Footy fever

"The heroic sport of brawny men in hot pants gleefully defacing a cricket pitch in the world's most frenetic field goal kicking contest"

I was temporarily at a loss as to what to write about but then I remembered it's Footy Grand Final Day. How can you ignore that? And there is a definite food component to it all which I shall come to.

I will say at the outset that I know nothing about footy really, except the names of a few teams. To me it looks like grown-ups playing keepings off in the playground. David calls it aerial ping-pong, which I don't think sounds rough enough because it's a rough game - and guess what the fastest growing game is in Australia - women's footy - or Aussie rules as it is semi-properly called and AFL as it is properly called. I found this lovely article on the SBS site somewhere, written by Spencer Hall. The quote that opens this article and the two below are taken from it. It's called Why Australian Rules Football is the greatest sport on the planet. Check it out, because it does seem to get the essence of the game, as in these two quotes:

"You won't have any clue what's going on, but that's fine. Players have to bounce the ball every ten meters or so. Why they have to do this is a mystery; it may be to demonstrate some element of skill besides just running headlong into each other like rugby players, or it may be a tribute to early Aussie Rules players who had to smash deadly brown snakes and redback spiders crawling on their fields.

Players can move the ball by running, punching the ball forward, or kicking it. You'll have no clue why they're doing this at any point, leading you to believe that Aussie Rules is really just a cover for random violence, astonishing displays of kicking accuracy, and bizarre running volleyball sets."

Australia, as you may probably know is a sports mad nation. We seem to be mostly good at it, so it's a source of national pride and masses of money is poured into it. Victoria is even more sports mad than the rest of Australia. The big three events are the Grand Final (the footy I am talking about), the Melbourne Cup and the Australian Tennis Open. But there is also the Melbourne Grand Prix, various Golf tournaments about which I know less than nothing, and the cricket of course with the Boxing Day test being the highlight of that sport. We have even muscled in on rugby league - the domain of NSW and produced one of the sports' dominant teams and there's just about every other sport known to man as well. We have public holidays for the football parade the day before the Grand Final and for the Melbourne Cup. Nowhere else in the world has a public holiday for a horse race - and I shall cover it when it comes up (November).

I discovered some years ago that if shopping is your thing, then today is a great day to do it. Whilst the Grand Final is on there is absolutely nobody out there. The shops are deserted so you can have them all to yourself. This is because everyone is either at the Grand Final, watching it on the television or having a party. And here we come to the food.

Food for the footy is very traditional - meat pies and sausage rolls slathered with tomato sauce. The main purveyor of these is Pattie's pies whose brand name is Four and Twenty Pies.

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It has always seemed to me to be a messy thing to eat - a hot meat pie - but I can sort of see why it goes with the footy. The smaller versions shown at left are especially made for all of those football parties. The supermarket had a case full of them, together with sausage rolls. And what I find interesting is that mostly, for these parties, people do indeed buy in these mass-produced, and really not very wonderful or nutritious items instead of making their own. But then I suppose pies are one of the more fiddly kind of foods you can make. But so much tastier - see below:

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And the supermarkets (which once again inspired this article) have everything you can need for your party. The poster at left was at every checkout in Woolworths and shows the 'snags on the barbie'. For there's the barbecue of course. You can make a good bet that a lot of these parties will be barbecues, and not very sophisticated ones at that. I was actually surprised that Woolworths was not really making a huge deal about pushing sausages and chops and steak for sale. And really when I think about it the pies and sausage rolls had a relatively small display. I should have gone to Coles to check out what they were doing. And of course there was a sausage sizzle outside.

Alas it's not a very good day for it this year. I did the Eltham walk this morning because it was cool, but I had to use my umbrella at one point because it was raining a bit. Not a real good day for a barbie - but then they will mostly be clustered around their television sets cheering on their teams. This year we have a Sydney team - boo - and a Melbourne team - the Bulldogs who hail from Footscray, a western suburb of Aussie battlers and immigrant Vietnamese, that hasn't had it's team in the final since forever. I think the crowd will be somewhat one-sided, though I have no idea which is the better team.

"Sure there have been injuries and deaths in football - but none of them serious." ~ Adrian Anderson

Sums it all up really.