In a city that's fanatical about its footy, one group stands apart as, well, insanely devoted to their team. They are the cheer squad.  Specifically, the Tiger Army.  The Age Melbourne Magazine’s Konrad Marshall recently joined their ranks.

So this is really happening?" My wife as much sighed as asked the question, staring vacantly at the yellow and black action in front of her, eyes already glazing over. "You're really about to watch a replay of a game you just came home from?"

Yes. Yes, I was. Not to relive victory, mind you. The Tigers had just been flogged by the Hawks - a 63-point wet-weather shellacking leaving little room for hope or consolation - but I felt bound to watch it again anyway, desperate for even a glimmer of potential. I do it after every game. Revisiting the trauma and making sense of the slaughter is but one step in my weekly bereavement process.

The better part of the next morning would be spent scouring web forums and newspapers for analysis of the debacle. The early part of the following week would see me nodding sagaciously or cursing at every football pundit over their interpretation of what went down, riding out each day in what English author and soccer tragic Nick Hornby described as the natural waking state of all long-suffering fans: "bitter disappointment".

If lucky, I might be emotionally stabilised by midweek, just in time to get my hopes up once more and enter the MCG again, this time against the chillingly dominant force in the league, Collingwood, comforted as always by the warm delusion of hope.

This is not a fish out of water story. This is a story familiar to anyone who loves the game, or, more specifically, to anyone who considers themselves a devoted supporter of a Melbourne football club that has met with less than frequent success.

I am a member. I have driven to Shepparton in summer to watch meaningless practice matches. I've paid top dollar to attend the Jack Dyer Medal night. But I always felt that to sign up as a cheer squad member - a professional barracker - would be admitting my affliction.

Yet, for one week, I have decided to banish those doubts and to acknowledge my disease, to see where passion meets pathology, to join the Official Richmond Cheer Squad and spend a week asking the question: How deep is my love?

Cheer squad leader Gerard Egan recently welcomed a son into the world. "About half an hour before the season opener," to be specific, "Carlton versus Richmond."

The game was on the TV in the hospital room 30 minutes later, says his wife, Nikki, 35, but that almost wasn't enough for Egan.

"At three quarter time we were up and I was thinking, it'd only take me 10 minutes to walk across the park - because we were at the Freemasons Hospital - and I could watch the last quarter of the game and come back," says Egan, sheepishly. "Then I thought, no, I'm not going to ask. But the thought did cross my mind."

Egan, 46, now sits in his Camberwell home sipping coffee out of a Richmond mug, a Richmond clock ticking on the wall just before noon. His newborn Tiger, Murray, is in the other room stretching his lungs, already in training to barrack. Born on a Thursday night and signed up as a Richmond member on Friday morning, Murray is a reminder of the Bruce Dawe poem, Life Cycle:

When children are born in Victoria
They are wrapped in club colours
laid in be-ribbonned cots,
Having already begun a lifetime's barracking.

Egan himself has been a fan since he was taken to buy a footy jumper as an eighth birthday present and found himself smitten by the black guernsey with the yellow sash. His grandfather took him to games at first, then he went to a game alone at 13, "and I just headed for the biggest area of yellow and black and started to become involved," he says. "I've been there now since '77."

I'll be surprised with what I find in the cheer squad, he says. For one thing, as much as the perception of Tigers fans (and cheer squads in general) is a screaming mass of spit-flecked lips and murderous eyes, no swearing is allowed in the cheer squad. No alcohol, either. And no bagging Richmond players (although opponents are fair game).

I will also be among friends, he says, meaning I won't have to deal with the taunts from insufferable Magpie fans magnifying my pain.

"You've got people that, in normal life, probably wouldn't look at one another in the street," he says. "But during those four hours at the MCG on a Friday night, it's friendship. It's family. It's home."
I will have certain responsibilities - namely to support the team with "colour and voice" as outlined in my welcoming letter: "If you choose to sit in the cheer squad then you will be expected to use flags, floggers or patty dukes (plastic pom-poms). We also expect you to join in chants when they are started. If you choose not to participate then you may be asked to vacate your seat for someone who will."

The most visible display of support, of course, is the banner. Egan comes up with most of the banner slogans, so I briefly consider pitching an idea for a haiku:

Tigers against Pies
Richmond players are youthful
Collingwood will fall

Instead, I suggest, "Yellow and black, Beats black and white, Let's send the Pies home, With a big loss tonight." Any good? "I like it," Egan says, "but we have a policy of never acknowledging the opposition in our banners." My favourite banner was hoisted in 1995, I say, Richmond's best season of the past 30 years. We won nine of the first 10 games, sat atop the ladder, but the experts still doubted us. I was at Princes Park that day. So was Egan. I begin reciting the slogan and, unprompted, he recites along with me: "The Tigers object, To being labelled suspect, Now we expect, To be shown some respect."

