The mighty Lions, Cazaly and young Mikko

I was a “rover” which was pretty apt seeing my best mate, the Kelpie-cross was also a Rover, but he had four feet which would have been useful for ducking and weaving under the hot northern sun.

Australian Rules has had a long history in Queensland dating back to the 1860’s not long after it first appeared in Melbourne, the traditional home of AFL. The first games were played in Brisbane’s Queens Park, and by the 1880’s it was the colony’s most prominent sports code. But it gradually lost that title to Rugby League.

It was introduced to Townsville in 1955 and schools in the district were invited to participate. My Dad, Garnet (Garnie to his mates), the headmaster at Stuart State School, was never backward in accepting a challenge and a team was soon formed under his tutelage.

He had never played the game himself, and all his coaching would have come straight from the code’s rule book, but that didn’t deter him or the 18 kids who put their hands up.

Somehow, that included me. Normally, I’d sooner be off fishing or hunting after school or on weekends, so it’s likely some paternal pressure was applied.

I’ve never been greatly into any organised sport, but I was a pretty good runner. So I was appointed the Stuart Aussie Rules team’s rover.

A modern football coaching site has this to say:“The rover needs to be an agile and fit player that can collect the ball from the ruck-rover and ruckman. Rovers also follow the ball all over the field and also need to be able to tackle and apply pressure to the other team”.

Fair enough, unlike Rugby League there’s no off-side, and I could be anywhere that the flying “pigskin” took me. Duck, weave, bounce the ball, hand-ball it or kick it, no hard tackles, no game-slowing scrums; take a mark, kick a goal if you can, maybe a behind or two if your aim is slightly off ....

Maybe it was the bush air, but our team did well, advancing in the competition round. I had no idea that there were also “talent scouts” out watching our weekly games and that some of us would be selected in the big, season-ending “representative match.”

And so it came to pass that I was on the field that day. Young “Rover” Mikko was feeling the pressure and the heat after taking a mark.

The big flaw in our game so far was that we were uncoordinated, mainly because we hadn’t really trained together as a team. We were hand-picked and hastily thrown together, apparently with the expectation we would perform as well as we did with our own individual teams each weekend. Any coach should know that’s a sure-fire recipe for failure, but so far, we were still within reach of our northern rivals.

I had the ball in my hands, still a long way from the goal posts and I looked around for a friendly face among a sea of strangers. A voice from a Stuart mate off to my left called, “Over here John!” so I kicked the ball across to him.