It should be a day of celebration for the Swans. Instead, walking into the SCG this Sunday will feel more like a funeral.
It’s a history-making day for the club. Its first double header, the AFLW team’s opening home game for the season and the first time the women have played a game on the SCG.
Sydney president Andrew Pridham admits it will be a difficult day. He may find it harder to watch than most.
Some fans are planning to boycott the men’s game (a dead rubber against North Melbourne) which follows the AFLW clash against Essendon.
Long-time Swans fan Tim Isidro is one of them. He will take his four-year-old son Freddy to the women’s game, but they won’t be sticking around to cheer on the men.
“I thought numbers would be down because of what some of the men have done and I wanted the women’s team to look up and there be bums in seats,” he said.
“I didn’t want to hang around for the men’s team because I thought what happened is gross. I wanted to show my daughter and family that as a man I step up and don’t just say things, I’m doing something, even if it is just small.”
I’m hearing Tim and Freddy won’t be alone.
The Swans will need to heed clearly the disappointment, disbelief, and anger being felt by the general fan base and what it has done to the reputation of the club more generally. These blokes were at work, for goodness’ sake.
“I love the women’s team. I feel sorry for them. I want them to know that we’re proud. I hope others come and appreciate them and support them,” said Isidro.
As for the women, they are not only bearing the reputational damage caused by some of their senior male colleagues, but they have also been silenced. For now, the club has told them not to speak publicly.
Can you imagine how they must be feeling? Furious. Disappointed. Distressed. Muted.
Some will even be traumatised. One in five women in Australia have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Let’s think about that. Six women in a AFLW team. If the MCG were full of women, that means 20,000 of them would have been the victims of sexual violence.
How does the club convince these players that they still belong? How do they make them feel proud to run out in red and white on Sunday? That their female fans can throw the scarf around their neck and feel respect and belonging?
The Swans’ AFLW team has set the benchmark off the field since their introduction to the competition four years ago. They have one of the highest memberships. They averaged more than 5000 fans a game last year, including the second-highest attended match of the home-and-away season – the derby against the Giants which filled Henson Park.
Sunday was meant to be finally their moment in the sun. Four years of hard work on and off the field culminating in their first run up the race onto the hallowed turf of the SCG. They’ve proven they deserve to be there. They’ve recruited well – snaring the Brisbane Lions’ two-time premiership goalkicker Taylor Smith. And it’s a team that boasts drawcards Chloe Molloy and Zippy Fish, two players who played for Australia in the hugely successful representative game against Ireland.
They’re now in a crisis that wasn’t of their making.
Isaac Heeney, who is the focus of the police investigation, attended the Swans’ AFLW season launch and guernsey presentation a fortnight ago. This masthead has reported that all five players deny any criminal wrongdoing, according to a source familiar with their position.
Heeney has been at the club since he was 12 years old.
The poster boy of the Swans’ academy – who knocked back offers to play rugby league, cricket and soccer – had developed into the club’s golden boy.
The 30-year-old from Newcastle is newly engaged.
A friend texted me this week. He said, “I’ve been trying to work out how to tell my seven-year-old daughter why her favourite player Isaac Heeney isn’t playing for the rest of the season and why she needs to choose a new favourite player.”
Also at the W season launch was the CEO of the club’s major sponsor – QBE Insurance. This year the Swans celebrated a 40-year partnership with QBE, the longest-running sponsorship in Australian sport. The insurance giant is so far standing by the Swans, backing their condemnation of abuse and disrespectful behaviour towards women.
Last week, the Swans women’s team played on Sunday in Adelaide. On the same day the men were in Melbourne. Chief executive Matthew Pavlich chose to fly with the women’s team. You couldn’t wipe the smile off his face when the Swans celebrated one of their most significant wins, a come-from-behind victory against Adelaide, a team they had never beaten. And it was under a new coach, former player Colin O’Riordan. The beginning of a new era.
Pavlich picked the women over the men. He picked Unley Oval over the MCG. Would his presence in Melbourne have made a difference to any of the decisions made on Sunday night?
Then again, he probably didn’t think he’d need to be in Melbourne to babysit grown men.
So much for the Swans’ no dickhead policy.
Kelli Underwood will host Sunday’s AFLW coverage for Fox Footy.
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