As many of you are aware, we were very fortunate to have a couple destination options for this international assignment – Brussels, London, and Melbourne. As we were weighing the pros and cons of each, we received some excellent advice from our friends Donna and Dirk – long time expats themselves. Dirk said, “As you’re choosing, think about what you’ll be doing when you’re NOT working. Consider where you want to wake up each morning.” Hmmm foggy London? With the bad traffic and high cost of living? Or Melbourne? Endless beaches, sunshine, and kangaroos? Right. Melbourne it is. (No, we never considered Brussels…). Donna advised, “When you’re living abroad, don’t live like a temporary citizen. Embrace the city and culture as if you were planning to spend the rest of your lives there.” There have been a few blog references to sports and how Australians – especially Melbournians – are crazy for any sort of sport. As part of our quest to truly embrace the city and ‘live like a local’ we’ve attended a number of sporting events.
Tennis
The Australian Open (one of the big 4 – the other three being US Open, Wimbledon, and The French Open at Roland Garros) is held in Melbourne each January. (Yes, Tanya, you can gloat to your friends that you were correct.) The “Asia Pacific Tennis Grand Slam” is fabulous. The tennis grounds are permanent, with 3 major arenas and 22 side courts where you can get close to your favorite players. You can get up close with Andy Roddick, James Blake, Jarkko Nieminen, the Williams sisters, or Raphael Nadal as they practice, play doubles, or in early round matches, play singles. It is THE BEST way to spend a day. The hot January sun beating down, ice cold VB, hushed crowds, and the rhythmic sound of the tennis ball bouncing off the racket and the new cobalt blue courts – unless of course you’re watching Maria Sharapova where each shot is punctuated with her signature grunt.
If you think this event is completely peaceful and innocuous, here’s an excerpt from the January 16 newspaper, The Herald Sun.
“THE Australian Open erupted in ugly violence last night as police doused tennis fans with capsicum [ed. that’s ‘Strine for pepper] spray. Panic gripped Margaret Court Arena as spectators gasped for air after coming into contact with the spray. Many ran for the exits and the match had to be stopped. Police used the spray to try to subdue fans of Greek player Konstantinos Economidis who became upset when police tried to evict members of their cheer squad.”
Can you imagine tennis fans being so unruly that they need to be pepper sprayed? Yep. If they’re AUSSIE tennis fans.
M&M at Australian Open in Jan
Australian Rules Football
Australian rules football, Australian football, Aussie rules, or simply “footy” is a sight to behold. It’s played between two teams of 18 players on a large oval grass field with four goal posts at each end. Half the footy teams are based in Victoria and I tell you, Melbournians are MAD for this game.
It’s a game I wouldn’t necessarily think of as intuitive and it takes a while to get the hang of how it works. Lots of men without helmets, padding, or any other protective gear running, jumping, tackling, and kicking (the football) back and forth across the field. I have no idea what is going on, but then Matt finally came up with this explanation – imagine a game combined of soccer, rugby, and keep away… THAT’S IT! I’ve got it!
Now, can someone explain why the uniforms are so hideous? There’s one team – Hawthorn – that’s known as the “poos and wees” this is because the team colors are urine yellow and excrement brown. What could be worse than these colors? I’ll tell you what could be worse – the putrid way they’re displayed on the stripped knee socks and jerseys the players wear, that’s what. Imagine thick, alternating swathes of the offending colors. I just can’t get behind a team that looks that revolting.
Neither can our (aforementioned) friend, Tanya. John and Tanya made their second journey to Australia this past March. We had a fabulous time visiting pubs on St. Patrick’s Day, the Melbourne laneways, the Yarra valley and a Hawthorn vs. Melbourne footy match. Hawthorn is a top tier team and they beat the pants off of the Melbourne Demons. How badly you ask? By more than 100 points. That’s not just a win… it’s humiliation. John and Tanya took a spin around the massive arena (which seats 90,000!) and returned with a souvenir. A Melbourne Demons shirt. Tanya shrugged her shoulders, “I just couldn’t pay good money for Hawthorn shirt – they’re horrible”.
