Geelong Nabs The Matildas And Even I Can’t Grumble Too Hard

I’ll admit it straight up, which doesn’t happen often in this column: Geelong has pulled off something clever here, and I’m not just talking about another final eight berth built on percentage and a soft draw. The Matildas are coming back to Victoria for the second leg of their series against Colombia, and head office in Canberra, or whoever runs the show for the Matildas these days, has picked Geelong over the big smoke to host it. Good on them, I say, even if it pains an old Carlton man to admit the Cats have landed a proper coup.

Not Everything Has To Happen At The ‘G

Back in my day — and here we go, I can hear the groans already — everything of note happened at the MCG or not at all. The granny, the big representative matches, the Boxing Day cricket you’d sneak away to watch half of. Geelong was the place you drove through to get to the Great Ocean Road, not a destination in its own right for anything bigger than a Friday night home game. But football, and I mean the code in its broadest sense now, not just our VFL, has worked out something the old guard took decades to learn: you don’t have to funnel every big occasion through one ground in one postcode. Spread it round the state and the state starts to feel like it actually matters.

Geelong hosting the Matildas against Colombia is exactly that kind of thinking, and whoever in the Cats’ corner made the pitch to bring it down the highway deserves a quiet beer for it. It’s not footy, strictly speaking, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that builds a sporting town rather than just a sporting club.

The Cats Know How To Run A Big Day

Say what you like about Geelong — and in this column I generally do — but you can’t fault how they run a major occasion. They’ve turned GMHBA Stadium into a genuine fortress for finals footy, they pack the place out for the big Friday nights, and the council and the footy club down there have worked together in a way that still makes some of the old Melbourne clubs look like they’re stuck in 1987. A Matildas international is a different beast to a home-and-away game against the Suns, sure, but the infrastructure, the transport planning, the simple logistics of getting forty thousand people in and out of a regional ground without chaos, that’s all stuff Geelong has had plenty of practice at.

I remember when the idea of a genuinely world-class stadium outside Melbourne proper would have been laughed out of the room by the old administrators. Now it’s the model everyone else is chasing.

A Bit Of History Repeating, If You Squint

There’s something almost familiar about this for anyone who’s followed the Cats for long enough. Geelong has always punched above its weight for a provincial club, going right back to the old days when they were genuine premiership players in the competition we used to just call the VFL before some marketing bloke decided it needed a national flavour and a new name to match. They’ve never been shy about putting on a show and making the rest of the state come to them, whether that’s finals crowds or big representative matches of their own era.

So in a funny way this isn’t new ground for Geelong at all, it’s just a different code wearing the same old lesson: if you build it properly and run it well, people will travel for it, and other sports will notice too.

Good For The Game, Good For The State

I’ll say this plainly because it needs saying: anything that gets big sport out of the Melbourne CBD bubble and into the regions is good for footy fans generally, even blinkered ones like me who think about little else but the navy blue from March to September. Kids in Geelong, in the Surf Coast, out towards Colac, they get to see genuine international sportswomen up close rather than just on the telly, and some of them will be playing junior footy themselves come next winter with a bit more belief in what’s possible. That matters more than any of us grumpy old columnists like to admit.

And there’s a practical side to it too. Big events like this test out a ground, a transport network, a hospitality precinct, under real pressure, which only makes it better prepared for finals footy down the track. Everyone wins out of that, even clubs like mine who’ll never set foot in Geelong for an actual home game.

Where My Grumble Still Lives

Now don’t think I’ve gone soft altogether, because I haven’t, and there’s always a but with me. My concern, and it’s a genuine one, not just an old bloke whinging for the sake of it, is whether these big cross-code events start crowding out the humble stuff that actually built these towns in the first place. The Under 18s on a Saturday morning, the local derby that pulls three thousand people rather than thirty thousand, the stuff that doesn’t make headlines but keeps a footy-mad region ticking over. I’d hate for Geelong, or any provincial centre for that matter, to start treating the big international spectacle as the main game and the actual football club as the undercard.

I don’t reckon that’ll happen here, to be fair. The Cats have never lost sight of what actually matters to them, which is winning flags and filling the outer on a wet Saturday in July, not just hosting glamour events for the ledger. But it’s worth saying out loud anyway, because head office types love a shiny new thing and sometimes forget the unglamorous stuff underneath it.

Credit Where It’s Due

So there it is, a Carlton man tipping his hat to Geelong, which doesn’t happen without gritted teeth round these parts. The Matildas against Colombia down at GMHBA Stadium is a genuine coup, it’s good for the town, good for the sport, and good for anyone who reckons the big occasions shouldn’t all be hoarded by the one ground in the one city. Just don’t expect me to be cheering for the Cats come finals time because of it. Some things a bloke’s principles simply won’t allow, no matter how good the infrastructre looks.