BULLETIN - POST ROUND 10

Stan Alves: It is official, I can announce it - Fremantle have mastered the art of losing.
Gerard Whateley: All that you can hope for in life is to master one art or skill and Fremantle unquestionably have done it.
Stan: What about their supporters?
Sam Lane: So, Gerard, did you tip the Tigers?
Gerard: Yes. Without a moment’s hesitation. And I didn’t do it on judgement. I don’t want the angst involved in tipping Freo. I want nothing to do with them. Because if you’re emotionally involved in it, it ruins your whole weekend.
Stan: Can the Fremantle members claim their membership back on Medicare?

from ABC Grandstand’s Sunday Inquisition

Losses have many hues and I employ various (relatively consistent) corresponding responses.

Dockers supporters (and tipsters) would have been suffering the particular and extremely lethal ‘loss by a very small margin’ on Saturday night. Such a loss precipitates the dreaded ‘what if … ’, ‘if only …’ curve and may take a sleepless night or whole weekend to accept and digest. They can even last well into the week and haunt right up to the bounce of the next round. They have a heavy mental toll. Recovery is tough.

A walloping is best put behind you straight away. I don’t dawdle on these too much (unless it’s against Collingwood!). I focus on next week.

A lazy loss infuriates and can be relatively easy to shake. Disgust overpowers regret.

A loss to a rival stings a little but the emphasis is always on redemption. When do we play them again?

A(nother) loss to a bogey side confounds. When is probability going to square the ledger? They leave me grappling with self pity which always takes time to shake. Just when you think you’ve nipped self pity in the bud, invariably you get a recurrence. It’s the universe’s fault, not the team’s, and that’s harder to sort or justify.

A Saturday loss is different to a Sunday loss. A Saturday loss often means some degree of nocturnal turning, followed by Sunday – a naturally contemplative day. I am susceptible to bouts of pensiveness on the Sundays after Saturday losses. I find it hard to respond to the eaglet’s cheeriness. I am susceptible to bouts of cleaning on the Sundays after Saturday losses – an effort to restore some kind of order. After a loss, I find it helpful to saturate myself in post match press conferences in an effort to extract some sense. And let’s face it, Sunday’s journalism is never as comprehensive as Monday’s. I have to wait longer for counseling. A Sunday afternoon loss can be more quickly swept up in ‘getting ready for Monday’. There’s a sense of being closer to the next round than the one just being completed.

Recurrent losses rarely have the numbing effect on me that some claim to submit to. They can really start to affect life. There’s a cumulative effect. You can conquer them with humour if you’re brave … or Richard.

A loss after a string of victories can go one of two ways. It can be a wee stumble and nothing to worry about. Or … there’s always the nagging doubt that it is the beginning of the end, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the first wave of the turning tide. How will St Kilda fare this week, with their cellular memories screaming of 2004, when they were 10 – 0, went to the movies mid-week and lost to Sydney in Round 11 – the loose thread that unraveled that season?

A televised loss is different to an attended loss. An attended loss gives more scope for absorption - banter with the O’Reilly boys – a certain sorting out of what went wrong for whom and why – the walk back to the car or train, the trip home. Those transit spaces provide digestion time.

After a televised loss, there’s nowhere to go. Once the box is off, it’s just the silence of the house, the solitude of self or the potentially incompatible forms of regret that may or may not need to be shared with someone close. We don’t get much de-brief TV in NSW.

I boasted recently that, since my Swans membership is now 10 years old, I am able to respond to most losses with a greater degree of imperturbability. It’s not early stages of my relationship with the Swans anymore, when everything has to be positive and the slightest imperfection sends alarm bells ringing. I am in a long term relationship with this now. I know there will be ups and downs and lots of unsatisfactory indifference in between.

Last week it didn’t count for anything. The loss to the Doggies stung.

I’m not sure why. I was half expecting it. But a dangerous rhizome of hope had managed to penetrate the soil of my belief and I found myself ill prepared for the slaughter that unfolded on Saturday afternoon in the capital.

I watched the match, tucked under a doona on the living room floor with the eaglet. With each of the Doggies’ 13 unanswered goals in the second quarter, he pumped his tight little fist into the air. He had tipped Footscray.
‘Go the Doggies!’ he hollered. I chose to ignore it.
‘Go the Doggies!’ again and again like a displaced echo that I know my living room is not capable of. By fist number 10, I ordered him to stop, with just enough motherly authority to make it clear I was relatively serious, but not enough to seem like a bad loser.

