The Jack Dyer Stand at Punt Road Oval (Image: AAP/Daniel Pockett)

The history of Australian Rules Football, its importance to the country and to Melbourne especially, is to be tested tonight at a Melbourne City Council meeting.

An application to demolish the Punt Road Oval stand — known for a few decades as the Jack Dyer Stand — is set to come before the council. The application is by the Richmond Football Club, who argue that the stand’s limited capacity is holding the club back. The Richmond board is now throwing its toys out of the pram and saying it will leave Punt Road if the demolition application is rejected.

Well, one doubts they will, but the application needs to be rejected in any case. The club is being a phenomenally bad public citizen by this bullying move, and immensely self-destructive of football’s history and a sense of continuity with its past.

The Punt Road Oval is about as close to a birthplace of football as one is going to get. The Jack Dyer Stand, built in 1915, is the concrete representation of that –- its elegant Edwardian brick and lace work has looked across the place where the road meets the river for more than a century. To simply destroy it, to destroy everything like it and imagine that football can retain its soul, is worse than hubris — it’s an error about how things matter and why we hold on to them.

Far from wanting to pulverise it, the Tigers should be honoured to be the custodians of it. The slick corporates who now populate the board should have some humility as to what they have inherited, and serve it as a sacred trust — not try and blackmail the city into giving up more of its heritage.

Following the recent threat to the John Curtin Hotel, and the greenban on it, surely there has to be some circumspection about a willingness to simply demolish the means of our connection to the past.

Melbourne City Council should reject the application, and so should Planning Minister Richard Wynne. If neither do, unions should greenban. The Tigers should use the expertise they can draw on and save the stand, as is undoubtably possible. We now return you to that election thingy…