

The trip to spread the gospel of Aussie Rules was sold to the Carlton players simply as an extravagant end-of-season-trip.

When the contingent was much larger than that traditional player-only inner sanctum of the time, it initially raised eyebrows.

“Quite lot of the committee, staff, trainers and players and supporters all came along,” Byrne remembers. “There were women and their partners…it was very different to the regular footy trip.”

That did not necessarily function as a hand brake on the Blues from living up to their good-time reputation of the era though.

“It was a fairly long trip, so we had to fill our time,” Byrne laughs.

“Most of us were around 24, 25, 26 so we were in our prime. I don’t think we broke Boonie’s record, but we would have got close!”

The extent of most Blues players overseas travels had been Fiji for training camp, so to go to the USA represented a special opportunity. Alex Jesaulenko took Super8 movies of the tour that were sold as part of his memorabilia auction few years back, a relic that would be fascinating to watch.

The tour took in Los Angeles with a trip to Disneyland, Las Vegas, and Hawaii. A highlight was a group of players being take out for dinner in LA and finding that Australia’s Miss World winner Belinda Green was joining their table.

But it is the stop-off in San Francisco that that bought us to this conversation, and Byrne has solved part of the photographic mystery.

All organised by then-Carlton General Manager Keith McKenzie, a bus took the Blues contingent to the fabled home of San Francisco sport, Candlestick Park, on a Sunday, where the Carlton team were booked as the warm-up act for the city’s beloved 49ers NFL team.

Somewhere along the line in McKenzie’s fact-finding mission, he must have managed to contact the San Francisco 49ers, and a deal was struck up to provide pre-game entertainment to fans.

But the team’s entry to the ground was memorably bizarre.

“What I remember is we had to get changed in a bus in the car park a Candlestick Park, “Byrne says. “They wouldn’t let us into the ground beforehand.”

“So, we got changed and then we all get off the bus and were mucking around with footies in the car park before we went in.”

“The yanks are coming along asking ‘what are you guys doing’ and we told them and they said, ‘oh you speak English in Australia?’’

The Blues’ finest then strutted into Candlestick Park alongside 49ers fans in their full playing kit and out on to the field ahead of the NFL game.

There they conducted a 45-minute training session as an exhibition of the great Australian game.

“We did some drills and then we started having kick-to-kick. They couldn’t believe how far we kicked it,” Byrne says.

“Swan McKay kicked it from one goal to the other – big torpedos… the crowd loved it.”

A more forward-thinking 49ers executive may have fast tracked the rise of Australian punters in the NFL had he waved a contract in McKay’s face.

Byrne admits however that the wear and tear of the trip had taken its toll on others’ performances.

“We couldn’t do too much because a lot of us weren’t 100%. We had the CUB fever a lot of us.”

When the 45 minutes was up, out came the 49ers to play while the Blues exited the field, and Byrne thinks, into the 49ers changeroom facilities. They got changed and then took a seat to watch the game and resume one of the great end-of-season junkets.

In a time when the NFL had little exposure in Australia, most Blues players were nonplussed at the game but as Byrne recalls all the stoppages made it easy to enjoy the hospitality provided.

By the end of the game, they were not too sure what they were watching anyway.

The whole lost-to-history experience would be the kind of exposure that the AFL today may invest millions in. That seemingly half of the AFL and Australian sport’s front office heavy hitters are in San Francisco this weekend underlines that fact.

With the 49ers confirmed to be playing at the MCG in the first Australian NFL regular season, perhaps Carlton has a role to play on that day too?

Byrne’s fond memories of the tour are understandable as it’s postscript was life changing.

After the US leg he travelled on to Europe to backpack for 2 months and met his wife to be.

When he finally got back to Melbourne after months of merriment he was, his words, “as fat as a pig.” The message from new Blues coach Ian Stewart suggested his career was on borrowed time.

While Stewart would only last a month, Byrne was also on his way out.

Yet his mid-season switch to Collingwood revitalised his career, becoming a favourite at the Pies for another six years when heading back home to Bendigo may have been the alternative.

There are still more holes in this story that would be fascinating to understand, but one Byrne thinks he can help with is who the 49ers played that day.

He believes they travelled in late October, and NFL records that say that the 49ers hosted Tampa Bay at Candlestick Park on 30 October 1977.

He has no memory of the game, but if that is correct the 49ers had a 20-10 victory in an otherwise ordinary season.

“Yep, they got a lot of tips off watching us train,” he laughs.

