OVERWHELMINGLY, fundamentally, footballs fans follow the game through the wonderfully irrational prism of their allegiance to clubs.

Fans admire other clubs, but love only their own. They would no more change club than gender. Even the unmoved in this city feel compelled to declare for a club at some stage.

A club provides its fans with important links, to a place, to the past, with all its resonances, and to each other. It provides a sense of tribalism, of belonging, of righteous struggle — week by week, season by season, decade by decade — in which no game stands alone, but is a step one way or the other in that ceaseless and unifying struggle.

The Tribute Game, by definition, sits outside this dynamic. It is a one-off, an exhibition, between two representative teams, one rarely seen, the other made up. Little, if any, emotion bubbles up in anticipation of it. I am not excited by it, but nor can I work up enough feeling to loathe it. I feel indifference.

At one level, this is counter-intuitive. Australians are fiercely parochial, and this parochialism vividly animated interstate football when it was popular. But once the club game was expanded to encompass the nation, the interstate contest became irrelevant and died. The proof was in the pudding.

Victorians will have common cause when they barrack for Victoria on Saturday, but it will not be as deep or heartfelt as the common cause they have every week with fellow fans of their clubs, and will be as fleeting as the day. The Dream Team is even more ethereal, without a history, existing nowhere, belonging to no one, wearing no known colours, admirable, but too insubstantial either to love or loathe, the true measure of football vitality.

The Tribute Game is as all exhibition games are, contrived. Tacitly, the AFL has acknowledged this by its blizzard of publicity. Journalists have had set aside many megabytes to archive the emails. Yesterday it was to announce — cue drum roll — the umpires, timekeepers and ball stewards. And there are still five days to go …

But most of the publicity has focused on one man, Jonathan Brown, and the chance to see him in a Victorian guernsey. By dwelling on the man rather than the team, the AFL again is highlighting that the game has no real stake, and therefore edge. The four premiership points your team will play for the following weekend means more by far.

I cannot help but think that if Brown plays on Saturday, he will find the experience a little hollow. David Beckham plays games for the sake of self and show. Brown, as I perceive him, does not.

I have no doubt that Brown is genuine in his desire to play for Victoria. He is proudly a Victorian. But his football identity is intrinsically bound up with the Brisbane Lions. I'll barrack for Brown if and when he joins my club. Until then, I will remain in awe of him, but from a distance.

Without any other meaning, exhibition games at least need to be spectacular and preferably close. In this, the interstate games of old have been a little mythologised. At club level, everyone accepts the verity that a team of champions does not necessarily make a champion team. Contemplating interstate football, most choose wilfully to overlook this.

The Victoria/South Australia match of 1989 is a case in point. It is remembered as a halcyon day, perhaps the last. Before a vast crowd at the MCG, Tony Lockett, Jason Dunstall and Gary Ablett played in the same side, and Victoria won by 86 points.

But my admittedly fading memory tells me that as well as Lockett, Dunstall and Ablett combined that day, they also frequently got in each other's way.

Besides, it is problematic that Dunstall, a Queenslander by birth, even was playing for Victoria. On Saturday, Adam Goodes will play for Victoria despite saying yesterday that he considered himself South Australian and has played all his AFL football for Sydney. See contrivance, above.

There is another immutable, also underscored by 1989. Much as stars get in one another's way in this made-up football, so they stay out of harm's way, or at least try to. While Lockett, Dunstall and Ablett disported in 1989, Hawthorn's Tony Hall did his knee, missed the rest of the season and never recovered his full powers as a footballer.

Hall suffered his injury under the duress of a tackle, properly and innocently applied, by Hawk teammate Andy Collins. Neither ever forgot it and nor did many others. If Brown finds himself in a position to crunch Jamie Charman on Saturday, would he act as instinctively and ruthlessly as in a club game?

Somehow, it is hard to think that he would. That, in a nutshell, is what fails about the Tribute match, but, perversely, underscores what is fundamentally good and sound about the game. It's about care. And, gratifyingly, club is still thicker than border.