Matthew Webber

While Matthew Webber did not have complete and open access to the Suns for their first AFL season (a real shame, but the club would have insisted on a final edit so as it could “protect its brand”) he does know enough of the players, coaching staff and hangers-on to give this book something of an insider feel.

He works for the club at the National Draft, is at preseason training, at the first trial game, all the while trying, as is everyone else, to work out how this team of mainly elite teenagers will cope with the hardened men of the Australian Football League.

The Gold Coast Suns had been established a couple of years prior, from nothing, to enter the AFL in 2011. They had experienced a couple of seasons in second level VFL, having created a team with generous draft concessions. The Suns had also managed to lure a small number of experienced players, but only one gave them credibility – Gary Ablett Jnr. Not that the others couldn’t play, far from it, but the acquisition of a dual premiership player from Geelong with a Brownlow Medal to his credit was something to make the football world sit up and take notice. So too, but in a different way, was the signing of rugby league international, Karmichael Hunt.

Webber get a lot right in the way he has written this book. He has captured the essence of what it is to be involved in a football club – the hopes both immediate and for the future; the commitment, investment and involvement of ordinary people who work almost as family and desperately seek success for one another; the immediate disappointments, followed by reassessment, excuses and the redevelopment of hope. I know from experience that this is the case not just in the major league, but also in minor league and junior clubs. It’s always there, and it’s a beautiful thing that many people outside such an organisation might never experience.

Webber’s use of minor and junior teams as a parallel for the Suns is very clever. During the course of the book we also spend time with the Byron Magpies, Palm Beach Currumbin Lions and the Suns reserves. Each club, each player has a story. I enjoyed Webber’s telling of the night a couple of Suns visited the Byron Magpies kids to assist with training – and to sign autographs. He, and the senior players and their club, understand the handing down of the joys of playing, and their responsibility to the Game.

There are some terrific vignettes in this book, two of which will stay with me for some time. It’s clear Matthew Webber dislikes Essendon fans (and rightly so). But it’s interesting what really gets his goat: “What rankles most is the queue at the ticket booths. Surely if these Bombers people were members of their club they’d be scanning their membership cards and walking straight in. Instead it’s fifty deep in Bombers gear at every window. Fair weather followers, these ones. Fickle. It genuinely shits me. And it’s because of them I miss the opening bounce. That shits me even more.”

Later the author visits Kardinia Park in Geelong, a ground with which I am quite familiar, when the Suns make their first visit. The venue has a fearsome reputation in the AFL, with opposing teams rarely winning there. At the time of the Suns first game there, Geelong’s winning streak at the stadium was approaching 30. But Geelong supporters seem so nice when they play at home. Webber meets Dorothy who offers him various baked goods as a snack before the game. Other supporters sip their beer, rather than swill it. The conversations are clever and intelligent. However beneath it all lies a darkness: “But despite all the pleasantness, never in the history of the game has there existed such a slaughterhouse. Last week a troubled Melbourne side lost by near enough to two hundred points. I bet the pre-game vibe was the same then too. Smiles, lamingtons, how-do-you-dos, and isn’t-that-lovelies all followed up by a routine disembowelling.”

Perhaps it was a lost opportunity that the club was disinclined to allow Matthew Webber to document this first season from inside; it certainly would have been something interesting that had never happened before, and would have added wonderfully to the literature of Australian Football. But if he had done that we might never have met Dorothy and Dylan and Lewis and the author’s wife and daughters, and we would be the worse for that.

‘House of the Rising Suns’ is a worthy addition to sports and Australian Football literature.… (más)