UPDATE

David McKay, the man who most impressed the Americans according to Byrne, listened to the radio segment and was able to clarify more details.

McKay remembers that they also kicked American footballs on Candlestick Park but thinks that his teammate Byrne may have generously added a few yards to his kicking exploits on the day.

The mystery he can solve is who the 49ers played that day.

49 years on McKay has found the official program from the game he bought that day.

The match was played on 9 October, 1977 which was a 49ers 0-7 loss to the Atlanta Falcons. The low-scoring game perhaps an explanation for the players not being enamoured with the new sport.

Yet it’s the relic that sits on the second last page, that made McKay laugh.

“We got a mention…as entertainment!” McKay says.

The section reads that “members of the Carlton Football Club from Melbourne, Australia will give a demonstration of marking (high catches) and kicking (drop kick style).”

It went on to make the Premiership Super Bowl comparison and explain that “this style of football is played by every red-blooded Australian boy.”

And while the pre-game performance did not inspire an 49ers, the Blues of ‘77 can be proud that they received top billing on the entertainment page.

Wallsy, Jezza, Sellers, Swan, Rugged and co. sat a rung above the esteemed Live Oak High School Band that played at half time.

LISTEN TO SEN RADIO’S ‘KNOW YOUR HISTORY’ ON THIS TOPIC

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12 months ago I enthused to some younger work colleagues that these Oasis gigs I’d just bought tickets for would be “like Taylor Swift for old blokes.” 

I was wrong. 

This was a Taylor Swift moment for everybody. 

Any age, any sex. 

It was hard not to be overwhelmed  by the mass power and precision that Noel and Liam (The other guys? There were other guys?) delivered across the two nights I attended. 

This was not some washed out facsimile of the glory days. 

Never a band endowed with traditional rock glamour (and in Noel, always looking slightly incongruous as a rock star), today they look older but they do not look old. 

More focussed, the time away from each other doing the solo thing has enhanced their live performance chops. Distant from the chaotic 1990s, Liam’s voice and Noel’s playing (and voice) are better than they’ve ever been. 

Leaving behind “cigarettes and alcohol” and “the white liiiiiine” will do that for you. Oh, and not wanting to punch each other up after every second gig probably helps too. 

Yet in between the pummeling of ‘Acquiesce’, ‘Bring it on Down’ and ‘Rock and Roll Star’, and the sweet singalongs of ‘Live Forever’, ‘Whatever’ and ‘Don’t Look back in Anger’ with more than 50,000 every night there were thoughts. 

Oasis thoughts, of course 

How could it be that 20 years ago, I saw this band at Festival Hall in Melbourne with perhaps only 4000 others? 

Back then they had long tumbled down the creative and commercial peak they raced to with Definitely, Maybe and What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?.  

Yet in the UK they still packed stadiums, shipped albums by the million, and had hit singles that permeated pop culture until the acrimoniously dissolving in 2009.

Heroes at home, most of Australia had long fallen out of love with Oasis. 

For that there are a few reasons. 

The 1990s in Australia were a time of the anti-rockstar. 

The rise of Triple J as a national radio network resulted in its years of greatest cultural impact, and it was enthrall to Cobain and Co.’s American alt-rock that raged against the rock star machine. 

The alternative rock gods that preceded Oasis’s rise actively worked against that biggest band in the world ideal; practically (Pearl Jam) or tragically (Nirvana).

It would inform the local scene for the remainder of the decade. 

The Britpop moment happened in Australia but not to the level revisionist history might tell you. 

Not one of Oasis’ singles from their debut made it to the  listener-voted end of year Triple J Hottest 100. 

Nor did any of the singles crack it for a spot in the mainstream ARIA top 100. Not even for one week. 

What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? then smashed into the mainstream, wonderwall going number one in the country, and taking out top spot in the Triple J poll in 1995. The title track of the album (perhaps the Oasis song closest to American alt-rock) came in at 13 in the Js poll.

The following year, despite more hits flowing on the charts, they had disappeared completely from the youth network's poll. 

For right or wrong (and there is an argument for right that is also an argument against some JJJ philosophy today), the 1990s creed meant banishment if commercial radio took a sustained interest in you. 

Oasis became too big, too mainstream and too boorishly rock star for 1990s teens and 20-somethings. 

Wanting to be a rock and roll star had about as much credibility as synth pop, skinny jeans or the England cricket team in the 1990s.

Three cancelled Australian tours added to the suspicions, and by 1997’s Be Here Now, JJJ presaged the eventual global disappointment by barely playing it. 

