BULLETIN - POST ROUND 17

I got home from my Theory and Writing class last night and realised that there is far too much depth in my life. Not enough superficiality in this girl’s house of cards.

One of our esteemed tipsters remarked to me last Sunday morning that she struggled to understand how someone who knows so much, or at least absorbs so much, about football could be such an unsuccessful tipster.

‘I’m too emotional a person’, I defended.

We’ve been over that turf. We’ve gardened my personality in these pages enough to know that I am someone who prefers to believe in the dream rather than the reality, someone who bucks the interminable ‘expected’ with a small but willful effort to divert it, someone who sacrifices accuracy for the throngs of the narrative. We know this turf. We’ve been there before.

But another thought occurred to me.

On Saturday night, I had been at the Legs on the Wall fundraising cabaret and a female friend and I had been admiring a young man – a young man, I might add, who we both know. It was not a silly perve. There we were, having this conversation about this boy, when Patrick – who agrees with our assessment – asked what was so impressive about him. Said female friend astutely replied that he is simply one of the most 3 dimensional people she knows. He is good looking – in an off-centre, dark eyed kind of way; very cool; creative - a musician; demonstrably intelligent; well read and well thought; charming; extremely personable but aloof enough to maintain your interest. Voilà. Three dimensions.

Later that night, back on the living room floor in my woolen fair aisle socks, mug of chamomile in hand, I watched the Saints demolish the Doggies. And what occurred to me was, that the Saints are finally looking three dimensional. They’ve always been pretty boys – Riewoldt, dal Santo and all those blondes down back … Gilbert, Gram … they have a ready made ‘boy band’ down there. They’ve always had the creative potential. But up until this year, this group had never quite mustered the umph, the seriousness of what they could do. And now … they’ve got it. They’re the boy coming out the back-end of the worst stages of puberty and realising his power as a young man.

It occurred to me then, that this business of young men … it affects my tipping. It may account, in part, for my poor record. Young men account for a lot in the world. These boys, in their different colours, remind me of the boys of my teenage years, the boys of my early twenties, the boys who awakened me to the world of all things male.

The Saints have just become the prized catch – the boy who was good looking, smart enough, good with the girls, but not overly so, skilled at something with enough disinterest in the mob to go and actually make something of it.

The Cats used to be that, until they pursued it so well that they made an interminable gap for themselves. Nobody likes old, established talent as much as the thrill of a new find.

The Doggies are the brainy boy who was good looking enough. He was smart enough to be fascinating but lacking the confidence in himself to turn your whole head. Unfair. The Hawks are the school dude who was equipped for everything but ruffled to the hilt in a disguise that made it look like it came all too easily. The rich kid with a bit of brawn. Charismatic but not totally reliable … which just made him all the more attractive.

The Pies are the boy with skills but no class, the over-entitled bully. The Blues are the boy who always came an admirable second in the class, got the girls on the rebound and was too shy to take the baton and run for first. Even if you liked him, you knew he wouldn’t go all the way.

The Dockers are the ‘spunk’ who rode on his looks and let the substance he didn’t fully understand trail behind. He was charming enough to get away with it, but likely to have peaked at the age of about 17. The Cokesters are the older brother of the guy you liked, narky and agro. You always knew there was something ugly brewing behind his bedroom door. The Port boys were the boys who looked up to these older brothers, heading in that direction.

The Bombers are the quick witted boy up the back making all the girls laugh, with enough potential not to be a mere disruption. He had cheek to burn and was the year’s most likely to mature into an interesting person.

The Lions … maybe it’s just the Jonathon Brown thing – although Daniel Rich is keeping the mould alive – they are the big, tough country boy, the boarder. I never had anything to do with them and their moleskins. And the Roos, Tigers, Demons, Crows … don’t think I said a word to those boys ever, only if they were on the stage management team of the school play.

And … my own boys? The Swans are the boy who had your heart for real, the one you phoned a few times a week, the one with whom you pretended you were just best friends, the one who talked to your parents when he came to your house. Good looking but not suspiciously so, smart, sensitive and funny, more hard working than flashy and never on the wrong side of the jerk-o-meter. You figured you’d know them the rest of your life.

It’s a personal thing. Your view will be different to mine. As it should be. Cause we all traversed those moments of discovery about boys and/or girls on fragile and particular ground. We made our own archetypes, they crossed and traded places over the years, experience deepened or scratched them. But they prove to be imprints which are hard to discard.

