Tiger Diary 12.4.2017

Richmond continue to remain undefeated…….

Thus spaketh the Tigerland website !

Sounds a bit like an enduring power of attorney, but that's just the way things work in The Year of Answers.

I like it ! 

And apropos more Answers, I do need to say within this predominantly Red and White forum that Daniel Rioli’s stunner of a goal on Saturday afternoon reminded me so much of Lewis Jetta’s long awaited first AFL goal for the Swans. May he have a wonderful career playing his own kind of Rioli Magic.

And may Todd Elton quickly recover from another humiliatingly awful game. 

In 2012 he played against Adelaide in a game we lost having led at quarter time by nearly 50 points. I think he managed one kick for the game. A couple of runs in low-stakes AFL games finally followed last year, then an excellent pre-season and VFL start to this season earned him the trip to Perth to face the Eagles. 

He had a game-low 3 kicks and looked like a rabbit in the headlights.

The crushing feeling of being again unable to repay your coach’s faith could seldom have been worse.

Thank goodness we won this time. 

Is “Sorry coach, I can’t.” your final Answer, Todd ?

Will the real Todd Elton PLEASE STAND UP !

Round 3, 2017: Swan Lake

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Waking on Saturday morning, there are only a few tiny clouds circling the immense camphor laurel outside our window. It’s sunny in Sydney, just past 7 o’clock, first day of school holidays, no urgency ... but that hypnopompic gentleness is broken by the nag of something not right. And the mind scrambles backwards for the root of the cause, and Saturday morning comes into focus as the thing that follows Friday night and Friday night … we lost. By the threadbare margin of 1.

It’s a disproportionate disappointment we feel, isn’t it?

*

I bought us a new phone last Wednesday. Ours had been struck by Sydney’s volatile summer weather, a crack of thunder so loud I woke to a right angle in bed. The Cob saw the full blue light in the lane beside our living room.

I plugged the phone in and handed it to the Cygnet. He tried the 40 ringtone options and settled on a rather pompous digital classic.

            ‘Swan Lake!’ yelled the Cob from the back of the house.

            ‘Perfect!’ I said, ‘for Lance!’

I threw out the packaging and began preparations for dinner. Until I poked my head gingerly around the Cob’s study door: ‘Doesn’t the beautiful Swan die in Swan Lake?’

            ‘She does.’

On Thursday, the Cygnet and I watched Marngrook in anticipation of an interview with the 250 gamer, and just as Lance’s smiling face hit the screen, the phone rang Tchaikovsky’s famous motif. Lance’s face. Swan Lake. The two things clanged like cymbals.

‘Perhaps we should change the ringtone,’ I suggested, suddenly in the role of the harried heroine who knows the future and must remap the present to save everyone. ‘The Swan dies in the end, darling!’

            ‘Oh Mum, you don’t really believe in that stuff …’

*

The coffee machine is my first companion on Saturday morning. In the motions of brewing solace, I

can see the dropped mark that began the 4^th quarter, the drop but then the free and the goal to Reid. I can see the tightrope ‘play on!’ against Jones, the ensuing swerve of Varcoe. I can see the 20/20 vision of brother Sam on Ben, the beautiful 1,2 from Florent, through Buddy to Hayward for 6. I can see the miss from Fasolo. The miss from Jesse. I can feel the kinetics of Buddy’s knee high pass to Florent for a 1 point deficit. And as the heat builds in the milk jug, I can feel newbie Dawon’s point to level, Captain K’s point to edge us ahead. I can hear Gwen in Row T yelling: ‘C’mon Swans, use it!’ (Gwen rarely yells.) Will Hoskin-Bloody-Elliot slots. But I can see Lance’s pressing assist to Newman for points. And a mark from Ollie on 50 and just ahead, Lance again, screaming for it inside, wings at full span open to a fairytale. But Ollie doesn’t see him. There it is, fading from view, the kick to Lloyd and the flick to Dan and …

Home from the SCG on Friday night, the Cygnet tucked in bed, still in my scarf, I had parked myself on the floor against the couch with Thins chips and verbena tea. I wanted to check that last quarter, as if by checking it, I could change it. But they couldn’t use it. None of their efforts could tip the score. They couldn’t make the moment what it might have been for Lance.

