How the 'four right blokes' turned the ABC's coverage of the VFA into must

Walking in West Brunswick recently, Phil Cleary was stopped by a cyclist asking the way to North Fitzroy.

He responded with directions in that trademark voice that has roused footballers and skewered politicians for decades.

Pedalling off, the cyclist turned around. "Hey, you used to call the VFA on TV, didn't you? I know your voice!"

Cleary's achievements are impressive; premiership footballer and coach, Federal Parliamentarian, and — most importantly — the pioneering male voice on the scourge of violence against women.

Yet for people like that lost cyclist, he is just as recognisable as the evangelical voice of the old VFA when its match broadcasts gained a cult following on ABC television.

When ABC Sport announced its return to Australian Football broadcasting last week with a VFL (the artist formerly known as the VFA) rights deal, the same nostalgia kicked in for its new commentary lead, Jason Bennett.

A social media callout for the garish green and gold ABC Sport jackets of the 1980s was a nod to Cleary and his colleagues' days.

"Everything VFL/AFL was on replay on a Saturday, so the only footy that we could watch live was the VFA on ABC," Bennett remembers.

While some footy fans will simply rejoice in a new expanded VFL broadcast partnership that will see Fox Footy and Seven join the national broadcaster, for others the ABC's return will evoke memories of the last time they stepped into cover the AFL's 'little brother.'

Suburban footy grounds, local legends, the irrepressible Cleary, and the magic of the VFA's unlikely 'fab four' of commentary.

'I saw the value of a true community game'

Peter Gee was the frontman for those ABC broadcasts and says the key ingredient was the deference his team gave the VFA.

"Some people regarded it as the poor man's version of the AFL, but I never looked at it that way," he remembers.

"I saw the value of a true community game. It was a legitimate competition, and footy the way it should be played."

In 1987 the ABC held the new expanded national VFL competition for one year only after a television rights dispute led to the incumbent broadcaster, Channel Seven, walking away just weeks ahead of the season.

Up until that time the ABC had been a secondary broadcaster of games alongside Seven due to its regional and national reach, so the capability was there.

Separately the VFA, which had grown a serious following via Channel 0's (later Ten) live Sunday afternoon broadcast of matches in the 1970s, had been left without a broadcaster at all after Ten's gradual withdrawal through the 1980s.

When the VFL finals were played in 1987, a hole was left in Sunday afternoon programming that had been filled by live interstate games. So, part of the ABC team in Gee and Drew Morphett were deployed to cover the VFA Finals.

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They also tapped Cleary as an expert comments man; the then-Coburg coach was the VFA's biggest name as well as a burgeoning social commentator.

A month before, a violent ex-boyfriend had murdered Cleary's sister Vicki. With the blessing of his mother the commentary call-up was a step out of the fog back into public.

"Peter Gee and I talked about this recently and we agreed how bizarre it was that nobody publicly made any reference to my sister's murder, which reflects the times," Cleary says.

Despite the awful backdrop to Cleary's debut, ABC management saw chemistry.

When Seven took back the VFL broadcast rights in 1988, this time exclusively, the ABC was left out of big-time football broadcasting for the first time since television was introduced.

Yet that taste in 1987 offered a footy lifeline, negotiated by producer Allan Pridmore, with the VFA and resulted in Gee sticking to television while his colleagues switched to the VFL on radio (or in Morphett's case jumped to Seven).

The ABC would be the home of the VFA in 1988, riding league name changes and club dissolutions all the way through to 2014.

'What evolved was something quite distinctive'

Gee had grown up watching the VFA in Channel 0 in its 1970s pomp and took the opportunity with relish.

"As a kid I'd followed Geelong West with Joe Radojevic playing full forward, so I was a genuine VFA fan," he says.

The ABC television model switched the traditional VFA Sunday play into a standalone 'match of the day' on Saturday, initially all at Port Melbourne's North Port Oval.

This would allow Cleary to be involved in the broadcast whenever Coburg was not scheduled.

It worked well.

The Lions won back-to-back flags in 1988-89 while their boss spent the other half of his weekend on television.

"No doubt it enhanced my coaching," Cleary says.

Cleary's involvement settled the classic VFA on the ABC broadcast team.

Gee and Ross Booth shared play-by-play, the former taking hosting duties and the latter splitting his time with boundary-side interviews and reports.

Cleary and a then-media novice in ex-VFL and VFA player Sam Kekovich were the expert comment wildcards.

With the same panache he coached Coburg with in their glory days, Cleary reels off the individual and collective qualities that made the broadcast loved all these years on.

"We were unique, because of the four people we brought together. And what evolved was something quite distinctive," Cleary says.

"Peter Gee was our moral compass. He was brilliant, blessed with a great voice and an eye for the moment, and he was unconstrained."

Both Cleary and Gee still laugh at Kekovich's mixed metaphors; players 'seeking the sanction of the boundary line' or 'these blokes can walk off the ground hanging their heads high.'

"Keka was funny, larger-than-life," Cleary says.

"Despite his reputation for not toeing the line as a player, he brought genuine passion."

Little did they know this was the first tentative steps for the man that would gain national stardom delivering sermons on The Fat, or flogging lamb.

