As many of you will no doubt have guessed from my not so weekly bulletins, I’m in a bit of a football slump. After last week’s games, I realised that I didn’t know where the Swans were on the ladder. I didn’t know who was in the Top 8! The players I ‘grew up with’ had been freshly inducted into the Hall of Fame. Maybe it’s just a mid season crisis. But somehow I feel emotionally removed. Must be why my tipping’s so good.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m on my team. I’ve been at the SCG for five out of five painfully close and despicably wet home games. I know that the now 20 year old Hanners is already talking about blooding ‘the young kids’. I know Mummy’s knee has been in Arizona for the last two weeks getting ready for the Pies. I know that I love the new number 34, Alex Johnson. I know Reid, S is on the rise.
And I’m on the broad brushstroke of the weekly events of the game. I know Barlow’s leg is back and Roughy’s Achilles is bust. I know Adelaide must be a miserable place to be. I know the small men are kicking goals and the big men are resting forward. I know that Karmichael’s thighs are thinning, as is James Hird’s fairytale hair. I know the Blues are up and the Dogs are down and the Tigers are somewhere between. And I know that Mrs Selwood is not shopping for a frock to wear on Charlie Brownlow night.
But for all I know, it doesn’t feel quite as easy this year.
I’ve come to think that there may be a critical mass of football to which you need to be exposed in order to feel inside a season. It’s like getting a tan. You’ve got to put in a certain number of sessions in the sun until the pigment is finally receptive to the rays. I dare say, in the southern capitals, while some of the solar exposure may be more tricky, the footy exposure happens without thinking. Footy exposure down there is like the tan you get on your driving arm. It just happens. But on the Albury side of life, you have to work for it.
Shortly before 9.30 on Monday night last week, I sat down to watch One Week at a Time, the kind of touch-base that every Sydneysider needs and must settle for. We don’t have the luxury of choice up here. As the opening credits spun, I remembered that there is now a League version of One Week at a Time which has usurped the 9.30 time slot in NSW. Disgusted, I forgot to record the 11.30 AFL version.
On Tuesday I cleaned off all our living room bookshelves. As I assembled my fourteenth ruckman like tower of paperbacks on the living room floor, it occurred to me that channel One replays the show the next day. I flicked it on to find the AFL credits rolling. I was just in time for the League repeat. I sat on the floor pouring over Tony Lockett’s My Life, then tossed it into the garage sale pile.
On Wednesday morning, I walked into the newsagents on King Street, Newtown. I let out an audible yelp when I spotted a single unit of the hologram covered 2011 AFL Game Card Album. A home for the Cygnet’s homeless cards! I bought it involuntarily. A reflex action. (I spent three days last year walking the August streets of Melbourne looking for one remaining folder!)
On Thursday morning I squatted down in a large basement-style homewares shop to look at a book on party cakes for kids. I almost rolled onto my back when I flipped past a red iced Sherrin, lace-up atop a chocolate field nestled in shoots of iced green grass. I read the recipe: ‘This could also be made as a Rugby ball instead of an Australian Rules Football.’ There it was, the old apologetic self deprecation. Published for the Sydney market no doubt.
And as we left for the country on Friday afternoon, we waited on the Princes Highway next to a Bigpond van, painted up with two life-sized, young boys leaping for a mark in junior club colours. I could have cried.
When I finally dived into my electrically warmed bed to catch the eleven o’clock replay of the Saints v Geelong last night, the gale in the Shoalhaven had completely decimated the digital reception and I had to suffer a mute and broken Goddard, executing the same single kick across two pixelated minutes. I finished my book instead.
Working that hard for your exposure can really take it out of you.
When you’re down, in any sphere of life, what you sometimes need is to be carried along for a while as you recalibrate. But if it’s a footy malaise in Sydney, you can’t rely on the sort of constant peripheral drip feed to carry you through. There’s no solid continuum of footy background noise into which you can slow and rest a while, imbibe and rise when you get up to speed again. Up here, you scrap and scrape for every little tit bit. You have to be vigilant. You keep your heel to the pedal or you get run up the ass by Rugby League.
Possibly I simply need my annual winter Melbourne séjour: a few days walking the city streets, eavesdropping on the trams, a bit of banter with the local taxi drivers, a weekend kicking around in Albert Park, the Sunday AGE and a coffee at Baker D. Chirico. Eleven years into this footy love, I am coming to think that it is a very necessary top up, essential foraging before (or even mid) hibernation.
I know I’ll keep soldiering on. Tomorrow I’ll come in from work, get the Cygnet to bed and stream Grandstand’s Sunday Inquisition. On Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment