Batmobiles, elephants and Wharfie Time: footy’s gimmick graveyard
Wharfie Time arrived this year like a mate who’s had four schooeys and reckons he’s invented a new game. It wasn’t the first time footy has tried to jazz itself up with a gimmick, and if history’s any guide, it won’t be the last time it ends in someone quietly removing the press release from the website.
I’ve watched Richmond lose by ten goals in the rain at the MCG with about four thousand people there, so I’m not exactly the target audience for razzle dazzle. But even I’ll admit there’s something endearing about the AFL’s relentless, slightly desperate urge to tart the game up. It’s like your uncle who keeps buying gadgets off late-night telly — the intentions are sort of sweet, the execution is almost never good.
Wharfie Time: the fresh wound
We’re still bleeding from this one so I won’t dwell too long, but for the uninitiated — someone decided the game needed a dockworkers-themed countdown clock concept that nobody asked for and fewer understood. Commentators stumbled over explaining it, fans on talkback were audibly confused, and somewhere a marketing consultant cashed a very decent cheque. The concept has since been quietly wound back, in the way these things always are — not with an announcement, just a sort of fading from view, like a boyband or a diet.
The thing about Wharfie Time is it wasn’t even the strangest branding exercise the code’s served up. It’s just the most recent one, and recency bias makes it feel like the dumbest. Give it eighteen months and it’ll be a trivia answer nobody can quite place.
The hovercraft era
Older heads will remember, or at least have heard legend of, the hovercraft that was supposed to deliver the match ball onto the ground at a Grand Final in the eighties. From memory it either didn’t start, didn’t arrive on time, or arrived and promptly looked like a confused pool toy wobbling across the turf while 100,000 people wondered what on earth they were watching. This is the great tradition of footy gimmickry — someone in an office somewhere decides the actual game, the one with the bouncing ball and the desperate smother and the bloke taking a screamer, isn’t quite enough on its own, and needs a hovercraft.
It never does. It’s never needed the hovercraft. The game was invented by blokes kicking a ball around a paddock and somehow that’s still the best bit.
Enter the Batmobile
Then there’s the Batmobile — or a Batmobile, the actual provenance is murky and I suspect deliberately so — wheeled out at some stage to drive players onto the ground, because nothing says