On some deep but superficial level, I think they’re just another thing affecting my tipping. I may be, in part, tipping for the boys of my adolescent imaginings, showing my preferences, fulfilling old longings. Sigh.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Back to literary theory.

Happy tipping!

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 16

As of next week, I will be a single mother beginning a Masters degree with a part time job and a terrible habit for perfectionism. The anticipatory sleeplessness has begun already. I turn and turn and turnover – but no one grabs the ball and runs off with it.

I’ve been thinking that the best way to tackle a long, lone spell with the Bomblet and a full schedule, is to face it like a full back: presence and intimidation; playing with a close check; relying on my capacity to read the play better than him. He is an impressive opponent, the Bomblet. He plays hard and fast, the ball and the man and he rarely accepts a rotation. The problem with the full back model is, I don’t fancy sticking to my man like glue and I’ll be limited in my capacity to run off him and create play, without the support of any team mates. The risk of ending up in a game of catch up is too great. He can be explosive, the Bomblet!

I need an alternative approach.

* * *

In the first thirty minutes of Saturday’s Swans v Blues clash, I became more than a little bewitched by the shining light of the big #18 – Jesse White. Like Hamlet’s ma I sat, with Bazza’s corpse hardly tepid, admiring the lead and leap of the 21 year old. An in-form Dwayne Russell (see quotes) agreed: ‘Barry’s been keeping him out of the spot too long’. With his facial hair arranged like a novice gangster – sideburns, scratchy mo and goatee – White’s 105kg frame gave the Swans much needed confidence up forward.

And then, it came to me like a pleasant dream where desirable strangers play bit parts and all the signs make sense.

In this dream, I saw the haze of life for the next two months: work to get to, trains to wait for, preschool curfews to make. Morning cuddles to allocate, meals to dream up, lunchboxes to stuff, a tired face in the mirror to fix. A trolley to push and garbage bins to drag, sheets to tuck and pets to keep alive and skirting boards to vacuum. Reading to do and writing to do and thinking to do. Clothing to wash and magic tricks to teach and birthday presents to procure and ugg boots to air and stories to listen to and stories to read and realities to shield and cosmic events to explain and tips to do and heaped up teaspoons of Milo to forbid. Afternoon chatter to horde and horde. Comfort for his bouts of loneliness, for things that don’t work, for the irrational desire for incompatible friends. Endless negotiations over quiet times and ‘nothing’ times, over the execution of the most basic human tasks and which of his four alter egos would be joining us for dinner. Getting to night time university, dinners to leave and kisses on pillows, babysitters to arrange and yawns to suppress, opinions to have and opinions to share and quiet drives home on night-time streets to savour. Contempt for routine to stifle and mind traffic to censor so sleep can come and it can start all over again.

And, in the dream, into the picture rides … Jesse.

‘Could he be the “white” knight Sydney’s been looking for?’ asked the commentary team.
‘Well he’s certainly all-white,’ they guffawed.

Wide awake, it occurred to me, with his fourth goal for the half, that whether he was the answer to the Swans forward structure or not, he would be the answer to my structure, my white knight, a 196cm bolt of inspiration delivering a master class on dealing with an opposition. I would face my months ahead, not like a full back, but like a full forward.

Put the body work on early. Don’t wait until I’m in a one on one. Move, move, move. Be in the shower before he can complain about dressing; be in the car before he can spoil with reluctance to go to preschool; be in the kitchen chopping before being smothered by another LEGO police narrative; be in bed before it’s under 6 hours until he’s up again.

Get front position. Anticipate what is coming. Have confidence in the 1762 previous meetings with the Bomblet. Take away doubt and back myself.

In moments of uncertainty or indecision, spin. Strong leading forwards run up to the wing, prop and spin the ball in their hands while waiting for options. Spin the hands on the clock, the lid on the whiskey bottle, Justine Clarke on repeat, the hills hoist, lies, remote controls – whatever it takes to buy some time or space.

Be prepared to double lead when behind. Eliminate the risk of staying back in the contest and bringing things to ground. Without reliable crumbers, I’ll just be left with crumbs.

By the time I’d gotten through a half of footy, I was feeling supremely confident. If ‘the kid’ could do this well in just his 14th senior game, and his first at full forward, so could a veteran like me.

Fake it ‘til you make it.

