The Club

Greg Baum celebrates the revival and triumph of a local footy club

Miracles still happen. I saw one on Sunday.

It was as a little amateur football club that was teetering on the brink of extinction four years ago suddenly won the premiership, its first senior men’s flag for 32 years.

By the width of a goal post, it was meant to be. Its opponents won’t see it that way, nor would anyone expect them to. They were gallant in their own right, and gracious afterwards, and no one would have begrudged them if victory had fallen to them, or at least not for long. But this was one for the true believers.

Covid’s ravages and a mass exodus of players had put the club on its knees. Over the previous half dozen seasons, they’d won fewer than one match in every four. One year, there were no wins at all. The next, they avoided relegation to the lowest division only because of a reconfiguration of the league. That was only two years ago.

In the way of community footy, many hands, men and women, worked tirelessly, invisibly and thanklessly on the rebuild. An Under-19s side was reconstituted and promptly made two grand finals in a row. A batch of new senior players liked what they saw and decided to make themselves at home. Now there were plenty to go around. The days of ringing around ex-players on Friday nights begging for fill-ins were gone.

The women’s section, which also had been reduced to a rump, was rejuvenated, too. Women’s footy had changed the club for the better when it first arrived, and now the women were front and centre for the resurrection.

The husband of a former women’s player, a Gippslander, signed on as playing coach of the men and promptly began to pour his all into the job while ranging up and down one wing and kicking the occasional goal. He knew it wouldn’t be easy; his first win as coach was the club’s first for 655 days. A pep talk to the coach from Nathan Buckley might have helped.

This season, an electronic scoreboard appeared. This week, the club’s ground was fenced off for a long-overdue resurfacing. On grand final morning, old hands spent some time around a picnic table poring over plans for a pavilion redevelopment that has been on the drawing board for seven years, but at last looks about to be ticked off. The new shoots were sprouting.

Still, at season’s beginning, the aim was necessarily and prudently modest; a place in the finals would be a start. Then a string of early wins and a suffusion of confidence propelled them to the top of the ladder and opened up a glittering new horizon. A late-season faltering and an agonising one-point loss in the second semi sent them the hard way round into the grand final.