Tiger Diary 17.4.14

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Tonight's game seems to have a theme from 1981 

...............been in the back of my head all week:

The African Lion Safari

Lions and Tigers and Bears

The African Lion Safari

It's Scary but Nobody Cares

Repeat - scary, but nobody cares.

Between Remembering and Forgetting

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Photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

Last Saturday morning, the Cob, the Cygnet and I were discussing the state of affairs, in particular the method by which Collingwood slaughtered the Tigers the night before.

            ‘They were so neat,’ I proffered. ‘I’m very attracted to tidy football this year. They were so tidy.’

            ‘A lot like their coach,’ added the Cob.

            ‘What?’ piped the Cygnet.

            ‘Their coach, what’s his name Buckley. He was a very meticulous player in his time.’

            ‘Nathan,’ I finished.

            ‘You know,’ confessed the Cygnet. ‘I was having trouble remembering his name the other day too. I had the Buckley bit, but not the Nathan bit.’

I imagined the most unlikely scenario of the Cygnet, prone before sleep in the dark of his bedroom, trawling for the pit bull’s name.

            ‘You know …’ offered the Cob. ‘You know what you have to do to remember something.’ He followed it with the perfect pause, long enough for a moment’s thought, but not for any kind of answer.

‘You have to forget.’

*

When the Swans lost on Sunday I was at work. Not privy to the apparent mess they were making out on the field. I had an eye on the score. Down at the quarter, down at the half, but by just a single kick. And then it unravelled. Heath Grundy kicked a goal! Richards a behind?! And then more and more numbers on the other side of the margin. We only kicked seven for the game??

A topsy-turvy feeling overtook my afternoon and as I climbed on my homebound bus in the new early dark of daylight spendings, I thought of the Cob and the Cygnet heading home from the ground together and hoped that a similar sweet philosophy was being passed back and forth between them, something to save our souls.

‘You know what you have to do,’ the Cob would assure the Cygnet. ‘If you want to win, you’ve got to lose. Only when you start losing again, can you go on and play better and win.’

To hell and high water with consistent Geelong and ruthless Hawthorn. To hell with North Melbourne’s pre-game huddle, which must have gone something along the lines of … if you want to score, you have to defend first. Would the Cygnet buy it? I had my wallet out and the change in my hand.

And then, could this infinity loop of an equation be expanded a bit more? Now that the boys remembered what it was like to lose, could they forget and get on and win. And when they remembered what it was to win again, could we be done with all this losing. But the demonic opposite of all this lurks. Are we supporters embarking on a process of forgetting the wins in order to remember them again one day? Is it just a long losing streak ahead? Janus-faced all of us, glancing between backwards and forwards and Round 4 remembered as the threshold?

Monday came. Lunchtime came. I thought of heading in the opposite direction to ‘the Baristas’. There’s a guy at a place in the bottom of a corporate tower, brews a superb single origin bean from a new developing nation each day, looks like Marty Mattner and is just about as reliable. But if I want to win with pride, I’d better lose with grace. I headed to the Pâtisserie. Standing in line, Barista #1 - North Melbourne supporter - appeared at the top of the stairs. He pointed a double barrel salute my way and mouthed, ‘I was hoping you’d come in today.’ I paid. ‘Come on up,’ he motioned. We’re on first name terms since then. And I climbed the couple of stairs to the back of the place and the bar in front of the machine. We picked it apart with the usual tools. He with his grace, me with mine. He with his diagnosis. Me and mine. Me with my pre-emptive comments about our very expensive forward line. He with his about midfielders kicking goals. Me with my flattery of his boys. He with his encouragement for mine. Those North supporters they know about loss. They are finding out about winning.  

*

We headed down the coast on Tuesday for an early Easter with the olds. A most divine bucolic setting: vulgar green hills spotted with Fresian cows; an Edo mist falling off the escarpment and down the rainforest to the back courtyard; the Frenchman and his excellent pinot and cheese; my mother’s roast chook.

We still have her mother – my grandmother – 95 years old and going strong. Despite her increased physical incapacity – the Frenchman drives her illegally on the seat of her walker as soon as they are out of view of the nursing home staff – we pride her on her razor sharp mind. The Frenchman collects her for weekly lunch and rolls her in for a G & T, some iPad Solitaire and a good feed. I sat with her today, tucked up tight so she could hear me. And after some discussion about Barry O’Farrell’s shock resignation and my sister’s new baby in Berlin, she turned to me and asked under her breath, ‘Darling, tell me. I can’t recall for the life of me, I’ve been wracking my brain and I simply cannot remember.’ I was all ears. ‘What on earth is it that we celebrate at Easter?’

I am the most ill equipped person for the job, but I didn’t dare laugh and I didn’t dare defer and break our code. ‘Well, on the Friday, Jesus was killed … on the cross. Crucified. And then …’ I would take the purely chronological route. ‘Saturday he lay in the tomb and then on Sunday, when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, the stone had been removed from the door and he had resurrected.’ I waited to see if any penny was dropping.

            ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she giggled as she slapped my knee.

            My mother had overheard my description of the Passion and was suddenly enquiring of us as she shoved the lemon and tarragon up the bird. My grandmother was laughing now and with her full public confession came all the mirth and warmth of the family.

‘I couldn’t for the life of me remember,’ she said. ‘And for days I’ve been trying to think who I could call who wouldn’t think I was round the corner.’

She may have meant ‘the bend.’