As the match progressed, I was so inspired by the revelation, that I was even taking hints from the opposition ruckman floating to full forward. The commentators remarked on Kreuzer, ‘Even his misses go through!’ Good point.

Score off your bad shots. When I find myself, accidentally, in the die cast toy car aisle at Woolies, think bribery. When all I’ve organised for dinner is left over self-saucing chocolate pudding, think bribery. When I haven’t done my ‘homework’, think the 3 hour, M rated dinosaur DVD … and bribery.

Even other key position players were making sense. Swans, Mattner and Grundy, the #29 and #39 respectively, are constantly being mistaken for each other. Great idea!

Pretend your somebody else. I have often observed the Bomblet snuggling the leg of his aunty at a family function when both of us have been wearing knee-length denim skirts. Dress like the other mothers at preschool.

Despite heading into August/September without a pre-season to speak of, underdone, with only a handful of runs in the reserves, I was feeling super confident of my chances by now. I was even anticipating a night out at Crown and possible Legend Status in the new Hall of Fame.

Play the full four quarters.

Super confident, that was, until the siren sounded for the fourth quarter.

Maintain a lead of more than 15 at all times.

The steepest denouement unfolded, the structures fell apart, the opponent ran rampant, the supply dried up and … Jesse was rendered lame.

Oh no. What if it all ended up like this for me? What if I find myself, after a couple of weeks, with my early get up and go deflated, run off my legs, toyed with by the Bomblet like impotent prey, rendered completely ineffective? It gets worse. What if, in trying to play both forward and back, in trying to fill the gap in front of the danger man, I too end up like Teddy, taken down in courageous backward flight, prone on the turf with the Bomblet’s knee cap imprinted on my shattered rib cage, coughing blood? It’s no coincidence that the man taken down on Saturday is the Swan with the greatest amount of time on the field this season – 94.5% of all game time. That’s about what I’ll be doing! (Although, without the broken ribs, punctured lung, chest drain and ground transfer, a few non-negotiable days in hospital and some heavy painkillers could be just the ticket.)

I felt grim after the match, desperately grim, but began an immediate review. All of Jesse’s good work was undone by the Fab 4 in the navy blue. Change of plan! Perhaps this stint is best taken on like a midfielder? But I know I don’t have the tank to match it with the Bomblet in the midfield.

I joined him in a bath on Saturday night, suspiciously staring into his bottomless green eyes, wondering what he has in store for me. After a curative dinner of pungent cheeses and a generous balloon glass of my father’s finest medicinal Calvados, bed beckoned. There’s a TV in the bedroom at my parents’ place. It was just before 11pm - footy broadcast time in NSW. Time for a night with the old flame. Buddy. Just as my hope needed recharging, a reinvigorated Buddy reminded me how the full forward can indeed get the job done.

He was mercurial, he ran on the ball and then re-appeared in the forward line, his defensive pressure superb. He wasn’t afraid of a bit of biff, baiting and niggling Didak – ‘unsociable football’ I think they call it.

Don’t be afraid of being a bit unsociable with someone a fair bit smaller than you.

He retrieved, fended off and, by the all important fourth quarter, Buddy was finishing them off. ‘There’s nothing better than a forward keeping their feet’, called Matthew Lloyd in commentary.

Keep your feet. Don’t go to ground.

I slept well, bound in sweet dreams of my ‘white knight’ and my best buddy.

* * *

On Sunday, we were back in the city and back to reality. Watching North versus the Tigers, the inevitable became apparent.

Any battle between human souls is never usually one-sided.

My months one-on-one with the Bomblet will be a time for raw courage. For all my silver lined dreams of the big boys at full forward, no doubt it will eventuate into a skill-less scrap, every disposal a 50/50, missed shots, turnovers, attacks and counter attacks, all the play under pressure, no easy possessions, endless stoppages, raw nerves, scoring opportunities without reward, goal for goal for a deadlock in the end, the type of game where you need a third man up, but there isn’t one available. Perhaps a draw is desirable in my case.

Don’t, whatever you do, lobby for extra time.

Probably just as well my team is not heading to September. But we are headed to Rivalry Round – a perfect warm up for a couple of months with the Bomblet.

Happy tipping!


And to better bear the angst of whatever might be worrying you, you need to read this and this. Life is a rich field of dung just waiting to sprout edibles and these guys completely understand that.

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 15

The Eaglet and I have flown the coup this week … to the country.