We won by 10 goals.


For the loyal supporter, there is no escape, says Dr John Cash, a (Blues fan and) social scientist at Melbourne University. "The clubs are almost vampiric in this regard. Once they sink their teeth into you, it's like an infection of the blood."

Cash authored Inside Footy Mania with his colleague (and Collingwood fan) Dr Joy Damousi, and the pair seem well equipped to help me understand my addiction.

Damousi, looking on me (and perhaps all Richmond supporters) with something like pity, recalls an old Tigers membership recruiting poster that basically spells out our predicament: "Yellow and Black. It's in the blood! Make your blood oath today."

Attachments to football clubs can be formed for any number of reasons - geography, parentage, performance - but inevitably, she says, every story dovetails into opinions about players and eras, and then into memories of shared intimacies between fathers and daughters, and understandings between friends. Biographies are framed through the game.

"Their own life story gets entangled with the life of the club," Damousi says. "The more you talk to anyone about their team, you realise they're actually talking about themselves." Viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, says Cash, we're suffering from over-identification. "We see this process occurring where the team comes to represent you as an individual and as a member of the group, so it is a kind of narcissism." For many, being a fan of a team is part of what makes you, you. Jobs, partners, homes and hobbies change - but not the connective tissue of fandom. Manning Clark called it our "strange infirmity", and it is one that Cash says produces a distinctive Melburnian mixture of "melancholia, mourning and mania".

"Every game throws you back into the nostalgia of your own personal history, all the painful matches as well as the delirious victories over time," he says, laughing. "The thing is, these clubs don't go away."

Damousi remembers a father calling in to a radio station to ask whether he should doom his 10-year-old son to a lifetime of pain and suffering by encouraging him to follow Richmond, or if he should nudge him in a more sensible direction. It was a legitimate question, although not for anyone in the cheer squad. "If the principle argument for experiencing emotion because of football is around identification, the cheer squad is the ultimate consolidation of that," Cash says. "You're in a team. You're part of it. You're expected to perform."

"You are now in another world," Damousi adds.

Night falls with the rain outside James Loughnan Hall in Richmond, where banner construction is already underway. Yellow paper letters on eight by 18 metres of woven black crepe paper spell out the chosen mantra for the week: Feel the claw, Hear the roar, As tonight we kick, The winning score.
There are about three dozen people gathered - weavers, cutters and stickers - and the group is purring, the whine of packing tape echoing off the high, stained ceiling of this hall deep in Tiger territory. Artwork in the form of claw marks is made in advance by hand. They don't do computer-generated graphical printing here, like many other cheer squads.

They all have their own level of all-pervasive over-commitment to the cause. David Ward drives in from Somerville every Wednesday night to help construct the run through, and says his two teenage daughters know better than to bring home prospective boyfriends who don't support Richmond.
Mick Thornton is working overtime for a month so he can afford to fly to Sydney with his 10-year-old son Gerard for an away game.

Brett Beattie, 46, hands me a sausage in bread and shows me photos of his sun yellow 1978 Holden Premier (with black stripe), his yellow and black Christmas tree and the bright yellow afro wig/hat he wears to every game (hoping to eventually "prove to myself that it's not unlucky").

Like father like son, Beau Beattie describes the suit he paid hundreds of dollars to have airbrushed in Tiger stripes, which he wears in the cheer squad weekly. "It's a completely different atmosphere in there," says the 22-year-old marketing student. "You feel more involved. I've definitely watched games where I think the crowd helped shift the momentum, or carry it forward." He has, in fact, come close to passing out during games from screaming so much. "I get to a point where I can barely function. I frequently lose my voice."

I used to wear a T-shirt that read "Football is life - Nothing else matters," and while I never believed that to be true I feel a kinship with those who do. Still, Beattie says something next that stops me cold. Something that makes you grasp just how close following a football team can be to nationalism, or religion, or the blind devotion to any imagined community or cause.

"I would actually die for the club," Beattie says, thoughtfully. "If they said someone had to die to save the club, I would do it. It sounds crazy, but if you knew how much it meant to people, it would make sense. I'd do anything for the club."

As the team files out onto the ground to train, the dozens of children frolicking in the mud behind the goals of Punt Road Oval sense a presence. They drop the worms they're playing with. Necks crane, eyes widen and then come the squeals: "I see Jacky! I see Jacky! Jack-eeey!"

One hundred or so fans are gathered on this wet Thursday morning, perhaps because of school holidays, and they are rewarded as the team jogs by like a convoy of sports cars in low gear. The athletes skip over the sodden turf and take casual pot shots at goal, raining down heavy yellow bombs on the gleeful mass - a flurry of Sherrins popping off hands, glancing off heads and shoulders.
Each child scrambles to retrieve each ball, hoping to be the one who tosses it back over the fence to Lids or Cotch. Some will wait long enough to get an autograph, pose for a photo or splutter out a stunned "hello" to a hero.

