In March 2005, I decided to take a two week holiday and travel around various parts of Northern Australia I had not yet visited: Ayers Rock (my heart skipped a beat when I first saw it from the plane), Alice Springs, Darwin, Townsville and Cairns.
I ended the holiday with a few days in Brisbane, which I have visited from time to time, albeit rarely (I am much more familiar with Canberra, Perth and Adelaide than with Brisbane or Sydney).
During my sojourn in Brisbane, I stopped into the Storey Bridge Hotel, which is not far from the Gabba. There was going to be an AFL game at the Gabba that night, it being around the start of the AFL season, and the pub was going to get busy. When talking to the bar staff and expressing my surprise that a rugby league city like Brisbane was going to have much interest in AFL, I was told that due to the threepeat (ie the three premierships in a row which the Brisbane Lions won in 2001, 2002 and 2003) the Lions were now as big as the Broncos (ie the NRL team) in terms of local support.
Last time I was in Brisbane was in August 2015, when I did go and watch the Western Bulldogs play the Brisbane Lions at the Gabba, and I must say that it’s a great place to watch football.
Even though some would say that the early 2000s were an excellent time for Australian Rules Football in Queensland, I would argue that the events of the past month have seen it enter a Golden Age.
My reasoning for that is the following:
. the obvious – Brisbane won its second premiership in a row yesterday
. the somewhat more subtle fact that Brisbane announced a membership record of 75,000 members this year (as compared to something over 60,000 for the Broncos in the NRL)
. the Gold Coast Suns not only played in its first final (at long bloody last), but it won it and then played off in a semi final against Brisbane
. a Gold Coast player won the Brownlow Medal
. Southport, Gold Coast’s reserves team, played off in the VFL Grand Final (ie the AFL’s main reserves competition).
If I was an AFL official, I would be very happy with how things are looking. The local Gold Coast NRL team, the Titans, has about 16,000 members compared to 30,000 for the Suns. The other two NRL clubs in Queensland, the Dolphins and the Cowboys, also do not have very high membership numbers (29,000 and 11,000 respectively).
I have not done any deep diving into crowd numbers at matches, nor, much more importantly, TV viewership in Queensland, but right now, both Queensland AFL teams are highly competitive at the same time for the first time in history. This is going to turn into strong growth in local interest in Queensland in Australian Rules Football, which can only be good for the AFL and to the detriment of both Rugby codes.
I also should note that the COVID in 2020 (time sure has flown by) did force the AFL to lifeboat the entire competition to Brisbane for that season, and the AFL Grand Final in 2020 was played at the Gabba. This itself, as I reflected at the time, showed how AFL had grown into a mature competition which could play away from its cradle in Victoria and probably caused interest in AFL in Queensland to increase.
It is a shame that the Gabba is not going to be rebuilt as a larger stadium for the Olympics in 2032, but this does have a silver lining in that there will be no interruption to the momentum currently enjoyed by the Brisbane Lions in terms of disruption caused by a home ground rebuild.
Lost For Words! 