You can’t turn on a television right now without stumbling across a football documentary. The highlight of the current crop is surely Adam Kingsley’s paint peeling spray at half-time of last year’s Sydney derby in the GWS Giants documentary No Holds Barred. It was reminiscent of Leyton Orient’s John Sitton berating his team of hapless, bewildered scrubbers in the 1990s. Unlike the Orient, Kingsley’s Giants responded well to the blast.
Of all of them, Amazon Prime’s Final Siren: Inside the AFL had the biggest budget and the most hype. It promised “war without weapons”, which was a bad start, and which itself was the title of a footy documentary from the late 1970s. Netflix’s Drive to Survive was very much pitched at people who normally couldn’t give a stuff about car racing. Likewise, The Test was a way of reconnecting the Australian sporting public with a national cricket team that had very much been on the nose. I’m not sure what the purpose of this one is – whether it’s to make the sport accessible for overseas people who have never seen a game of Australian rules, or to whet the appetite of rusted-on fans on the eve of the season.
