It is pretty tough going when a bye is your best performance in a whole year of football. But like their namesake, the Ardmona Cats never say die; they just get up, brush off the dust and mud and get on with their next life as a 100-year-old football club.
But, as bad luck would have it, they might well be on their last life. The Kyabram District Football League have lost patience and suspended the club from the next season for not paying their dues.
For the Cats, it is not about winning and losing, it is how you play the game. The Cats are sitting on the bottom of the ladder. It is not their worst year – their percentage is sitting at 10.6 with 3,858 points against their 409 for the 2019 season. In 2013, their percentage was around 7.
Notwithstanding their losses and a near win against the second bottom on the ladder, Longwood, the Ardmona Cats have earned a new epithet: they are now the official worst football team in Australia, according to online betting.
It has not always been so bad for the Cats. Over the past 100 years, they have been premiers 10 times in the different leagues they have played and Perry Meka, a former player, still holds the Kyabram District Football League record for the most goals scored in a season for kicking 174 back in 1992.
Wikipedia notes that the township of Ardmona has several prominent features including a corner shop, a primary school and a football field. Set among the regular rows of fruit trees that stretch to all points of the compass, the football ground and clubhouse has a history that goes back to the club’s genesis in 1921. Having an initial area marked out at the primary school, a committee of locals was formed in 1923 to raise funds to purchase land on which the current football ground would be established.
The Cats’ current troubles are financial. They need to raise around $100,000 to pay off past dues to the league in what seems to be a never-ending progression towards the corporatisation of country sporting clubs.
The increasing press coverage that the besieged club is receiving, possibly more than any other club in the league, is working to make small inroads in fundraising.
Club supporter and local resident, Teisha McCoy has opened a GoFundMe page to raise $100,000 to go towards the club’s arrears. At the time of writing, they have raised around $11,000 in just over a month.
Notwithstanding their present difficulties, the Ardmona Cats represents all that is good about country sports from a player’s perspective. Rain, hail or shine, it is the game, not the winning that keeps them going.
