The AFL's Essendon Football Club was founded in 1872. Essendon was a respectable suburb in the lower middle class sense of being seen to be respectable. Many early players were drawn from local churches. Anglicans, Baptists and Methodists gravitated to the Club. Catholic footballers, largely Irish and working class (although some were better educated and culturally richer than many of their bovine-like overlords), knew they need not apply to play at Essendon, and generally went to the neighbouring industrial suburban clubs of Foostcray, North Melbourne or Fitzroy.
Reasons are lost in the mists of time, but history yields clues. In 1916 the highly-patriotic Essendon Football Club, exclusively Protestant, airily proposed along with many of the more affluent clubs that players compete as amateurs and that the League turn all gate receipts over to the Patriotic Fund. The proposal was rejected as a drain on the poorer clubs, and the four working-class largely Catholic suburban pillars of Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond and Fitzroy were the only clubs to take the field in 1916. This was a victory for anti-conscription Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix who, obviously along with many, was appalled at the shocking toll the war was taking on the male population.
Decades went by. In the 1920s Essendon made a notorious attempt to annex working-class North Melbourne Football Club and steal its home ground. The move failed and the Club blithely sailed across the decades winning premierships at will until the modern trend of boards sacking coaches became a form of corporate OCD.
With its diverse board of non-football people, Essendon Football Club was perfectly positioned to fall into the abyss of wokeness, which it did last week after sacking a new CEO within a day after someone 'investigated' his background and discovered that he was a practising Christian. No, not a member of the KKK or a devil-worshipper, a Christian.
The worm had turned. The once-proud Protestant club had fallen to the twenty-first century wokeness that destroys its own cultural heritage. Of all places - a denizen of Alpha males, the top of the sporting tree - the football club had utterly failed to hold its nerve for even a day in fraught, timid fear of the cultural warriors, that pathetic orc-like army of axe-grinding, keyboard smashing victim-worshippers. Not even twenty-four hours. Well might Dinah Washington sing What a Difference a Day Makes. A day doesn't even get to happen at Essendon.
Simon Kennedy, research fellow at UQ and a research analyst at the Institute for Civil Society, wrote on Friday that for 'those who aspire to prominence in the corporate world, the freedom to associate is on the chopping block. ... the game is up. Conservative Christians need not apply.'
In 2022, the Essendon Football Club finds itself where its underclass was a hundred years ago. Shame it didn't have the balls Archbishop Daniel Mannix showed in 1916 in standing up for its Christian heritage.
Good grief. Of course, were the CEO Muslim, no one would have said a word. (Nor should they have; but when you don't treat everyone alike, there is no equality. And what does religion have to do with suitability for the job in the first place?)
ReplyDeleteThe Club is shedding members on both sides of the argument - indignant Christians on on hand and the ‘woke’ crowd (a lot fewer of those although far more vocal) on the other , the latter objecting to the initial appointment even though it was rescinded in the blink of an eye.
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