One town, one team: Hungry Cats create Geelong’s defining era

Geelong is a place that still has a sense of itself. Sure, Melbourne might be advancing down the highway, swallowing Werribee, sprawling towards Avalon in a way that could one day make the length of the Princes Highway a concrete conglomerate. But people from Geelong know that they are something different. They define themselves by it. Down that highway, out of the Melbourne footy fishbowl, Geelong Football Club offers one part of that sense of identity.

Geography doesn’t mean much in the AFL anymore. Modern-day Carlton is full of lawyers and the uni student children of wealth, not earthy Italian cafe owners shouting “Woof!” at Ang Christou. Collingwood, Richmond, North Melbourne, the ghosts of Fitzroy, all fuse into an inner-city conglomerate: the surviving commission flats form islands among the hipsters and artists who can still afford it and the rich dullards wanting that reflected coolness while complaining about the noise. Real estate parasites would place St Kilda, Essendon, Footscray, Hawthorn all within the most desirable inner band of a metropolis ballooning beyond. Most Melburnians who follow football now live in a Melbourne that football doesn’t represent.

South Australia got a generic Adelaide team, then an Adelaide suburb. Western Australia got a generic team that everyone knew was Perth, then a Perth suburb. New South Wales got a generic Sydney team with a Harbour Bridge motif, then another that is supposed to cover everything else from Redfern to Canberra. Queensland got a generic Brisbane team, and while the Gold Coast is a Geelong-like distance away, it is umbilically attached to the state capital in a way that the Victorian cities would never countenance. No one from Melbourne goes to Geelong