IT IS being hailed by some in the media as the ''battle of the codes'' but the push by the Australian Football League into the rugby league heartland of Sydney's western suburbs promises to be more complex though no less interesting a contest. By 2012 the AFL's second Sydney team will be up and running with Blacktown Olympic Park as its home.
Long-time Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy has been lined up, a chief executive and a board are to be announced next month, and sponsors are lining up to get in at ground level.
All that's needed are the fans.
It might take them a decade of hard work to build a team and a brand from the ground up but AFL managers are confident the membership of the Greater Western Sydney team will exceed that of the Swans, which is in the low 20,000s and took at least 20 years to get there. And if last weekend's match between the Swans and Carlton was any indication of the level of support it can expect, it is heading in the right direction.
Eighty per cent of the almost 10,000 people who turned up to see the game - the first AFL match played at the ground - were drawn from the neighbouring catchment area. Perhaps as many as two-thirds of the spectators on Saturday night were Swans fans, which suggests the club has reached beyond its heartland of Sydney's eastern suburbs and North Shore.
While AFL managers don't discount the strength of league in Western Sydney, they don't plan to go head-to-head with it. They'll take league supporters if they want to switch but the focus will be on getting people who have hitherto not signed up to any sporting club. Adjacent to the club's ground are two municipalities - the Hills District and Blacktown itself - that the AFL believes NRL clubs such as the Penrith Panthers and the Parramatta Eels have failed to tap into much. That's half a million people without a major league team. ''They haven't got an elite team based in their area that they can follow and see on TV and go to the games. They are unbranded and, as far as I can see, the north-western corridor of Sydney is open for business,'' says AFL general manager for NSW and ACT Dale Holmes.
Much of the marketing will be directed at 5-to-12 year-old kids to channel their pester power to get the family on board. And the AFL knows the competition is not just league or soccer but Playstation, movies such as Avatar, the Aquarium or anything else that is competing for the family's leisure and entertainment dollar.
Last weekend it launched a competition asking locals to find a name for the team. It also made sure that those at the event before the match were fully aware that the man often credited with creating the game we know today as Australian rules was a local. Yes, Tom Wills was a New South Welshman, though he had to go to Victoria to get the game up and running. You could almost argue, as I am sure the AFL will do in future marketing campaigns, that football was well and truly coming home.