There’s nothing like the change of air, a change of scenery. As you drive south along the coast, you are weaned from the city first by the southern suburbs, then the national park, the mounts above Wollongong, until you are driving in vulgar, rolling green hills, hills that look like they’ve greedily swallowed all the water of the state and are only too happy to boast about it. Every time I make the trip, I expect that the physical transposition will affect a similar kind of internal change on me – that I too will become clear thinking, spacious, wholesome. If only it were as simple as changing the concrete greys to greens.

As Barry Hall’s white ute rounded the boundaries of the SCG on Saturday afternoon, past the little Auskick kids whose shorts meet the cuffs of their socks as they willingly drop balls just past their boots but gallop forward no matter, his face became more and more broken. Each metre seemed to give way to a dawning, for him, of everything he had given away by not being able to change his ways. Many suggested that the big leopard never would. It wasn’t for a lack of opportunities.

The sadness for me, what I read in the trickle of the big man’s tears, was a knowledge of the potential regret that will come from never knowing whether he might have had a better exit, whether he could have changed those spots.

Unless, that is, he changes his stripes. Unless he finds a new guernsey to pull over that scone in 2010.

* * *

On the eve of Round 15, esteemed tipster and provocateur extraordinaire, Travis, sent me a brief message:

‘I don't know if I would feel good or bad about Barry kicking a 'bundle' for another team. He's says it would be tough to play the Swans, in fact he said he couldn't. If I did feel good about this prospect it would be coming from a bad place.’

He qualified this for me by revealing the ‘bad place’ to be the desire to see Swans people ‘have to ordeal with the Medhurst Principle’.

How the sting of the traded player remains.

There are a bag of notables running around today: Judd, Cousins, Gardner, Medhurst, Akermanis, Motlop, Hudson. Whether voluntarily traded, caught in the bonuses of November deals or looking for the yellow brick road ‘home’, however they got there, there they now play. They wear the colours, they sing the song.

When your traded player goes and plays about the same, there’s not so much to begrudge. No-one’s crying rivers over Schneider, Dempster, King, Johnstone or (Judd’s fall guy) Kennedy.

When they go and break down, well, that’s the footy Gods closing their karmic circles: Nathan Brown and his broken leg, Playfair and his irreparable hammy.

There are those few – club champions, high achievers – who leave to a chorus of ‘good riddance’ and what follows is largely irrelevant. Somehow, these players never look quite right in the colours they end up in – Aker in blue and Carey in Crow hoops. Hall in …?

When the heart and soul of your club goes, it’s unfathomable. Imagine being an Eagle and losing Judd and Cousins having already slipped a grip on Gardner. Can you conceive of Kirk leaving the Bloods or Richo leaving his nomenclaturally appropriate Richmond? It’d be like giving away your grandmother’s antique furniture to Vinnies.

And what to do with those rare few, like Josh Carr, who go for some time and come back again? Port to Fremantle and back to Port. How are you supposed to feel about those guys? They give their best years to someone else and want you to nurse them through the dribbling.

The pain to which Travis refers – when your traded player departs, only to find a very blustery second wind elsewhere – that must sting. Farren Ray has slipped into Sainthood this year with as much ease as Mary MacKillop is having difficulty. Words are sworn over those releases.

Travis is right. Us Swans have rarely ordealed with the Medhurst principle. Perhaps it is our turn with Baz. We have, until now, been on the other side of the bridge. It’s a risky business – like doing the Saturday garage sale circuit. You can find gems or get exactly what you paid for. We have been mostly lucky, or astute. The Swans have absorbed the discards of other clubs and after a quick wipe and a new set of batteries, they have become favourite additions. These players change like phantoms as if they never were who they’d been, appearing to have only ever been who they now are.

Sydney took a triple grand final emergency player in Craig Bolton and made him into an All-Australian club captain. Does anybody remember him in maroon? We took a second tier ruckman and made him into one of the big men to beat in the middle. Can anyone still ‘see’ him in the navy blue and red? We took an inconsistent, hot headed thug of a kid from St Kilda and made him into an imposing, hot headed thug of a man in Sydney. We won a Premiership with these three. The jury’s out on Richards and Mattner, although both have been more than handy. And as for the # 2 … sometimes you have to invoke a kind of colour blindness. Swans supporters were reluctant when a Shaw came to Sydney. But, now, as he heads the Swans’ kicks and disposals, is 4th in the league’s rebound 50s and 1st in bounces, he is ‘Rhycey’ to all of us in the O’Reilly, as familiar and uniquely ours as the intersection of the SCG’s centre square and 50 metre arc. It’s better to take from Collingwood than to give to them, n’est-ce pas Travis?