You don’t need to teach children about the pleasures of winning. You have to teach them how to do it ‘nicely’ but you don’t have to teach them how to deal with the feeling. Parents spend a great deal of effort teaching their children how to lose. We drip feed them losses. We let them win for years, missing the obvious in a game of noughts and crosses, pulling back just short of a finish line, landing on Mayfair and their 3 hotels. We try to model and transpose our own bravery in the event of losses. Recall the footage, after the Tigers’ loss to Essendon, of the young child in the crowd crying into his father’s shoulder, his eyes eventually shielded by his father’s protective hand. Gideon Haigh remarked: ‘Terry Wallace is now guilty of something else – making children cry.’ When it comes to loss, you need to teach the child not only how to conduct themselves, but how to process the feeling.

Last week, by chance, I heard Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro speaking at the Sydney Writer’s festival. He mentioned, in passing, how we naturally make the world into a nicer place for children, how sad it is when children are not granted this bubble. Given the existence of said bubble, it is then the parents’ job to guide their children out of it when the time Is right. Boy, will Mr and Mrs Selwood have a job on their hands when the bubble finally bursts down at Geelong. Joel Selwood has lost only 4 games in his 55 game career. Will he be a good loser?”

But, in our house, it works a little differently. On Saturday night, the eaglet and I sat down to dinner.

‘I feel sad.’ I deposited into the silence.
No answer.
‘Did you feel sad when the Eagles lost last night?’
‘No, cause I tipped the Blues.’
‘But isn’t your team more important than who you tipped?’
‘No. I love my team anyway. So I just feel happy that I got one right. Anyway I’ve got the Bombers and they’re right, right up the ladder.’
‘But what if they lose to the Cats tomorrow?’
‘Well then I have the flowers ... and the sticks and the leaves and the branches …’
These are all fictitious teams which Omar created and has supported since his hands were big enough to hold a Sherrrin. The flowers wear pink guernseys and play behind trees – that’s why you never see them.
‘Oh well. I feel sad,’ I finished.

No matter what variety your team suffers, losses are upsetting. There is no happy ending. For me, the unease stems from the loop of satisfaction for effort and investment never reaching completion. One must find something else to close it. And the funk that follows a loss is the searching.

This is where the eaglet has developed a very functional model for dealing with loss. He leaves no space. Instead of dwelling, he fills the gap by inventing another investment instead, real or unreal, whatever it takes – a kind of eternal staircase to heavenly hope. It seems a dreamy kind of approach, but in fact it is alarmingly pragmatic. He has the blissfully one-dimensional and ignorant courage to add to his emotional investments at a time of loss, not recoil from them. In our house, the lessons are being taught in reverse. The bubble is opened up for climbing into.

Adulthood may correct us and convince us we learn more from loss if we are forced to inhabit the empty space, but perhaps the mind of a child is best applied to footy.

On Sunday night I received a distressed email from esteemed tipster (and Dockers supporter) Travis – a cry for help. He was no longer able to deal with the losses:

‘I'm not bouncing back anymore … Football means too much to me to support a team like this and it's been going on for fifteen years. Barely a scrap of 'stringing a few together (apart from the joy that was the second part of the 2006 season), and losing heartbreakers so often that I constantly feel like I've broken up with someone … I feel like I should turn my back on it altogether. Help me.’

I am not mother to you tipsters, but I am mistress and I feel a certain watchfulness over each of you. I sympathised with Travis. Apart from the hand of solidarity, I had very little to offer. However, on reflection, I am not unconvinced by the efficacy of the eaglet’s ‘prolonged investment model’™ … if you can. And it’s a big if.

I suspect ‘football’ has plenty of ways of manifesting the same bubble. I think the most common is called ‘focusing on next week.’ And it may well be the entire point of ‘fantasy footy’ and ‘dream teams’.

Shortly after the email from Travis, the phone rang. It was Tiger Richard, calling to celebrate his 8 tipping points and the Tigers’ big, heart stopping win. I explained that I was in the middle of dealing with Travis’ grief. 'But the Dockers have had four or so wins this year, haven’t they?’

It’s all relative.

Happy tipping, especially Travis ... and Richard!