Redfern lament

The historic former football ground is now flattened and desolate, the grandstand demolished and the playing area a mass of weeds and onion grass enclosed by green mesh on the perimeter.

Across the street further indignities await.

The leagues club has now closed down for 12 months and a planned redevelopment before Sydney City Council includes a Woolworths supermarket on the ground floor.

What inspiring social engineering.

A supermarket chain that makes tens of millions of dollars a year in profit and is known for its arrogance towards independent business is establishing itself in one of the lower socio economic areas of Sydney. Can it get any tackier?

What about a $2 shop as well, selling everything from plastic back-scratchers to rayon flowers so garishly coloured and mis- shapen they would make mother nature weep.

Not to mention the moral difficulty of having people coming to buy groceries with their pensions and risking being lured to poker machines on higher floors.

Once Redfern Oval boasted the deeply-ingrained traditions of courage, character, friendship and amiability from Souths teams dating back to 1948.

On its mostly sparsely-grassed playing surfaces, surrounded by those disturbing rows of red and green plastic seats that looked like an endless test for colour blindness, great things happened.

In 1986 under a street light, new coach George Piggins listened as new recruit Phil Gould outlined with diagrams drawn in soil the tactical advancements the game had made since George retired.

That year Souths came second, up from ninth in 1985.

In 1955, Redfern Oval was where Clive Churchill kicked one of the most famous goals in premiership history.

With his broken wrist hanging by his side swathed in the cardboard cover of a school exercise book, Churchill landed the goal from the sideline near fulltime.

It was one of an unprecedented 11 successive sudden death games Souths won to take the title.

In a 1970s match against Canterbury, Souths legend Johnny Sattler was sent off in the opening minutes after a young hooker named Purcell was flattened.

Retired Rabbitohs Test player, the late Bernie Purcell, whose son also played for Canterbury, was in Souths' dressing room when Sattler started apologising.

"When I heard his name was Purcell I was horrified. I thought, 'please don't let it be Bernie's son'," he said.

"No worries Satts," said Bernie, whose amiability disguised a steely resolve. You would have known if it was my son. I'd be chasing you with a lump of four-by-two."

And don't forget the keen supporters, many of them women of indeterminate age, who sat through training sessions in all weathers in a corner of the Redfern Oval grandstand they called Baker's Corner. They specialised in evaluating in loud and often lurid detail their thoughts on each individual player's performance the previous weekend.

They were there the night Souths completed their last training session before a grand final and saw the players joyously throw their coach Clive Churchill in the mud.

The battle for Redfern has been fought and lost (or won, depending on your point of view) and nothing will change. It's just a real bastard watching it happen.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21787913-5001023,00.html