This year, Aussie rules celebrates 150 years of Australian Football. I’ve decided to barrack (Australians don’t say root…
rooting is only done by consenting adults) for St. Kilda – the area of town closest to where we live. They’re called the Saints and their colors are black, white, and red. Now this is a team I can cheer for!
Tanya, John, and Matt at Footy
Cricket
For us Yanks cricket has always been that genteel game played by snooty British twits wearing white pants and cardigans and saying things like “By Jove, splendid wicket there Lord Reginald!” In reality, cricket is nothing like that: in Australia (and every other cricket country) it is a sport played by the common masses and inspires the same sort of rabid intensity of sport fans of any class or socioeconomic status. In fact, in Australia going to the cricket is considered the ideal party day out for the younger set – which we learned at the matches we attended this year.
Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said Aussie rules isn’t very intuitive? Let me tell you a little about cricket. Cricket has been around over 250 years. It is a bat and ball sport played by two teams with 11 players each, although when a team is batting that team only has two players on the field and they are both batsmen (batters). The batsmen) are “bowled” (pitched) to by a bowler. Why don’t they just say “pitch”, like baseball? Because “the pitch” is a rectangular area of the ground approx. 20 yards length the bowlers run along before they bowl the ball (a hard Cricket ball about the size of a fist, thrown overhand into the pitch, it should bounce once and then reach the batsman). Behind each of the (2) batsman (one on each end of the pitch) there are two sets of “wickets”. Wickets consist of three wooden stumps (a couple feet high) with two bails (wooden doo hickeys) on top.
As a batsman, the object is to hit (bat) the cricket ball in order to defend the wicket that’s right behind you. When you do bat the ball, you and the second batsman (non-striker), run back and forth across the pitch to score runs while the other team (mostly comprised of fielders) races to catch or field the ball and get one (or another) of the batsmen out. If you hit it out of the field (a “boundary”) in the air its 6 runs. A boundary on the ground is 4 runs.
There are multiple forms of cricket but the three most common versions are –20 over cricket, one day cricket, and test cricket, the last which is a match that spans several days. The two longer ones have breaks in the match. The breaks are not called anything like “interval” or “half time”, they’re called “tea”, “lunch” and “drinks”.
Confused yet?
When booking tickets Matt had no idea where to sit so he bought reserved seats, not general admission, to ensure we were not amongst the unwashed masses. When Kris, a co-worker, mentioned all the seats are great except for those in “Bay 13”, which he described as a haven for the young, the drunk, the slightly offensive – you get the picture. Matt googled “bay 13”, and sure enough, it was mentioned in several news articles. The most common adjectives in the stories were “notorious”, “rowdy”, “intoxicated”, and “arrests”. The actual area had been eliminated by a reconstruction of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (aka the MCG or just “the “G”) a few years ago, but the atmosphere lingered in the general vicinity: Hmm, should we be worried our seats were in “section 13”?
We brought our good friends Megan and Will (visitors from the states and cricket virgins) to the match. “It will be a great way to spend a leisurely afternoon” we said. “Sunny Sunday, quiet and relaxing like baseball”, we said. Not in Australia. The fans were intense, riveted, and unruly. In the end we sat above section 13, which meant we were out of the hooligan section but had an excellent view of it. Fans – replete with face paint and wearing Australian flags as capes – were getting hauled off by police at a regular clip and the Melbourne police set up a temporary office to book, fingerprint, and/or fine the offending fans.
Megan and Marlys watched 4 hours before deciding they had enough. Matt and Will stayed on a few more hours until the end. Imagine the poor blokes hauled out of the MCG – some pulled out and arrested even before the first bowl. That means missing 6 (or more) hours of cricket with your friends. Although we suppose that does mean enough time to make bail, sober up, go home, change, have a few beers, and head back to the MCG to meet up with your friends and catch the end of the game.
Some of you may ask how you know when a Cricket match is over and there’s a winner. My answer is: that’s a REALLY good question.
Bay 13
Marlys & Matt at Cricket
Matt wearing Aussie Cricket jumper outside the G
