@crucible said in [The WT Identity](/post/1459987) said:
What a load of CRAP. Guess what, if we make the eight next year, all this garbage disappears. In 2005, when we won, Magpies and Tigers supporters were stuck like super glue to each other! Where we play means SFA to the players. Having said that, ive never heard anybody say they always wanted to play at Cambo or Olympic Park or Bankwest. But, I have heard them say they love Leichhardt.
I agree the whole concept is baloney. What do Cronulla stand for? Parramatta? Dragons?
It used to be mostly about geography and that was fine in the days when most locals supported the local team. That's no longer true - fans are spread everywhere - and when you are a merged entity, you have a potentially unfixable geographical split - there is literally no way to match up the experience of Balmain with Concord with Campbelltown with Camden. They aren't the same thing.
The Dragons similarly cannot and will never coalesce Kogarah with Wollongong, because they aren't the same. If they were Wollongong-only they'd be more like Newcastle in representing an area and a people identified with that area, but any club in Sydney is really just a mix of all the bits and pieces. As far as I can tell, the Steelers have basically been eaten up, despite being 50% owned by WIN Corp.
Souths might like to consider themselves based in the heart of Redfern, but Redfern is no longer anything like what it was in the 1970s, and the old working-class battlers of South Sydney are all pretty well-heeled these days, same as Balmain. Souths haven't played consistently at Redfern for decades.
And that's where I call baloney for Balmain Tigers. My great-grandfather was born and raised in Lilyfield. He was a boy when Balmain were incorporated. My grandfather was one of 8 boys raised in Lilyfield and bought his house in Leichhardt. So all those men, even when they ultimately dispersed across the state, were working-class Balmain supporters from day 1.
I spent a lot of my youth in Leichhardt and it transformed tremendously between the 1980s and 2000s. It developed a very strong Italian flavour, the house prices became extremely sharp and the profile of the area changed dramatically. Balmain started to have big issues with not being able to engage the new white collar private school residents of Balmain, and nowadays Balmain and Birchgrove are as gentrified and insular as any alcove of Sydney.
So what is or was the identity of Balmain Tigers that the original article refers to? It's a myth in my opinion. The Balmain Tigers I knew as a young boy were developed from dock builders and factory workers, white Aussie catholics with a sprinkle of indigenous around the Glebe area. That is nothing like what Balmain was in 1997. There's a reason why Balmain were battlers all throughout the 90s and had barely a leg to stand on during Super League.
Nowadays I believe the old Balmain brigade has little to do with what Balmain were as a club in those last decades. Supporters like me from the last golden-era 1980s are all now 40 or older, many no longer live in the area, but all like going back for that dose of old nostalgia. I remember very clearly going to Leichhardt Oval as a kid - there was nothing nostalgic about it at the time, the facilities were ordinary and the crowds were often poor. I loved it to death, but it was nothing like the boutique Newtown-style chic decay nostalgia rush it has become.
Parallel with this is the Magpies experience, basically drifting ever westward per their namesake. The club incorporated in Ashfield, played for a while at Concord Oval, were muscled out of Pratten Park in 1967 (the council wouldn't let them play Sunday matches because of church - seriously), spent 20 years at Lidcombe, then decided to go wholesale to Orana Park. Wests Ashfield is a high-profit pokie den and the local area now has a heavy Asian immigrant influence. So what would you say Wests Magpies "are"? Half the modern supporters would not have been to Lidcombe Oval in their lives, let alone Pratten Park. How do you match up Campbelltown and Ashfield? The answer is "you don't", and anyone who claims a single sustained heritage or identity from that history is kidding themselves.
In my opinion those club heritages have all been condensed into a nostalgia-sized snack, with most living fans only being able to go back with fondness to either the late-80s Balmain, Wok-era Wests, or at oldest, the joint Balmain and Wests failed assaults against the might of St George in the late 1950s through 1960s. Not only is a "single identity" a fantasy, nobody could truly tell you what that single identity is.