*

Buddy Franklin appeared during Sydney’s 2005 premiership season. He debuted in Round 1 on the SCG, against Sydney. I remember noting the beautiful West Australian kid playing for Hawthorn, the kid all arms and legs like a mantis you would pray for. Hawthorn were bottom dwellers and lovable then.

There was something in the way he moved, like he worked on glide and sweep. He defied the brute physicality of players around him. And yet he was all physics. But I didn’t know what he could do back then. I didn’t understand. I was newish to the game myself. I watched Buddy for sheer incomprehensible pleasure. And I watched him grow into strut and champ, into the history books. And I grew to understand the unlikeliness of what he does.

The shock of his move to Sydney came with wonder. He would be on our side! I decided to call him Lance from the beginning, a clean break from Hawthorn’s Buddy. It took Sydney a time, I think, to find the right tension for Lance, to loosen the Bloods reins enough to let him fully claim the track. But now the arc of our little netball oval is truly his workplace, our pocket his pocket. We see him week to week, know him in a possessive embrace, ensured for the years ahead.  

It’s a disproportionate custody we feel. 

*

As I finish that first Saturday morning coffee in the northern sun that drenches our dining table, I see Lance’s face as he leaves the field, twitching with disappointment. I see all the first quarter free kicks to Collingwood that had nothing to do with umpires. I see Reid’s diabolical handball when he should have had the shot. Over and over again it loops to nothing. I can hear myself asking O’Reilly Max ‘Do you think they all have glandular fever?’

‘Of the spirit,’ he replies.

We want to believe that it’s possible for our team to get up and going every week forever, even though we know it isn’t. We want them to exceed the human median. When they match it, it’s uncomfortable. ‘Cause we seek elevation and magic in football, the same magic that promotes our ringtone into some kind of Godly apparatus and elevates the disparate elements of our everyday lives into an oracle of balletic proportion. We want to believe in that stuff! The disappointment comes when our team looks unremarkable. We love that our players are human but we crave for them not to be. Perhaps that’s what Lance took time to reconcile in the finals series of 2015.

*

Saturday segues into Sunday and the should-haves and could-haves are dimming but not out. I realise the condemned Swan is me. I have a choice as we face 0-4 or 1-3. Accept this fate of being a Swan forever or throw myself in the lake.

Round 2, 2017: The Dogs are No Bunnies

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It’s an excellent word, unfurling. Comes off the tongue with its meaning ready made. And if the Doggies had been put away over the off season just like their Premiership flag, they sure rolled themselves open and spread themselves out on Friday night.

With our Cygnet away at music camp, the Cob and I found ourselves with a rare three nights as a twosome. We headed to our favourite Pakistani in Enmore. It’s a white tiled affair with lighting that doesn’t hide a blemish. There’s a tandoor at the door with strips of chicken and fish oranging on skewers against the wall. The palak paneer has punch. The breads come too hot to handle. It’s a place whose din always reminds me of the months I spent on the subcontinent as a nineteen year old, living on a few dollars a day, eating at roadside stops and street carts, months of simplicity coupled with sensory weight. The Cob and I sat eye to eye, pulling at naan, scooping at daal, spooning spinach and tearing chicken, past the point of being full, into that territory when taste overrides sate.

We waddled to the pub down the street. The Warren View has sat at the intersection of Stanmore and Enmore roads since 1870, when it boasted a view of a mansion called ‘The Warren’, the home of a tycoon wool merchant and politician, Thomas Holt, who named his estate after the rabbits he bred for hunting. I suppose he would have kept dogs.

