What you need to know for the AFL Grand Final which is happening tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the biggest day in sport in Australia, or at least in Melbourne, where I live. It's the AFL Grand Final, that's the Australian Football League final game of the year where we determine who is the best team for the 2021 Season which started way back in March.

Now this is not Football as you would know it, it is not the round ball game, it's Australian Rules Football - this is hard to explain to foreigners, but here is a video I found on Youtube that does a reasonable job in 5 minutes.

Okay now that you know the basics what is happening in this year's grand final? Well firstly it's not being played at the MCG (With stands for Melbourne Cricket Ground - I'm going to assume some of you know what Cricket is and thus understand the size of the playing field, it's a cricket ground) Anyway Melbourne is still dealing with COVID so no crowds for sporting games at the moment so the Grand Final has been shipped over to Perth where they can have crowds and 60,000 people will be watching it.

Melbournians will be reduced to watching it on television - which is what I will be doing along with maybe 3 million other people. This is certainly a shame, because both teams in the Grand Final are from Melbourne. Although the AFL is a national competition it started as the Victorian Football League (or VFL) Victoria being the state Melbourne is in, so 10 of the 18 clubs are from Melbourne.

There are a few things that surprise foreigners about Football:

• It's a very popular game, if you live in Melbourne you have a team, across the 9 games in a round anywhere between 300-450,000 people are attending.
• In Melbourne, because there are so many different teams you get a strange rivalry - not English soccer bash people rivalry but a good natured 'we hate that team and we will certinaly give you shit at work on Monday if your team loses' type of thing. But on the flipside you always know someone who barracks for a rival team so you can find joy in most teams winning.
• The season is long - 22 Home and Away (or regular season) games, followed by 3 or 4 finals games. So it's Melbourne's culture for about half the year.
• Games are long - about 2.5 hours.
• The game is really old, like really old. The VFL started in 1896 and most of the Melbourne clubs started life before then. For instance my team, North Melbourne started life in 1869 - which is slightly insane when you think about it - close enough to 150 years of them playing football games each week, they predate cars, electricity being in common usage, the concept of a working week.

But let's get back to the game. We have to sides playing Melbourne Football Club and the Western Bulldogs.

You couldn't get two different Melbourne teams if you tried. Melbourne is the original Football club in Australia - founded in 1868 (just a year before North Melbourne by the way) - It's arguably one of the oldest sporting teams in the world. They are an establishment club, they play at the MCG (the home of football), their players were traditionally upper class (when the player came from the local area, now players come through talent pathways) and their supporters were as well.

They were also very very good, They have won the Premiership (which is what we call winning the grand final) 12 times. The first of these was in 1900 and the last was in 1964 - so they averaged one every 5 years for a while but then haven't won one for over 56 years - This is the longest drought of any team which has won a premiership (there are a couple of younger teams which have never won one) So there are plenty of Melbourne fans who have never seen Melbourne win the ultimate prize, so you know that would be nice for them to see it, I guess.

On the Flip side is the Western Bulldogs. Founded in 1877 but not admitted to the VFL/AFL until 1925 they are from the suburb of Footscray which was VERY working class (along with North Melbourne, hence I have a soft spot for them). They have never been a flashy team, they have never had money, and they have never really been a popular team, largely because they weren't very successful. They have only one two premierships, 1954 - when they beat Melbourne in fact and 2016.

I was actually there in 2016 - this is the seen after the match - to watch a group of supporters whose team hadn't won in 60 odd years win was amazing

And the Western Bulldogs had done it tough, both that year (they were the fairytale coming from 5th position and never expected to win) and throughout history. They had changed their name to the Western Bulldogs to try to appeal to the whole of the western suburbs of Melbourne, they almost merged in the mid 1980's. But they have battled on and succeeded.

So tomorrow is not just about sport, I mean Sport very really is just about sport it's about the rich versus the poor (but only in a cartoon villian sort of way Australian society is actually pretty flat) it's about the establishment versus the battler, the big guy versus the little guy. But more importantly for me it'll be about watching the game with a few beers - (check out my traditional #beersaturday post at some point which will be posted post game) eating some good food and watching a bloody good game of football.

Oh a convincing myself that my team (North Melbourne) or my wifes team (St Kilda) will be good enough to make it to that 'Final Saturday in September' and we can win our 5th (for North) or 2nd (for St Kilda) premiership next year - neither really seems likely.