It’s not easy to give away your colours nor to take the colours of others. It messes with your sense/s of loyalty.

I have dealt with the inevitable duality posed by loyalty, in general, since the day we took the tram back to Paul’s place after the 2006 grand final. While we expressed our sorrow over the Swans, the look on the Eaglet’s face told us that his heart had already been tempted to the other side of the continent. I have strummed his defiance gently. But there is a part of me that longs for him to lie in the gentle down-lined nest of the Swan under the wings of his mother and father.

And then, on Saturday, the Eaglet changed his wings from the noble wedges of the great bird to the steely span of the Bomber. What do you call a baby Bomber? A ‘bomblet’? Well, yes. Toby informed me, on Saturday, that there is such a thing as a Bomblet – any of a number of explosive, incendiary, or fragmentation bombs packed into a larger bomb or canister that releases or scatters them to explode separately. Multiple trouble. Sounds extremely appropriate.

Just like players, supporters (and tipsters) have been known to seek greener pastures. To be fair to the Bomblet, he has always laid claim to the Eagles and Bombers. He started his barracking life with the two team system in place. (There’s a whole separate bulletin to be written on the politics of ‘having a second team’ – Can you only be a true lover if you love one? What about parents with more than one child? Don’t they profess to loving two or more equally? Can you switch your second team from year to year? …)

People say that children lack the complexity to understand loyalty, because they don’t have any years behind them in which to have cultivated the hindsight-only benefits of long term commitment – the strength that comes, the lessons learnt in steadfastness. We treat their shiftiness as flippant and are lenient on its lack of experience.

But somehow, looking at the sometime Eaglet, part-time Bomblet crying for the big Swan looking for a reincarnation as … a Dog?, it was apparent that he was not shirking the complexity of loyalty by trying on all the colours, he was embracing it. Sitting looking at the Bomblet and at Barry, with Travis’s puzzle ringing in my mind, made me realise that the possessive, one-eyed supporter or the proud, one-club player, has no exclusive monopoly on heart and soul.

Children understand the essence of things not the connotation of things. They know they can love two parents, so why can’t they love two teams? If Tilda Swinton can live a polyamorous life, why can’t we all? Perhaps the Bomblet truly understands that human loyalty transcends singularity, that humans are good at switching their own loyalties, even while defending their right to loyalty from others. He is an honest loyalist.

I suspect our attachment to loyalty as a singular thing comes from the hope that it guarantees some kind of sturdiness and familiarity, a hearth to return to when we feel like we might get lost – the club as a home, like the central powerpoint into which the multiple powerboard is plugged, the server which allows you to go off wandering somewhere and welcomes you back after your adventures.

So, as the natural daylight tilted and Barry bundled up the opposition race, I decided that if he were to go and kick a bundle for the Dogs or the Crows … can I truly add Pies? … I’d be sad he couldn’t do it with us and I’d be pleased for him and for them. A little bit of my loyalty would go with him. And most of it would remain. And I'd be pleased that he might finally be able to check his spots in the mirror.

* * *

The Bomblet and I sat out on the deck at 7am this morning, fresh from a silent night’s sleep, seeing ‘cockatoos’ and ‘hens’ in the newly sunlit clouds hanging out over the coast, waiting for its rays to warm our own small patch of ground. I asked him:

‘Do you think Barry should play footy again?’
‘I think rugby league or union.’
‘But what if the Bulldogs offered him a guernsey?’
‘No. He looks a bit too much like Eagleton so I don’t think the Bulldogs. Maybe boxing.’

The sun popped over the escarpment and turned the grasses green. Danny Green.

Happy tipping!

WHAT DOG IS THAT COACH?

Below are two images. One is 'Rocket' the human. One is 'Skunk' the blue heeler. Which is which? As Lucie says, 'You can't take the dog out of Rodney'.

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 14

Marty Mattner, Barry and the Big Yellow Tractor

One of the Eaglet’s favourite books, Max and the Yellow Tractor, tells the story of Max, a small (red) farmyard tractor who, one day on his usual trip through the woods, comes across ‘a magnificent yellow tractor, much bigger than Max, with huge wheels that made great clouds of dust. And he was making really thick smoke … he beeped his horn and rushed past at full speed.’ Max is smitten by this great tractor and for the rest of the day, cannot go about his usual tasks. He gets stuck in a rut, starts up his windscreen wipers by mistake, beeps for no reason and makes the cows run off in a panic.