Their eventual 1998 tour consisted of just one Rod Laver Arena show in their Melbourne stop-off that reportedly did not sell out. 

Confounding for a band that 18 months prior had been the undisputed biggest in the world. 

“We sort of blew it really by not going at the height of our popularity,” Noel told The Age ahead of the tour, confirming the Australian decline. 

Their belated arrival in the country was the final nail in the coffin. 

Thrown off a Cathay Pacific flight and banned from the carrier for ‘life’ for bad behaviour was playing to the caricature. While this would be just more grist for the tabloid hype mill at home, in 1990s Australian music circles it was passé.

They had already lost the hipsters, now they’d lost the more conservative mainstream. 

Add ‘Pommy’ to ‘bad boys’ and you have a recipe for revile. 

Later in the year, JJJ listeners voted on their favourite songs ever, and despite it being packed with recent hits and Wonderwall having taken the annual crown two years prior, the Manucians didn’t rate a mention. 

They were destined to live in a kind of Australian music fan purgatory through the 2000s where JJJ might play their new singles occasionally, despite the songs fitting snuggly stylistically next to their staples. Commercial radio play was just as sparse. 

While filling football stadiums in the UK, they played as undercard to a headlining Powderfinger on the 2002 Livid Festival’s boutique bill and then those two nights at Festival Hall in 2005.  

That was it for Melbourne until our magical Melbourne Cup weekend. 

How it turned around is a little more confusing.

There is no question that the collapse of American alt-rock into the sorry wreckage of nu-metal by the end of the 1990s turned a lot of Australian eyes and ears back towards ol’Blighty. 

The Strokes-led rock revival may have originated from New York City but it was decidedly British in its influences. Indeed the Strokes were stars in the UK first. 

It coincided with a wave of diverse, energetic and utterly enjoyable UK and US indie rock cut from the same cloth. While not Oasis clones; the hooks, the mouths and the ambition owed something to the Gallaghers. From Bloc Party and the Killers down, all cultivated devoted fan bases in Australia. 

As if to confirm all that, the Britpop documentary Live Forever was released that painted Oasis as an heroic story, and showcased Noel and Liam as hilarious rather than hooligans.

Noel intentionally, Liam likely unintentionally.

Oasis’ past was quietly winning back indie cred in Australia during the 2000s, even if their new releases weren’t, and was trickling down through the younger generations too. 

Unencumbered by the 90s straitjacket of irony and slackerism, they heard ‘Wonderwall’ as the greatest singalong anthem ever written.  

As the guitar became less prevalent in the 16 years of Oasis absence, those that wanted to dig deeper found in the pulverising indie rock of Definitely, Maybe and the pop rock perfection of What’s the Story.., something elusive.  

Shorn of all the tabloid and mass fame-shame of the 1990s, Oasis sounded both accessible and credible. And, with streaming, able to be rummaged through at any moment. 

They found something that sits with Nirvana as THE definitive alt-rock act of the 1990s, not a circus act.

The “anyway, here's Wonderwall’ meme and the “play Wonderwall” festival joke became emblematic for a generation still in prams when Liam first proclaimed “I’m a rock and roll star.” 

JJJ listeners rocketed Wonderwall to 12 in its 2009 all-time vote, and then gave it the number 1 spot when they conducted a poll of the previous 20 years in 2013. 

The rehabilitation was complete. 

If a similar poll was held now, the only contest would be whether ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ splits the ‘Wonderwall’ vote. 

The 20 year absence in Australia has just built the fervour. It could be argued that the Oasis tour has made them a bigger cultural force in Australia in 2025 than they were in their imperial phase of 1995-1996.  

Streaming has closed generation gaps (not always a good thing) so that teens looking for guitars might find it first in Oasis. 

The culture wars that dictate life in 2025? 

The Gallagher boys have that cornered too. Their longtime disdain for artistic pretension, unabashed ambition and crowd pleasers with nonsensical lyrics that do not require analysis speaks to one side. 

The other side, who typically dive further into music, have an admiration of the underclass story that defined their rise and the humour in most of what they say/said (aside from a few mid-90s howlers). They celebrate their ability to distill/ape the entire rock music canon in five minute slabs. Once, when rock music held an unshakable cultural position, that was derided.

In a world where we can’t agree on anything, we can now agree on Oasis. 

For the first time in decades, rock music became universal. 

But don’t stop at Oasis.

Now is the time to go check out this generation's practitioners of anthemic guitar music. 

In contrast to Bloke-asis, encouragingly so many of the best today are female.

Is rock music off life support? 

Definitely, maybe.