And with that, the Champagne was popped, the eggs were hidden in the wilds of the outside world, the Cygnet was off and the chook was cooked. And now that we had remembered what she had forgotten, we could get on with forgetting it and simply serving up Wednesday lunch. Oh Lord, let the Swans please serve up Saturday supper.

Tiger Diary 8.4.14

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Tigers 98 -  Bulldogs 100

Two points points to two points.

Point one: To point at one mistake at one pointed time in a game is to miss the point, which is ok if you miss the point and kick a goal, but for every behind kicked there is a behind to be kicked which if left unkicked will come back to bite you on the behind and the point is that the appointed kicker needs to be the captain and I reckon we need a Captain Jack to man-up and let Cotch do even more of what he's good at and lead just by example.

Point two: Coming from behind is pointless if you don't win.

Round 2

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I catch the bus to work on Sunday mornings, always take a book and rarely look at it. Mostly I just watch out the window. The stuffed vitrines of Chinese grocery stores; a stash of surfboards on an inner city verandah; the recent proliferation of fitness places in the industrial streets of Marrickville; the mouldings of a particular rooftop; the way a couple sits square on to the street, sunglassed and side by side over coffee; the geometry of a poster advertisement; a Comming Soon sign in a King Street shop window. It occurs to me that these trips are lessons, in which I am consistently tuning observation. Not to the premeditation of composed personal narratives, but to the incidental, the small poetic details of life, things saved for peripheral vision, things remarkably natural and unaware of themselves.

The stadium experience can be like this - a deliberate experience of unknowing. Not the pre-plotted arrangement of a multi camera broadcast, a multi voice interpretation. Just whatever you manage to take from the meandering of chaos that is posing as a stream of intended movements and plays. Isn’t that why we relate to it? It’s like the view from the window, moments of high order and flourish, moments of glorious luck and beauty and lots of trying to get there in between.

But that view was interrupted v Collingwood. For the immediate Swans coterie, the solutions to the problem of Saturday night were on the table before the problem had even fully emerged. Each spectator was trying to single out the particular ingredient that accounted for the taste in their mouth. From Row 19, Connie was concerned about the game plan. Periodically she turned to face us: The game plan! she repeated, the game plan! A variation came in the fourth as the lead turned on its axis: Plan B Longmire?! O’Reilly boy was enjoying the refrain of the gangster man and his money, kachinging each possession for Lance, a goal for 70 grand. (He’s a wit and we enjoyed it too.) Jungle Jim, with his Under 11s coach’s hat firmly on, was focussed on forward pressure, his main concern the speed with which the ball was coming out of the forward 50 and rebounding the field for a goal.

While the urgency for answers was tossed around the crowd, what I saw all night on the field at ANZ was something intangible and unfinished. I saw a game plan that was a plan until the opposition put their pieces on the board. And beyond any sense of a competent assessment or solution, the throw of my thinking was on incidentals:

Jetta has his legs back. A spoil and goal from a contest he had no right to get to. And it looks very very fine.

The Reids were born to swing.

Rampe has slipped into more than the 24 jumper. He’s in Jude’s skin, walking on short groins like Jude, flicking the blonde like Jude. I think we called in unison On you, Jude!

Nick Smith knows how to mark a man, a torero, body on body with his opponent, his non punching arm artfully bent behind his back.

Pinball style handballs are dangerous.

The lingering ghosts of a unison Mattner, Kenelly, Malceski and Shaw are resolving into absence.

Someone should have introduced themselves to Lumumba. 

But Lance arcing into the left pocket and drawing that kicking foot back was exquisite despite the miss, all balance and geometry and unpredictable change of speed. And when those kicks go through and Sydney learns to behave far better than Melbourne and just be cool about Buddy, there’s a real opportunity in Abbott’s Australia to have not only the Australian of the Year on the team, but Sir Lancelot as well.

These are the paths of the mind. Even at the final siren with the points and the trophy lost, the whole match felt to me just like a frayed hem, running away from being stitched up too soon, but still able to be fixed. And I wanted to hold it that way, to see what the garment might become. As I buttered the smallest slices of ciabatta and spread them with vegemite before my bus on Sunday, the Cygnet sat at the bench, tracing the lines of the kitchen notepad. What do you think the game was about last night?  I asked. I have NO idea, he said.

We have no idea. And yet Monday morning was decked in 0-2. The equations were on the abacus. A precedent though … for comfort. North Melbourne in 1999, the Swans in 2006. Stats and markers, reports and reposts, belching out this truncated life.

There is no doubt that a good piece of observation can be that fine digestif. And well pitched it facilitates a finished-off feeling which can be hard to come by after three hours of consumption. But I wondered on Monday morning, whether we have reached a point in our communicative society where the sheer volume and imperative of words and ideas is actually impeding deeper, more patient observation.

Sometimes a game is a big statement, broad brushstrokes, held together by a well defined composition, full of intention. Something you can hang your hat on and write about with authority. And sometimes it’s a small abstract canvas, which reveals flashes of something but an overall not-knowing. The more I write about footy, the less I actually seem to write about football. And the more I read and consume of other things, the more I find myself sitting at the footy, watching them all coalesce.

A Tiger's Trip Home

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On Thursday night, Richd'mond, the Tiger, and the O'Reilly boy hit Melbourne town, another Backpocket and the Trophy room of the MCG. Won't it be grand when those handles are bedecked in yellow and black again ... one day.