IT’S THE week of North Melbourne’s only Friday night clash for the year and what has been strangely absent so far are the cries from the Shinboner faithful about how their club deserves a greater share of prime-time football.
Perhaps coach Brad Scott is saving it for his weekly media meet-and-greet or perhaps the Kangaroos have given up the chase, which would be a shame because their claims for a bigger slice of the action are sound.
If you apply the same logic that the AFL does when supporting the Collingwood-Essendon Anzac Day status quo (they put the work into building it up and so deserve to reap the rewards), then the Kangaroos should figure on our Friday night TV screens more than they do.
North played the first Friday night game in Melbourne, against Collingwood in the season opener of 1985. It then played one against Carlton later that year.
But you have to remember what the football landscape was like back in 1985. It was the year North became the third tenant club at the MCG, but also a time when every match, except for the Swans' home games at the SCG were played on a Saturday afternoon.
There weren’t enough Saturday afternoons and public holidays to accommodate all 33 Melbourne, Richmond and North Melbourne home games, so a different time slot needed to be found.
The combination of the old VFA’s protected status on a Sunday afternoon and the new MCG lights led to North becoming the pioneers. A crowd of 65,628 stormed the MCG for the season opener, while a more modest 32,861 attended the Carlton clash, which started at 8pm on June 28.
Again, a good crowd and it showed that the football public was ready to embrace fair-dinkum night footy that counted for premiership points rather than the half-baked affairs out at Waverley for the consolation prize of the night premiership.
What’s fascinating about the North-Carlton clash of 1985 is how low-key the coverage was. At a time when four Melbourne radio stations held the rights to broadcast League football, only 3AW bothered to broadcast the game.
Even more bizarre was that the Channel Seven highlights package only went to air at 11pm and only for an hour.
The prime time viewing that night was the movie That’s Entertainment on Seven, the England-Australia Test match from Lord’s on Nine, Carry on Around the Bend on Ten and music entertainment, gardening and lawn bowls on the ABC.
It was in that environment that North pioneered Friday night football and by 1986, it was playing four Friday home games. Seven was a bit bolder with its programming, showing a 90-minute highlights package from 9.30pm.
The following year, the Demons and Tigers started to stage Friday night home games as well but it took another 10 years before the Friday night load was truly shared among all clubs and both the League and the broadcasters started to recognise the appeal and the importance of playing the best games of the round at the start of the weekend.
By then, North had given us a swag of Friday night memories. The Krakouers in the 1980s and Wayne Carey in the 1990s. Indeed, many North people would tell you that Carey’s best ever game for the club came on a Friday night at the MCG in 1996 when he had 31 disposals, took 15 marks and kicked 11.2 in a match against Melbourne.
The irony was that because it was played during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the game was only on pay-TV. The company that sold the DVD of the game had to make extra copies the following week as word spread of the superhuman display by Carey.
So the ties that bind North to Friday night footy are strong, but for the Kangas, that’s where it starts and ends. And you kind of think that coach Brad Scott likes it that way.
The North coach prefers to borrow selectively from North Melbourne’s history. He would love to play more Friday night games, but would rather they be earned on merit, than feel the club has some sort of entitlement to them because of the dusty pages of history.
He understands the stakes at Etihad Stadium on Friday night. Beat the Blues and the Kangas might find themselves invited back to the bright lights of prime time sooner rather than later.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the club
