"Hands Off The Banner": The Fan's Last Stand
- May 11, 2017
- 4 min read
“Don’t you think it’s time that we maybe don’t have the banner?” sniffs Footy Show host Rebecca Maddern. “Everything in the game has become very professional and then to start the game we run through a bit of crêpe paper that costs $2.50!”
“For the first time probably since you’ve been on this show I agree with you,” responds panellist and career provocateur Sam Newman. “Talk about nonsense in this game. It’s a completely ridiculous thing.”
This conversation was transmitted over a week ago from the Docklands studios where the Footy Show is filmed. But if Maddern and Newman had stopped speaking, they might just have been able to hear the blood of thousands of footy fans boiling all over Victoria. Including the yellow-and-black tinted blood of Brett Beattie.
“When the people high up with money have a pot-shot at you, it gets to you,” says Beattie. “I’m a working-class man, I’m a storeowner. The banner’s a part of our game, it’s a part of our history.”
You probably know Beattie – he’s Trout the Tigerman, the face of the diehard force that is the Richmond cheer squad. He’s been a part of the banner-making nights at Punt Rd since, well, since before they were even at Tigerland. They were held at Coppen Street, Richmond in a venue out so small that construction would always have to be halted to fold the banner over so the second half could be completed. He’s seen Australian Rules go from a part-time game to a national corporation with the fan almost entirely been reduced to the spectator. Beattie can remember the old days when the club would ask the cheer squad to get involved with organising club functions and banquet auctions, selling memberships and rattling tins outside of games during the 1991 ‘Save Our Skins’ fundraiser when the Tigers went within a hair’s breadth of bankruptcy.
So to Beattie, and the thousands of fans all over Australia who make the banners for their team to run through every week (and the hundreds of thousands who cheer on the theatrical entrance unique to Australian Rules), the banner is more sacrosanct than ever. It is the last official recognition and involvement for fans on game day.
Every Wednesday night, a group of Tiger supporters will gather at Punt Rd to make the huge banner that their boys will charge through before that week’s match. It’s probably the most scientific process you could imagine being carried out with crêpe paper and sticky tape – once words like ‘weaving’, ‘balance’, ‘cornering’ and ‘poling’ start to flow out of these old hands, the uninitiated is left stumped.
“I did the maths once,” says Beattie as he carefully paints the massive tiger that will adorn the Round 9 banner. “It’s about two kilometres of sticky tape and crêpe paper. What happens if it doesn’t get
done? We’ll stay here all night. Sometimes we’re here until one or two in the morning.”
30 people are here at Punt Rd making the Mother’s Day banner for the Tigers’ clash with Fremantle. The inclusivity is remarkable. People from all walks of life are brought together by their love of Richmond. Yogi is a Hindi man who is an AFL Multicultural Ambassador. 11-year old Richmond and his mate Jack Dyer Norman are cutting out big, yellow letters for the banner. Cheer Squad Chairperson Gerard Egan, a 40-year veteran of the cheer squad, presides over what he calls a “family”.
“Some of the things were fun but I can understand why they’ve been cleaned up out of the game,” admits Egan, who was once routinely dangled by his ankles over second-tier advertising boarding so he could hang posters. “But things like decorating the clubrooms and running Family Day, they were great. So the banner is the last of those sort of things that we’ve got.”
Incredibly, the fan and the club were once so intertwined that Egan was trusted to run all ten premiership flags to Richmond Town Hall in preparation for the 1985 Annual General Meeting. Stories like this can’t help but give your heartstrings a twang when you consider the corporate nature of the AFL today. As he says, the banner “doesn’t hurt anyone”. Watching the Richmond family stick purple and pink flowers on the banner for Mother’s Day, it’s hard to imagine what Maddern and Newman would ever bother protesting.
Along with North Melbourne, Richmond has the longest-held banner squad of any team in the competition. For fifty years, they have preserved the grassroots traditions of a club so resolutely working class they were once known as Struggletown. While many cheer squads have changed to Velcro for their banners, Egan’s crew still uses crêpe not only as a tradition but because it involves more people.
There’s a million great stories that this family could tell you. They made the epic that Kevin Bartlett tripped on for his 400th game in 1983. They gutted a couple of pillows at half time on a road trip to Sydney in 1985 and left the SCG scattered with feathers. They were underneath the scoreboard when it caught fire before their Round 22 clash with Carlton in 1999. On one ill-fated Wallace-era trip to Adelaide, the bag carrying the banner got soaked and all the crêpe paper fell off but they went ahead with the most skeletal arrangement anyway. They consider the ANZAC Eve banners, embroidered with their Melbourne counterparts with silver and gold leaves, to be their finest achievements. Some are second, third, even fourth generation Tigers. One day, they will all go to each other’s funerals. And there are 18 of these families all over Australia.
Which just goes to show that “a bit of crêpe paper that costs $2.50” can sure go a long way.
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