Justin Constantinou, 30, who joined the cheer squad this week like me, has been a devoted fan since he was 12, since he made the trip down to Tigerland on a day just like this - since he met Matthew Richardson. "I was a Tiger fan after that. My dad's a Hawthorn supporter, so when I went home I was scared to tell him, but I did. 'Sorry Dad, I barrack for Richmond now'."

Matthew Klugman, a Bulldogs supporter and author of Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy has studied the way in which devotion to a team is consolidated in such moments, then becomes all-consuming. He also points out that "barrack" is an Australian word, emerging in 1880s Melbourne as a derisive term for those who "shout abuse". Spectator sports everywhere necessitated the creation of similar language, like the Italian term for soccer zealots, "tifosi", which comes from typhoid fever, or "fan" - an American word for those driven crazy by baseball, likely derived from the religious word "fanatics": those possessed as if by god or demon.

Football mirrors religion in many ways, he adds, beyond the hyperbole of calling the MCG a cathedral or the turf itself hallowed ground. "One of the key parts of being a supporter is believing your time will come and keeping the faith," Klugman says. "There's this sense of entitlement, as if people are waiting for this moment when the world turns and they enter the promised land. I mean, right now someone like Jack Riewoldt has got 'messiah' written all over him."

There is an undercurrent of dark humour that goes hand in hand. One of Klugman's favourites, discussed in an academic paper sub-titled I Love Him in an Absolutely Gay Way, is how straight men now openly eroticise gun players through "man crushes" or "bromances". Hearing this, I confess a certain giddiness over Trent Cotchin's skill on the non-preferred left foot.

"And you would not be alone in your Cotchin infatuation," says Klugman. "Football gives fans an incredible amount of pleasure, and they're very bodily pleasures. When something happens to a player it feels like it happens to the fan. There is amazing tension, hypnosis - moments when people can't move - and then release."

The metaphors often skew to sexual violence, too. One American ethnographer considered football "a ritualised form of homosexual rape" in which the winners feminise the losers. Take the words of a friend earlier that week: "Mate, Swan is gonna rape us on Friday night." Or take the famous words of Ted Whitten: "You stuck it right up 'em!" Yet footy will always be less about lust and more about love - that emotion most associated with excess and abandon. Sadly, as one writer observes, happy love has no history: "What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is ... not the satisfaction of love but its passion. And passion means suffering."

We haul the banner high, billowing black and yellow. I realise that I'm quietly nervous, that I am less casual about this match than I might have been, and that hope has been building in me all week. Because our commitment is so complete, I think, because our contribution is so error-free, maybe the team's will be too.

An eight goal to two first quarter quickly puts paid to that notion. Despite everything we've invested the payoff is not there, and with a 10-goal deficit at half time you sense it never will be. What surprises is how up-beat those around me remain. They're joking about how it must be the wind, selling T-shirts, signing up new members, sharing tea from a Thermos. When Collingwood has a shot for goal in front of us, I sit dejected while they stand flogging floggers, yelling and whistling to distract the kicker.

He misses, and we kick a goal, and that feels a little better. Then we kick another goal. And another. And yet another still! We wave the patty dukes, shaking a spray of stinky water from last week's game off each plastic thread, coating everyone in a smelly mist, although no one cares. And my voice is back, joining in the chants after every goal.

A little girl, Katia, 3, is in the belly of the beast, second row, giggling amid the excitement. Her mother, Alicia, smoothes the toddler's hair, touches her nose and softly sings: "Who, who, who are we? We are the boys from the MCG."

Alicia's mother, Carolyn, is on her feet, fist in the air. And Carolyn's mother, Brenda, the first in a four-generation maternal line of Tigers fans, sits elsewhere, nodding along.

People have mocked me in the past for saying "we won" or "we lost", and it dawns on me now that such criticism is patently ridiculous and potentially offensive. Our fearless captain is barely in his tenth season with the club. Our coach, Damien Hardwick, has not yet clocked 18 months in Tigerland. "They really do act as a 19th man," he says of supporters. "I don't say that lightly." The people around me now have a few combined centuries of commitment on the team itself. We go down with a fight.

Afterwards, we trudge and traipse out of the ground across to Punt Road, over hills and under spidery branches through the rush of foot traffic. We pack our gear away and talk - a watch salesman, a bank manager, a builder, a lollypop lady and her engineer husband, and a teenage couple kissing in the darkness by the Jack Dyer Stand. And then we depart, one by one and two by two, to lick our wounds until the next Wednesday banner build.

At home, I turn on the TV, switch to the replay of another loss, and wait for those moments when the camera goes looking for a reaction to the action, when it pans over the Official Richmond Cheer Squad, the team behind my team.blog comments powered by Disqus