Locals suit up for game to commemorate anniversary
Marian Carroll, Contributor, Denpasar, Bali
Like most Indonesian men, Ubey, a 28-year-old farmer and father of two, grew up knowing no football other than soccer, but over the past year he has become passionate about the version of the game unique to Australia.
Apart from being played on a field between two teams, Australian Rules football has practically nothing in common with soccer. The ball is oval-shaped rather than circular, and it spends most of its time traveling through the air rather than along the ground.
So it was with some curiosity that Ubey last year brought some friends to a property in Pancawati village, some 60 kilometers from Jakarta, where Robert Baldwin, an expatriate New Zealander living in this country since 1975, taught them the basics of Aussie Rules and initiated a league for Indonesians.
The Java Australian Football League, comprising five senior teams and six junior teams from villages around Greater Jakarta, is the first of its kind anywhere in the archipelago.
Ubey is captain of the Pancawati Eagles, which on Saturday played an exhibition match in Bali against the Pancawati Scorpions, captained by a 23-year-old farm laborer called Ateng, as part of the commemoration of the Bali bombings anniversary.
For the 28 touring players, the trip to Bali took 23 hours by bus and ferry, but they did not mind; for many, it was their first trip out of their village.
"The whole village was flipped about the teams going to Bali," said Baldwin, 48, better known as Baldy despite sporting a fine crop of hair and, until recently, a thick beard in the style of Santa Claus.
"Most of them are farmers of cash crops like beans, tomatoes and corn; a couple are ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers who run people down to the local market and back to the village.
"Some have been to the sea, but a lot of them haven't traveled at all and we had to organize identification cards for them so they could come to Bali."
The Rp 20 million cost of the trip was largely borne by the Jakarta Bintangs football club, made up of expatriate Australians who invited Baldy to join four years ago.
Over the last 12 months, the Java league players have trained on a field Baldy built at his seven-hectare property, learning to "handball" and "drop-punt", to "mark" (catch on the full) an air- borne ball, and to score goals by kicking the ball through the two tallest posts at each end of the field.
They have played regular matches based on modified rules, with 10 players a side instead of 18, a smaller field, and two 25- minute halves instead of four 25-minute quarters.
"They're small but some of these guys are pretty skillful," Baldy said.
"It's not fair to put them against the Australians, so having an exhibition match was a nice compromise, where they could belt each other around, and they enjoy doing that."
The New Zealander, whose passion for Aussie Rules invites ridicule from most of his countrymen, was driven to set up the league after being admonished by a neighbor in Pancawati where he has lived permanently with his wife Nina since January.
"A neighbor was getting on my case, saying that I wasn't doing anything for anyone in the village even though I was living amongst them," he said.
"So I offered to teach the kids to play the kind of footy I played...I haven't actually done a lot to get the league going other than invite a few guys to have a kick on my property, but they went out and invited people to play and organized the league themselves."
It has attracted so much attention that the number of senior teams is expected to top 10 next season with the inclusion of expatriate and Indonesian schools. The junior league will be expanded to include an under-12-year-old competition in addition to the current under-15s.
Baldy attributes the strong interest to the absence of soccer fields and other sporting facilities near Pancawati, and the fact that there is very little organized activity in the village outside of daily Koran readings.
His efforts in the hills outside of Jakarta have been mirrored in the Depok area by a fellow Bintang, Andi M Dyah, an Indonesian who fell under the spell of Aussie Rules while living in Melbourne.
Andi has been largely responsible for the development of the junior league, which, thanks to Bintang Dave Kainey, also includes a team from the International Bogor School, complete with two sisters from Brazil who have no reservations about taking on the boys.
The players wear Adidas-sponsored jerseys and have had all transport, meals and training costs (amounting to Rp 30 million this year, excluding the Bali trip) paid out of the Bintangs' coffers.
Contact Robert Baldwin at tel. 21-7883-3716 or 0815 921 7115.