"It was where he honed his act," Gee adds.

And then there was the much loved, and missed, Booth. An academic with an amateur football background who died in 2024.

"Ross Booth didn't just have a modulated voice; he had a critical eye for the game, and he said what he thought was logically and empirically sound," is Cleary's assessment of his friend.

Cleary would rib him about his scholarly pedantry and call him the 'Toff from Toorak' on air.

"In reality he was a country boy from bloody Numurkah!" Cleary roars.

Privately, Cleary and Booth would laugh at the fact that in the macho, masculine and, at the time, homophobic landscape of footy, Booth was likely the first gay man to call the game.

He was a little-known trailblazer.

As for Cleary, he says he tried to "add a political line about what was morally and ethically appropriate," to footy.

"It's a bit like a premiership side, you just get a bit lucky with the right 22 players," he says.

"The ABC got lucky with the right four blokes."

'The VFA was our be-all and end-all'

The call team treated the VFA as its own ecosystem. The AFL was ignored apart from score checks at breaks.

"I tended not to take any notice of the VFL/AFL in those days because the VFA was our be-all and end-all," Gee says.

"Having a bloke like Phil in the team, you couldn't help but be imbued by his enthusiasm for the league."

The commentary team gave a reverence to the competition that built weekday plumbers, schoolteachers, and factory workers into weekend superstars.

"I was more interested in characterising the game, whose character was triumphant," Cleary says.

"And that meant you spoke about the players."

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Names like Joskun Aziz (it was always 'Joskun' for Cleary, not the anglicised 'Jack'), Saade Ghazi and Rino Pretto will never be forgotten by footy fans of the era.

VFA broadcasts gave a better indication of suburban Melbourne's cultural diversity than any other mainstream television production.

In the days before any live AFL football on a Saturday afternoon, it found its niche.

It turned out Gee was wrong. Plenty were watching.

If you were not at the AFL or your local community ground on a Saturday afternoon, you more than likely got your footy fix on the ABC.

While its ratings were minor compared to prime-time figures, it more than matched its main commercial competitor for eyeballs in the Saturday afternoon slot, Channel Nine's 'Wide World of Sports.'

When it came to finals time with standalone Sunday afternoon games, it would regularly hit ratings of 20, figures that its AFL counterparts would be rapturous with.

'Sometimes Keka would be quiet and morose early on'

In retrospect the Cleary and Kekovich combination shapes as the most inspired pairing of personalities.

In theory it was Gee's job to control them.

"With great difficulty," Gee confirms.

"Sometimes Keka would be quiet and morose early on, and it turns out he had money on the fourth at Warwick Farm. He'd go out and listen to it a quarter time and all the sudden he was away. God he was fun."

The gig would help lift Kekovich from an ex-footballer wondering where to take his life, to stardom.

For Cleary, it would play a role in propelling him all the way to Federal Parliament as the independent member for Wills, taking it from the retiring deposed prime minister Bob Hawke.

"(The exposure) didn't harm my chances of winning," Cleary agrees.

Staggeringly Cleary continued his VFA commentary throughout four winters in Canberra.

Even more bizarrely, he also continued to coach Coburg during his first 'season' in the House of Representatives.

The Canberra bubble did not neuter Cleary's political edge when it came to VFA commentary though.

In an era of turbulence where its second division dissolved, clubs disappeared and the competition struggled to keep afloat, Cleary and the team were not afraid to tackle those issues.

During the 1994 Grand Final where Trevor Barker's Sandringham came from the clouds to beat Box Hill, Cleary could not resist having a dig at the AFL overlords who were taking control of the competition.

"I said something like 'the gods are telling the football hierarchy something about the place of the VFA' …and Keka chortled as if to say that's a bit rich Phil!" Cleary says.

The VFA eventually changed its name to the VFL in 1996.

Kekovich was snapped up by AFL radio broadcasters, and Peter Gee would head to Tasmania to become the state's ABC television newsreader.

The ABC broadcasts would continue with many of Australia's top broadcasters involved alongside Cleary until 2014.

Yet that first ABC team remains its most iconic iteration.

'State league footy is the last bastion of true romance'

Gee and Cleary are often sent clips of their work that have emerged on YouTube years later and both are quietly chuffed that it has aged better than they could have ever imagined.

The highlight that all agree on is another classic Grand Final in 1990, when Billy (father of Dane) Swan launched the longest kick of his record-breaking VFA career to cap an unlikely Williamstown comeback over Springvale.

"Peter's call of the final minutes was truly brilliant," Cleary says.

That game has become the calling card of an era, and the magic of the four diverse characters that brought it into Victorian homes.

"It was unique, it attracted a television audience and it mesmerised people," Cleary says.

"It was played at local grounds at a time when the AFL had lost that. The VFA was the embodiment of the old game."

"And it was beautiful."

Bennett hopes the ABC's return can do justice to that legacy.

"State league footy is the last bastion of true romance in the game and it feels like its returning to its spiritual home on ABC Sport," he says.

"To be part of that tradition is an honour."

And if Bennett would like to bring back those old ABC Sport jackets?

"I've got a wardrobe full of them at home if he wants one," Gee laughs.

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