Yarraville-Seddon Eagles won the WRFL Division 2 premiership in 2019. It had to wait more than 500 days to raise its flag.
For Caroline Springs Football Club President Terry Azzopardi, the lack of local football in Melbourne last year due to Covid19 had its upside.
“I actually got some work done’, he joked on WYN FM’s WRFL “Match of the Day” broadcast, ahead of the round two clash away at Yarraville-Seddon on Saturday. “I saw my family. I actually reacquainted myself with my wife.”
All jokes aside though, Azzopardi struck a different tone when recounting what last season was really like with no games.
“It’s huge (not having football),” he says. “You know, we spend six or seven days a week at the club, so there’s a huge hole, and probably for the first four or five weeks you’re like: ‘What do I do with myself’?”
It was a question he was far from alone in pondering last season.
While the AFL departed for hub life in sunny Queensland and interstate leagues continued to play on, the more than 1200 country and suburban football clubs in the sport’s Victorian heartland were forced into recess for the first time in living memory. Tens of thousands of players, coaches and supporters found themselves without their winter pastime and for much of that period, were confined to their homes.
As disorienting as this was, Azzopardi said the decision in June last year to finally cancel local football after months of uncertainty as the threat from the pandemic grew, came as a relief.
“I think the hardest thing was the stop-start and not knowing are we playing or are we not playing,” he says. “You get the boys up for training and then all of a sudden they’re breaking up for two or three weeks and then you try to get them up again.
“By the end we were just like, you know what, let’s just stop it, get everyone go home and enjoy their time off and try to regenerate when we have some sort of confirmation that we were back on for pre-season.”
As an administrator, Azzopardi spent the rest of his time off keeping the fledgling club on Melbourne’s north-western outskirts afloat. Less than 20 years old and based in one of the fastest growing regions in the country and with a booming junior program, the Lakers weren’t immune from the financial fallout of a cancelled season.
“The bigger the club, the bigger the costs,” he says.
Still, the club retained most of it playing list as well as coach and former Collingwood forward Brodie Holland. This sort of stability has been a rarity among local football clubs though, with the pandemic wreaking havoc not just on club finances, but on the livelihoods of coaches and players, many of whom have changed clubs as a result.
A prime example was Caroline Springs’ opponent on Saturday, Yarraville-Seddon Eagles. It was a big day for the Eagles, who were raising the WRFL Division 2 seniors and reserves premiership flags won back in 2019.
PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.
It was the club’s first home game for over 500 days and its first back in Division 1 for eight years. After three consecutive grand final defeats, the 2019 premiership that finally secured promotion was a significant moment for the club, but the celebrations were as notable for who wasn’t there as who was.
The coach who guided them to that victory, Vinnie Turcinovich, was a few suburbs away coaching Braybrook in Division 3. Star players such as Lachie Longmire, former Blue, Bulldog and Swan Andrejs Everitt, and a host of others, had either retired or moved elsewhere.
Turcinovich’s replacement as coach, Chris Atkins, left the club for personal reasons without coaching a game, as did his successor Michael Barlow, with the former Docker departing to coach Werribee in the VFL just months after signing on.
Brad Julier was coaching the WRFL interleague team back in 2019, but is now Yarraville-Seddon’s fourth coach since that season, a fact he takes in his stride.
“You could look at it that way (being fourth choice), but I don’t look at it that way,” he says. “I was beaten by a better man for the job (Barlow) in the first place, and then it sort of fell my way,” he told WYN FM pre-match.
The belated appointment also had its benefits when it came to dealing with the cancellation of last season. “I didn’t come until after Christmas and it was all done and dusted (the lockdown), so I didn’t have to deal with any of it, which was good,’ Julier said.
With community transmission non-existent, vaccinations underway and as of last weekend, all suburban and country and junior competitions back up and running, local football in Victoria is slowly returning to the days when Corona was a beer drunk on end-of-season trips.
However, as AFL Victoria boss Brad Scott points out, there’s still a way to go.
“Given what the state has been through and with summer sports going later than normal, some registrations for community football are coming later than they normally would but overall numbers are tracking well,” Scott told Footyology.
“With Easter and school holidays behind us, we’re hoping to see lots of families and kids come back to their Auskick centres and junior clubs in coming weeks, or become part of a club for the first time.”
Yarraville-Seddon’s big day was spoiled, with Caroline Springs winning by 45 points to go 2-0 and raise hope that a finals campaign might be within its grasp. Whatever the eventual outcome though, best-on-ground Keenan O’Shea echoed the views of many in local football when describing what it felt like to be back.
“Everyone’s missed each other and missed being around each other and realised how important it is that we actually are playing footy together,” O’Shea said.
