And the winner was ... Football?

The 2008 Hall of Fame Tribute match between Victoria and The Rest (aka The Dream Team) is done and dusted. The media representations have been, by and large, gushingly enthusiastic and positive, the AFL's slightly less so in order to dampen any groundswell for a return of State of Origin football.

The Tribute Match was a disaster as a spectacle. Almost 70,000 people were bored to snores. The main interest in the second half were a couple of fights at the city end and an enthusiastically-embraced Mexican wave.

The football itself was pretty good, with regular (and surely to-be-expected?) flashes of brilliance. The missing element was passion in the crowd. With teams based on confected eligibility (when was Adam Goodes a Victorian?) and confected allegience (surely the the All-Australian team is the real Dream team?), there was nothing to get excited about.

State-of-Origin (Australian Rules) football meant something before the national AFL league, when the SANFL and WAFL were elite competitions. The VFL's long-standing penchant for robbing the SANFL and WAFL of their best players, and for selecting those imports into the Victorian team for interstate matches, meant that, for South Australians and West Australians especially, there was a real passion to beat the hated Vics. Since the National competition and the emergence of two teams each in Adelaide and Perth, there is considerably less passion. As evidenced by the Tribute Match, in Victoria there's almost zero passion.

Not even EJ could have got really excited about a Tribute Match that teased with promise, but delivered little.