Passing time - Mark Pierce attends the Sapphire League AFL Grand Final between the Narooma Lions and the Pambula Panthers

I have often been charmed by the advertisement which declares that: It’s not country footy. It’s footy country. I decided to test whether that was still true by turning up at the Grand Final of the Sapphire Coast AFL comp, at Narooma on the far South Coast of New South Wales. 

The victorious Narooma Lions, Sapphire League Premiers, 2025

That experience was charmingly odd from the start. Entry to the ground was free. Hot food offerings were limited to dim sums, a noodle cup and chips, offering two nods of a sort to multicultural Australia. Perhaps mixed Asian greens could have been served as a side. 

Cars were parked everywhere outside the ground but, regrettably, nobody has adopted the American practice of tail-gating. That would have involved opening the boot after parking the car, removing a portable barbeque, pulling the tab on a beer or two, then grilling up sausages in the shade of the boot lid.

Instead, many locals had parked their utes inside the ground, with the back tray abutting the boundary fence. Three or four blokes then had enough room to stretch out, watching the game from their own personal mini-grandstand. Extra points for ingenuity were due to the family which had plonked a two-seater sofa on the tray of their ute, then squashed four family members together on it. 

A veteran of many AFL Grand Finals once told me that finals were altogether different from roster games: more noise and bustle in the rooms; warmer, drier days; game played on harder surfaces; easy to under-estimate the opposition’s resolution.  This Grand Final was different again, in all manner of good ways.

A light sea breeze blew across the ground. (After all, the sea was only a few hundred metres away; the surf would have been even closer if the game had been played at Bermagui.) Seagulls and pelicans browsed overhead. Unlike their raucously biased counterparts at home AFL games in Adelaide and Perth, the crowd was civil, applauding good play from either side. 

As Australians everywhere do, the spectators yelled out “ball” and “high” and “gone”, often indiscriminately but always with a good-humoured banter in the advice tendered to the umpires. Swearing was more or less rationed, which means you could only swear when exasperated, and – happily – betting was nowhere to be seen. 

One boundary umpire was so short he needed to come in a few steps from the boundary line before turning his back to throw the ball in.  All the umpiring team (none of whom we are now allowed to call “maggots”) adjusted to the fact that they could hear individual barrackers, not just a wave of crowd roar. Both the umpire and the offending player deigned to notice me when, after one bloke was walloped,  I reminded the bash-artist that he was a mongrel. 

The other audible oddity was that you could wander out to listen to the coaches at quarter and three-quarter time. That is vintage footy country stuff.  When I was a kid, North Hobart’s coach yelled out that one aged rover would give his bloody right arm to see the Robins win that day. The old warrior then held up his left arm in agreement and salute. When I was older, I listened to Ron Barassi telling his ‘Roos to kick long bombs to Snake in the square. Now that is all past history; long bombs are now deemed wasteful, full forwards do not lurk in the square, players with names like Jai and Tye are not usually nicknamed Snake. 

For the South coast teams, the coaches’ messages were distinctly retro, pure footy country. The game was to be won with grit and grip, the constituents of guts. Everyone was to give everything they had. The inference – a correct one in footy country – was that footy was not just a game and that there was no such thing as next year. 

All the teams played well. The winners were marshalled in their forward line by a burly bloke with a head either shaven or bald, chunky legs, arms like hams, fast on the sprint and tough all the way through. Were he playing Rugby League, he would have had no neck, a body festooned with tattoos and a fair few gaps among his teeth. Footy, though, is a rather more sophisticated pursuit.  When the teams changed ends, it turned out that they were playing another bloke – perhaps a brother – who looked exactly the same and controlled the back line. Both were top footballers, of the crash-through, break-a-pack variety.

Nothing about the game, not the ground, the players nor the spectators was anything less than terrific, good fun. A few blokes were hurt a bit, a few took speccies, drop kicks and stab kicks were still shunned, one side won while the other lost, but nobody on either side of the fence made a dill of themselves. We could do worse than adopting some of the rule book from footy country.