* * *

Last Thursday, I was transporting the Eaglet to his grandparents’ place in Bondi Junction. We pass the SCG on our travels and often take Driver Avenue to avoid the snaking, speed-humped, round-a-bouted track around the park.

As we turned left that morning, we saw the familiar red and white and navy blue of the Swans training gear.
‘There’s a Swannie,’ I said casually.
‘Who is it?’
‘Um, Jolly?’
Then getting closer, ‘Maybe Grundy?’
And then as we came side on to that slightly bandy-legged wander, full of the confidence of supreme fitness and youth: ‘No, it’s Marty Mattner!’
‘Marty Mattner?’ confirmed the Eaglet.
‘Oooooo-ee,’ I hollered like a sassy Negress in an evening sitcom. ‘He looks fine!’

We continued on. I held my line on the road. I may have extolled his virtues a couple more times during the short rest of the trip, leaving the Eaglet to make of it what he would.

As we arrived at the grandparent’s door, I undid my seatbelt and turned my head to line up the reverse. You’ll understand the quality of my reverse parking when I tell you I was once proposed to on the back of its merits. The back wheel climbed the footpath with a jolt!
‘Ooh dear,’ I confessed. ‘It must be Marty Mattner. Seeing him’s made mama go all doozie.’
And without missing a beat or raising his eyes, the Eaglet remarked, matter-of-factly, ‘You’re just like Max and the yellow tractor.’

I had considered my reaction to the Swan sighting a pure rush of blood to the head, the nostalgic sizzle caused by dark, fine featured, 20 something year old boys. There is no getting away from the attraction of young male bodies at their peak, engaging in the sorts of physical feats that have gotten the species this far. I’m not above the gaze. I take binoculars to the footy. (The O’Reilly boys think I am a strategist.)

But, at the tender age of four and a half, without a conscious understanding of attraction or infatuation, the Eaglet revealed exactly what he had made of my distraction – it was about admiration, the same admiration that little Max feels for the bigger yellow version of himself – a kind of ‘wanting to be like’. It occurred to me that, as usual, he was onto something.

Few of us, in our daily lives, have the opportunity to push our physical vessels to their extremes, to tone them and tune them as professional sports people do. In another life as a fairly full-time yoga practitioner and novice teacher, I came somewhere close to knowing the discipline and commitment this requires. I admire it. And I revere the mental capacity which allows these players to handle and often surpass their physical capabilities during a match. I often experience real gratitude towards my team’s players for allowing me to touch those places again, by proxy, in watching them, looking at them.

Last weekend at the SCG, as the Sunday afternoon sun crept up the rows of the O’Reilly and warmed my chilly knees, I looked out across the grass at the bobbing bodies in red and white and blue and felt a very pure admiration – for each player’s will to manage and manoeuvre their physical and mental application, to be the right piece of an ever-changing structural puzzle, on the run, all the time.

I even felt a warm admiration for the ‘kids’, with their crude tackles, their unreliable skills under pressure, their lack of awareness but puppy-like enthusiasm and … just occasionally … their sudden flashes of composure and brilliance. By the end of the first quarter, James and I were trying to think up a list of things we could do up in Row U – knitting, crossword puzzles, skittles, drugs - to accompany the next three years, while we supported them through their development. Because the process of playing those kids alongside Kirk and the Boltons and O’Keefe, will be about them feeling the ‘wanting to be like’ and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch.

What that very handsome Swan on Driver Avenue triggered (apart from a loss of control during the reverse park) was that feeling I have when the magnetism of footy distracts me completely. Some days, I think how delicious it would be to get lost in a week, a season, of footy – I mean completely lost, Alice in Wonderland kind of lost. To be lost in the arcs and the marks and the minutes and minutes of small significant events; in the mysterious language of plays, positions and numbers; in the strategies, the preparations, the mental and physical gathering up, the harnessing of information and then the jettisoning of the same when the time comes to run out and ‘do it’; the reflexes, the speed of the switches; all the things it takes to extend far enough to be the best, the hunted - the thick smoke and the dust under the wheels and the rushing by at full speed and …

The Eaglet is right. I am (often) just like Max.