We rolled in on the coin toss. Two fellas peeled off a small round table right in front of the main screen just before the siren. We haven’t watched a game together in a pub for an age. Possibly it was a dozen years ago in Lismore with a mate who barracks for Freo; we watched them play Sydney with the sound down. But sound and mood were up at the Warren View. The room was lined with lads. A table to the right propped a single numberless Doggie and a rowdy cohort of unidentifieds around him. We noticed a small plastic Premiership Cup in the centre of their beers. One hundred games for Libba and Reid and Sam goaled within the first minute. But I was still taking in the room. The numbers 19 and 29 down the front, the six sole women in the room, the SciFi door of the Pokie lounge, swallowing and spitting its callers. Tippett was suddenly down. But a second to Reid gave permission to be loud in there! And then Laidler was lining up for points. Swans had the first ten clearances of the match! The lone Dog applauded Bob’s first.

There’s something wonderful about the watching experience that is not from one’s sofa, nor from one’s stadium. In the intimacy of the pub, it’s a bit of both. We come together as spectators, casually, unsorted by the rigours of the stadium, intimately. We have one eye on the play and one eye on each other. And it’s a dance of attention that somehow expands the game.

It was horrid watching Reid in the ruck; I want him to think of himself as Swarovski crystal from now on. The shout for Ollie was already up for Florent. And Hayward ingratiated himself straight away. Newman and the replacement MO didn’t do too badly either. But the midfield looked inert. And our defence looked terrifying—for us. What was once stable now felt like that room of one arm bandits next door, a confined space where you might lose everything. The bodies we offered up down there for bolstering left a vacant lot in our front half. So when the rebound did come, the chase and recoil came quicker. Rabbits hounded into their warrens. The Dogs just run you to death.

The Cob and I spent half time sipping and wondering. Sydney’s population has just hit five million. What would become of humanity? We ordered million dollar scotches and a middy. One of the guys at the table ahead of us sat head down, rolling his coaster round and round while his mates stocked up for Part 2. He looked like Jared Moore, the brick-wall ex Swan 33. He looked very like Jared Moore.

He stayed calm while the rest of us swelled to the fourth. Up we went, down we sat. But he watched with the pendulum swinging on the inside. A Dogesque daisy chain of handballs landed in Buddy’s basket. One goal, two goal, three goal … When Reid’s sixth kicked us into a four point lead, the front room erupted. I wished it was 12 seconds on the clock not minutes. Picken missed the next attempt and the Irishman at the Cob’s shoulder gave him a wink: ‘I was calling to hook it.’

But they were so quick. They were so organised. Their structures were impeccable. Bont, Picken, Stringer, Picken. What was left to defenders? Our lone Dog in the pub was calm enough simply to applaud. He knew that his fellas had the smell of the kill in their nostrils now. The Doggies are playing with taste not sate.

As the siren cleared the field, the ladies at the adjacent table gathered up bags and coats. The Dog had his photo taken with the plastic Premiership. The fellas at the table in front ordered another round. All of our collective feeling unfurled in a jumble of shown and kept. That must be what teammates feel like sometimes. The Cob and I sipped the last of the amber medicine and contemplated Buddy’s effort, Reid’s dessert, the kids, Jared Moore.

‘He doesn’t look big enough to be Jared Moore,’ said the Cob.

‘He looks too young. His nose looks too straight,’ I added. He was glancing at us too.

Onto Enmore Rd we stepped, nothing in view but the downward slope. The Warren doesn’t exist anymore. Well not in its entirety. But much of the sandstone was used to line the gutters of Marrickville. We googled Jared Moore on our way down the hill. It was him! He did have the straight nose. But it wasn’t him. He’s got a coaching gig at North Melbourne. Long gone. Swings and roundabouts. As we passed the park, the Cob piped up:

‘Remember what we used to call him?’

I remembered.

‘Bulldog!’