The historic former
football ground is now flattened and desolate, the grandstand demolished and
the playing area a mass of weeds and onion grass enclosed by green mesh on the
perimeter.
Across the street
further indignities await.
The leagues club has
now closed down for 12 months and a planned redevelopment before Sydney City
Council includes a Woolworths supermarket on the ground floor.
What inspiring
social engineering.
A supermarket chain
that makes tens of millions of dollars a year in profit and is known for its
arrogance towards independent business is establishing itself in one of the
lower socio economic areas of Sydney.
Can it get any tackier?
What about a $2 shop
as well, selling everything from plastic back-scratchers to rayon flowers so garishly
coloured and mis- shapen they would make mother nature weep.
Not to mention the
moral difficulty of having people coming to buy groceries with their pensions
and risking being lured to poker machines on higher floors.
Once Redfern Oval
boasted the deeply-ingrained traditions of courage, character, friendship and
amiability from Souths teams dating back to 1948.
On its mostly
sparsely-grassed playing surfaces, surrounded by those disturbing rows of red
and green plastic seats that looked like an endless test for colour blindness,
great things happened.
In 1986 under a
street light, new coach George Piggins listened as new recruit Phil Gould
outlined with diagrams drawn in soil the tactical advancements the game had
made since George retired.
That year Souths
came second, up from ninth in 1985.
In 1955, Redfern
Oval was where Clive Churchill kicked one of the most famous goals in
premiership history.
With his broken
wrist hanging by his side swathed in the cardboard cover of a school exercise
book, Churchill landed the goal from the sideline near fulltime.
It was one of an
unprecedented 11 successive sudden death games Souths won to take the title.
In a 1970s match
against Canterbury,
Souths legend Johnny Sattler was
sent off in the opening minutes after a young hooker named Purcell was
flattened.
Retired Rabbitohs
Test player, the late Bernie Purcell, whose son also played for Canterbury, was in
Souths’ dressing room when Sattler started apologising.
“When I heard
his name was Purcell I was horrified. I thought, ‘please don’t let it be
Bernie’s son’,” he said.
“No worries
Satts,” said Bernie, whose amiability disguised a steely resolve. You
would have known if it was my son. I’d be chasing you with a lump of
four-by-two.”
And don’t forget the
keen supporters, many of them women of indeterminate age, who sat through
training sessions in all weathers in a corner of the Redfern Oval grandstand
they called Baker’s Corner. They specialised in evaluating in loud and often
lurid detail their thoughts on each individual player’s performance the
previous weekend.
They were there the
night Souths completed their last training session before a grand final and saw
the players joyously throw their coach Clive Churchill in the mud.
The battle for
Redfern has been fought and lost (or won, depending on your point of view) and
nothing will change. It’s just a real bastard watching it happen.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21787913-5001023,00.html