* * *

I was up to here, when ‘it’ happened.
I was parking the car outside preschool yesterday, when I heard ‘it’ on the 3 o’clock news. Where were you when Barry hung up the boots?

As I buckled the Eaglet into the car, I said:
‘You know what happened today? Barry Hall quit the Swans. He quit football.’
‘What does quit mean?’
‘Um, it means leave. Finish. Barry won’t be playing anymore.’
‘But he’ll still be writing, won’t he? About his other life?’

(Don’t let the Eaglet be right!)

I felt a certain humanity as I listened to that barrel of a voice on ABC radio. I’d need to change tack for this week’s bulletin. I’d have to divert it into a tribute issue for the big bald forward with the baby blue eyes. Barry, the footballer, deserves an obituary. But what would I write about? What is there to say that he hasn’t said himself in too many columns of type? As I wrestled (let’s use wrestling instead of boxing … for the moment) with a motif, I recognised a certain parallel with what I already had and what had just happened with Baz.

Cause, in his heyday, there was a lot to admire about Barry. And, in his case, it was never aesthetic. Barry certainly always blew thick smoke at full speed. But sometimes the big imposing yellow tractors of this world, who we look up to, are not always as indestructible as we imagine.

By the end of the Eaglet’s book, the big yellow tractor is broken down alone in a field of barley and Max is given the task of towing him back to the farm. And once he successfully has, driving carefully and slowly and beeping politely, he tells the old green jeep in the barn:
‘Today I felt a little bit bigger.’

Happy tipping!

with Mick and Baz departing,
the sub editors are working flat out on variations of:
‘New Blood Going Forward in 2010.’

ENOUGH

Never mind about whether Barry Hall should or shouldn't get another game for the Bloods. I don't care whether he never gets another game of AFL football full stop. But if I have to endure ONE MORE of Barry's 'dirty laundry' diary entries in the city's only broadsheet ... His thousand odd weekly words are an embarrassment to himself, to the club and to the integrity of Australian print journalism.

PLEASE support this petition to abolish Barry. Place a COMMENT below (don't be afraid, it's easy) and help condemn, to the pulp heap, the bleeding heart chronicles of a footballer we lost interest in a fair while ago.

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 13

I’ve been preoccupied with the slide.

The Swans CEO, the excellently named Myles Baron-Hay, retried from the club last week. The membership department sent a letter-headed message of thanks for my support and discount offers for the year ahead. Co-captain and number 1 defender, Bolton C. did not return to the starting 22. The coach fore shadowed changing times. The AFL held firm on the second team and the full forward is STILL belting people.

What is there for the supporter who has endured the good times who finds herself on the slippery slope of rebuilding and will not jump ship?

There is the generic re-building rhetoric from club officials, supposed to make me feel as fresh as a squirt of Norsca. There is the basically disinterested and terribly fleeting sympathy of close friends and family. There is the relegation of the commemorative premiership front page to the damp wall of the third bedroom. My mother suggested to me, that belonging to a team which is headed for the bottom eight is a bit like being in opposition in politics – a place nobody wants to be, the yards nobody wants to do. This from a woman who has no interest in team sports, but clearly a fine understanding.

I’ve been wondering how to handle myself.

On Friday, I had an exchange with Coach Ian, direct from the Penelope Cruz room of the 'Hotel Movie' in downtown Zagreb. He wrote:

‘ … it may just be my general tiredness, but the idea of the noble bearing in defeat, the offsetting of the loss by the sense of belonging and stoic endurance etc is just not compelling me.’

It IS tempting to feign a dignified defeat by martrying myself to the next phase in gratitude for what has been. I’ve been tempted to hang my head and grit my teeth and suffer through with a long face, loyal but languishing. I’ve been tempted by the widow’s black garb. But there is something inherently empty about the adoption of this strategy. Ian is right. It gives nothing. And anyway, I was feeling too sorry for myself and the team and the years ahead.

Until Friday.

The Eaglet and I had set ourselves the Friday task of returning the untended winter garden to a state of relative dignity. All winter it has sat floundering, without discipline – no early picks, no promising additions of youth. The broccoli have some kind of greyish aphid on them. The eggplant leaves are mouldy. The broad beans are stunted with lack of fertilising, the spinach littered with the tiniest of snails and the lack of mulch has encouraged a flood of weeds. Only the day before someone had enquired of me: ‘How’s your garden?’
‘Terrible.’ I said with appropriate hopelessness. ‘It’s been so unloved.’
I made it sound terminal as if nothing could be done. My mother once told me that your first garden is always your best because of the enthusiasm of the new.

