Footy fever

I am well on my way to becoming an honorary Australian: I spent the weekend watching footy and drinking beer as a prelude to visiting the beach on Monday. All I need to do now is wrestle a couple of crocs and barbeque a few shrimps, and citizenship (of the People's Republic of Stereotypia, formerly East Cliché) is mine.

I wondered why the customs guards were so strict when I flew into Sydney Aiport and why they asked if I'd been suffering from sudden palpitations, euphoria or deep depression. But it soon became apparent there was a simple explanation: Australia was in the grips of a highly contagious outbreak of footy fever.

Now from what I can tell, pretty much every sport is called football over here. You've got soccer (aka footy), rugby league (aka footy), rugby union (aka footy) and Aussie rules (aka footy). I believe cricket is different, but it wouldn't altogether surprise me to hear someone refer to it as footy.

On the second and third nights after my arrival both remaining Sydney teams got knocked out of the rugby league competition, making it the first time a New South Wales side hadn't reached the grand final. But a local team - the Swans, aka the Swannies - made it through to the deciding match of the Aussie rules season. (This, I learned, was very significant - as I understand it, the Australian constitution stipulates that Sydneysiders play rugby league and Melburnians play Aussie rules.)

Unusually both finals were played on the same weekend. Australia being Australia, they dominated the news agenda in the preceding week - in Sydney there was speculation about whether one of the Swans would miss the game because his wife was about to give birth (she very sportingly produced the baby early), and nationwide pundits debated whether Aussie rules was now a truly national sport (there were no Melbourne teams in the final). It was hard to get away from it: on Friday afternoon my mobile phone provider changed the location marker that flashes up on the screen of my handset from "Sydney CBD" to "Go Swannies". (I wondered whether they'd cynically done something similar in Perth, where the Swans' opponents, the West Coast Eagles, are based.)

I watched the Aussie rules final on Saturday afternoon in a pub (technically it was a "hotel", but I think I would have got a funny look if I'd asked for a room for the night) up the road from where I'm living. In an attempt to get into the spirit of things I wore a red-and-white t-shirt to match the Swans' colours. This had one interesting side-effect. The t-shirt, which I bought in Moscow in April with my last remaining roubles, has the very touristy slogan "CCCP" and is sure to annoy anyone who's ever lived under communism. After the game, an ageing Frenchman in the pub beckoned me over and in a bizarre mixture of French and Australian slang ("Bonjour, mate" etc) explained he was a communist from Marseilles and liked my t-shirt so much he wanted to buy me a beer. I declined, but throughout the game of pool I played next he kept waving and shouting "Parti Communiste!" at me.

Given that it was Aussie rules rather than rugby league, nobody was too upset when the Swans lost by one point. But I was impressed by how good-natured everybody was, even towards people who were loudly supporting the Eagles - I doubt a Manchester United fan watching his or her side play Liverpool in a FA Cup final in a Merseyside pub would last long.

Personally I thought the rugby league final - between the Brisbane Broncos and the Melbourne Storm - was less exciting, but I enjoyed the process of choosing which side to support. One of the girls I was watching the game with went for Melbourne because the shopping was better there, while most of the lads backed the Storm because "you've got to hate Queensland". It should be said that this inter-state rivalry is very playful and doesn't have any of the nasty vehemence of English football fans' feuds.

But I say we should encourage the Australians to keep playing their 57 different varieties of football. After all, if they were to start concentrating on soccer, we'd be in trouble.