In the most bizarre but most optimistic of them I imagine ACT Living Treasure Tobias Cole, the famous choirmaster and adventurous stager of operas and oratorios, teaching Canberra Raiders fans to sing.

I see him out there at Raiders' games before the match, working, with lime-clad choristers. some of the same choral magic he works with his Canberra Choral Society.

In this dream he begins by teaching fan to trill a simple ditty sung by some fans at almost all football occasions in the UK. For, while Australian football fans only make unorchestrated roaring noises UK football crowds are famous for being songsters.

And so Tobias the teacher urges the fans to single out an individual Raiders' player, let's say that tattooed generalissimo Josh Hodgson. And to the universally known melody of Guantanamera Tobias has them sing Josh's praises with the words (you singalong too, readers) "One Joshua Hodgson/There's only one Joshua Hodgson/One Joshua Hodgson/There's only one Joshua Hodgson."

From whence cometh this dream? Let me explain. It is time to teach Australian footie fans to sing.

Saturday night's grand, Storm versus Raiders football occasion at a packed AAMI Stadium is going to lack a thrilling, atmosphere-stoking ingredient I enjoyed last week at a very modest football occasion in Glasgow.

There were only a very few thousand, most of them Billy Connolly lookalikes and soundalikes, there in Glasgow to see Partick Thistle play St Johnstone. But, inevitably, lots of the Billy Connollys were choristers and would burst into guttural Glasswegian song in praise of Thistle, their battling little Scottish Premier League club.

For UK football fans do a lot of singing while Australian football fans do little or none. When, recently, I interviewed Elliott Whitehead one of the Raiders' two ultra-pommy stars the only fault Whitehead could find with Australian football life was that Australian football fans do no singing. He was quite bewildered by this lack of musicality, used as he is to the ways in which footie fans at home sing their hearts out.

This football-mad reporter, a experienced haunter of football stadiums here and in the UK, has always been disappointed by how Australian footie fans do no community singing. It is not only that massed fan choirs at football matches add lustre and emotion to great sports occasions but also that those occasions are quasi-religious and so a singing congregation can make an appropriately hymn-like contribution to the ambience. Then, too, when thousands of fans sing together they are magically converted from an unattractive, pie-eating rabble of tattooed individual werewolves into an effective fan force. Formed into choirs they have a power to give orchestrated boosts to the teams they support and to send electric thrills of fear up the spines of opponents.

It is with tentative optimism that I greet the fact that Raiders' fans have now begun to perform the "Viking clap" and accompanying grunt. It is a start. If fans can be taught to clap and grunt together they can be taught to sing together.

At the very first big football match I ever attended as a freckled English urchin something magical happened. Fans of Norwich City, formed themselves into a thousands-strong choir. They sang (movingly and hauntingly) the club's anthem On The Ball, City! (Never mind the danger.) Dating from the 1890s it has some claim to be the world's oldest, still-being-sung footie anthem. Ever since then I have always had a musical expectation of big football occasions.

Some English clubs' fans have extensive repertoires, with famous songs' and hymns' words often adapted so as to praise heroes or to deride (alas, sometimes obscenely) visiting teams and their fans.

At very big UK matches attended by lots of fans of both sides there can be a kind of Battle of the Choirs. The most famous UK club anthem of all is Liverpool FC's adoption of Rodgers and Hammerstein's sentimental classic You'll never walk alone from the tear-jerking musical Carousel.

Now, promisingly, Raiders' fans have begun to do the "Viking clap."

The clap leapt to global attention when massed fans of the Icelandic national football team performed it again and again at this nothern summer's European Cup in France. You can go and see it now, using the magic of YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8H-a8HTQL8

Icelanders surely have Vikingy things going on in their DNA, and of course the Raiders' very name and horn-helmeted logo embrace a Viking theme.

Research seems to show that the Icelanders, true to their Vikingly pillaging instincts, may have plundered the clap from some fellow northeners, fans of a nothern Scottish club.

But wherever the clap comes from it is, well performed, a wondrous, war-like, intimidating thing to hear and to behold. Like singing together it converts what was a rabble of fans into a choir, a team, with the accompanying warm glow of partisan camaraderie that comes with performing together. It is the same joy Tobias Cole's choirs feels when they warble (so far without clapping, although Tobias is an innovator and may introduce it this Christmas) Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.