But as I worked away, drawing at the onion weed and raking the fallen fig leaves with my clumsy gloved fingers … as I roped around those broad beans, pulled the last blackened stalks of basil, pruned the verbena and the rusted lemongrass and the overweight branches of the eggplants … as I cut handfuls of spinach and parsley to reveal the dry and dusty soil below and turned the winter air through it, wishing the great earthworms hello … some kind of airing of all my football tensions came to pass.

I started to look at my empty, fallow garden with acceptance. I was actually relieved, lightened, impressed even, by its barrenness. Could I approach one, two, three footy seasons with the same equilibrium?

The phone rang. I trudged inside, shedding shoes and gloves and soil. It was my father calling from the country.
‘Ma-thildie. Zat’s your dad.’
‘Hi.’
‘I’m calling with zat news of your childoood eero.’
‘Who?’
‘Michael Jackson. He ‘az died today.’
‘Really? He died?’
‘Yes!’
‘Dad, he was Eloise’s (my sister’s) hero, anyway, but … wow!’
I had flashes of lying on my sister’s red trundle bed, staring up at her Thriller poster, under which she slept every night of her 12th year, back in the days when Jackson was black.

Two of the great black Michaels in seven days! The week certainly had that end-of-era kind of feeling.

I went back out to the garden, stacked the brooms and the spare garden stakes, hung the gloves up in the sun and stared at the sparse stillness of my now tidy winter garden. It looked as if it were waiting … for something.

* * *

Saturday afternoon at AAMI delivered one last ‘maybe not’ on the Swans slippery slide. The team looked good, galvanised. They were moving the ball fast, the skills were sharp, new blood in a trimmed team, the rot momentarily eradicated, the seeds of a big win sown. But it never came to fruit after half time. The Crows left nothing but scraps.

As the Eaglet and I endured the third rendition of ‘We’re the pride of South Australia … ‘ I pulled on my black stockings for the opening of Patrick’s opera. I finally felt forced to accept that this WAS it, the end of the era. And I felt strangely composed.

They say you cannot begin to grieve something until you can accept it. The consent was everywhere that night.

I sat, with Patrick, in the front rows of the dress circle for the opera. At the beginning of Act 2 of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, giant projected words appeared across a scrim at the front of the stage, in what could have been my very own handwriting:

No Joy Shall Last.

A chorus sings of the end of love:
Wretched lovers! Fate has past
This sad decree: no joy shall last.

And inside that great big opera house sail, in the stillness and the dark of the theatre, surrounded only by music, it was Acis and Galatea and it was O’Loughlin and his white Swans and my basil and eggplants. It was Michael Jackson (and let’s not forget Farrah!) and it was Barry’s career and Friday and all things that pass. There was nothing stoic about this. It was written up big in caps, sung to the rafters – passionate resignation, standing in the face of fate, in defence of its ground.

From that moment, I had a good inkling about how I want to handle myself.

It could not have been more fitting that I drove home alone just before midnight, in my mother-in-law’s car – her temperamental volume stuck on way too high - to a disco mix of Jackson classics on FBI. And I knew all the words.

You can’t buck the Gods, you can’t buy more time. You can only work with what you’ve got. You can’t always make good times last and you can’t pretend that they don’t end. And it’s not always a good idea to distract yourself with the sweet face of something else. If we never suffer the paucity of winter, how can we appreciate the spring?

You can fist your way through the fear of the abyss or you can simply keep tending. You can wear the boxing gloves or the gardening gloves.

* * *

Back in the ‘Ville, I replaced tights with trackies and a hot cup of tea and found the second half of the Cokesters and the Hawks on the box. Teeming rain, a howling gale, the Gods in full force in the west. It DID look like something out of a Jackson video clip, hair streaming in a too wild wind, palms raised. And as the final quarter unfolded, I asked myself …

So what comes after M for Michael? The answer was right before me: N for Natanui. Nicholas Natanui. He looked that night like fate’s next decree, the next temptation offered up by the footy Gods.

Because under the aphids in my garden ARE the beginning of Brassica florets. And under the rusted leaves of the eggplant, white jonquils ARE blooming.

Happy tipping!