Across all its main carrying codes, Brisbane is a one-team the town.
Melbourne has its historic Aussie laws enmities, Sydney its suburban rugby league tribes – to not point out rival groups within the round-ball sport and T20 cricket. In Adelaide and Perth, clashes between crosstown AFL groups are the most up to date tickets on the town.
Brisbane, even though, till now, has possessed not anything similar.
So the newness of Friday’s inaugural assembly between the Brisbane Broncos – the soccer membership which defines the river town greater than some other – and the Dolphins – the NRL’s new youngsters at the block – is going a protracted solution to explaining the hype in the back of a derby being dubbed ‘the fight for Brisbane’.
There may be a splash of fairytale within the Dolphins’ surprising run of wins and the Broncos’ go back to implementing shape after years of floundering. Then input Wayne Bennett – founder of the Broncos and now the Dolphins – and you’ve got a tale the league’s boardroom directors may just rarely have dared script.
The town’s cathedral of rugby league, the 52,500 capability Lang Park, offered out days upfront. Friends are finishing conversations with the ‘phins up’ catchcry as a parting salutation and buyers input pubs with their arms pressed in combination, prayer-like and raised to their foreheads as though discovered.
In a rabbit warren of arcade retail outlets – op retail outlets, two buck retail outlets, dealers of data and nick nacks – beside the Redcliffe jetty in Dolphins heartland, Louis Murray sells rugby league products from a hollow within the wall he is run for just about twenty years.
“I’ve never seen nothin’ like it,” he says. “It’s like a Myer sale whenever you open the door now.”
From the instant they have been awarded the NRL’s seventeenth franchise 18 months in the past, Murray says the Dolphins turned into his bestselling membership. Loyal consumers who had “dropped thousands on” their most well liked groups – the Broncs, the Cowboys, the Eels, the Bunnies – have been all at once purchasing all 3 Dolphins jerseys. “We’ve gone from, on a Saturday, two staff to five – and that’s not enough,” he says.
When the Dolphins defied the percentages and gained their first top-flight sport towards the Roosters, his gross sales data have been eclipsed in an issue of hours. Then it took place the following week towards Canberra. Then once more towards Newcastle. “The hunger was there,” Murray says. “And it’s just built every week.”
But whilst that is the hole of a brand new bankruptcy within the town’s rugby league historical past, for lots of it’s one thing of a go back to a vanished golden technology.
Ash Vienna is a venue supervisor on the Caxton Hotel within the shadows of Lang Park. For many years, the road and the pub were synonymous with the Broncos. The membership’s legends are immortalized on its partitions, and post-match revelry and scandals are performed out in its beer gardens. Vienna is simply too younger to bear in mind it some other manner.
But prior to the Broncos have been shaped and a nominally nationwide league was once born in 1988, this was once the middle of a colourful festival between suburban-based golf equipment: the Brisbane Rugby League. Here the Redcliffe Dolphins first reduce their enamel in 1960, 13 years after the membership was once based.
“We’ve all seen the videos from back in the day and, yeah, it was wild,” Vienna says of the BRL technology. “It feels like it’s slowly coming back. This new rivalry is just adding to the street and the atmosphere.”
Across the street from the Caxton, the Lord Alfred hotel has dubbed itself the official Dolphins pub. Hallmark Group sales manager Luke Mellers says the 1,100-capacity venue was an “absolute sea of red” for the Dolphins’ inaugural Lang Park clash.
For this first Brisbane derby, The Alfred is throwing a car park party with live music and bars outside. “So we’ll probably stretch that 1,100 a little further,” Mellers says.
The publican reckons that, in Redcliffe, the NRL hit on a geographic goldilocks – just close enough to be considered a second Brisbane team and just far enough out to have its own distinct identity.
And he’s made another observation of his new clientele which might explain why the Dolphins instantly hit upon a vein of supporters. “Redcliffe seems to be a real family club,” he says. “It’s such a big club with so many junior teams, that’s been really represented in the crowds that have come through.”
In a down-at-heels arcade beside Murray’s footy merchandise shop near the jetty, a visitor might just stumble upon the Redcliffe Wall of Fame. The long line of framed A4 biographies and portraits of the peninsula’s favorite sons and daughters are dominated by league legends: ‘Big Artie’ Beetson, Ian ‘Bunny’ Pearce, Dick ‘Tosser’ Turner among them. Here, too, is a pictorial history of the Dolphins, including a black and white photo of Dolphin Oval with a horse grazing on its long grass.
The whole arrangement is as far from a slick marketing campaign as one could imagine – it represents something entirely different. Unlike other expansion clubs created from scratch in what administrators might describe as “rising markets”, the Dolphins rose from a storied club in the rugby league heartland.
Which explains why Carrie Te Wani, an administrator at the Queensland University of Technology law school, and her whole family have been to every trial and season match at Dolphin Oval and Lang Park, and have become one of more than 25,000 new Dolphins members, despite previously having loyally backed other NRL clubs.
Because Te Wani’s adult son played for, and her husband coached, the junior Redcliffe Dolphins teams.
“I will listen the Dolphins’ stadium from my space,” she says. “I know they represent a broader area now, but I think in the heart of hearts of Redcliffe people, they’ll always be the Redcliffe Dolphins.”
And then there’s the fact that “they are in the neighborhood” – Te Wani sees the players around town, going about their business.
Which stands in stark contrast to Dr Julie Kelso’s experience. The Australian Catholic University sessional lecturer in philosophy of religion and feminism, biblical scholar and Brisbane Broncos tragic says she hasn’t seen one of her sporting idols out and about for years.
What she has seen, though, which struck her, were the hundreds of football fans crowding into bus stops in unfamiliar guernseys when she drove to her Taigum home down Gympie Road on the first Sunday of March.
It wasn’t an ignorance of the game by which Kelso initially failed to recognize those Dolphins’ strips on the day of their first NRL match, rather her deep connection to it.
“I’m used to the previous, ’70s ‘Bunny’ Pearce days with the crimson and white,” she says.
Kelso’s dad Peter played for the Northern Suburbs in the 1960s and 70s, and the “dyed-in-the-wool rugby league lady” grew up watching him on the hallowed turf of Lang Park.
So when Kelso saw those hordes of new fans, she was struck by an emotion she hadn’t felt since childhood – though one she recognized from her time in Melbourne.
“That feel of the obsessiveness of fans, that’s going to bring a lot to the game in Brisbane,” she says. “I believe that is the start of a fostering of a more potent rugby league tradition and following.”