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. 

Getting to Know You

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Encountering new people means finding out about them. When people begin to get to know me, pretty quickly they learn that I’ve just finished a Masters in Writing, that I am trying to write, that I work part time in the bookshop of a contemporary art museum. They find that I grew up on art, serving peanuts at the openings of my father’s graphics gallery. They learn that he is French and I am half, that I have a single son and that I live with my partner, the father of said son, that we are not married and he works full time in the arts. They learn that I like to cook and if things progress well, I cook for them. They understand that I will plan dessert first. When they come to my house, they will see my nature in the rooms, on the walls, on the bookshelves. They will slowly discover my personal culture in the aesthetic curation of my home. And in the face of all of that, people, as we all do, will make assumptions about the type of person I am.

And then, there will come a point where I will quite naturally reveal that I watch AFL footy. They will be bemused. And then, I will reveal that I go to games. And bemusement will turn into surprise. The probing will progress and it will become clear that I know many of the players names, not only from my own team, that my knowledge is quite up to date, particular and opinionated. They will say less and less from this point on. Until I am admitting to having been a Swans member for the past 14 years. And then they will look slowly towards the collection of ceramic and paper and plastic Swans in the shadow box hanging on the dining room wall and it will all fall into place. And I will begin my defence. Football is more than sport. It is an arc on which to hang many of life’s philosophical queries. It is a performance.

*

On the days that I work, I buy my coffee from a small French Patisserie close by. The main barista was always reliable. Until he went off to do a personal training course, began his own business and cut his days to three. A new guy came to supplement the stocks. Tall. A little over-friendly to begin with, too eager to step into the role of confidante. He grew a ginger beard and settled down. But his coffee is on the milky side. I’ve been known to go up the road if I can see he’s on the machine.

There’s a particular way for a relationship to develop between a woman and her baristas. I like to dance between a certain demureness – restrained anticipation – and an easy friendliness; it’s a stance which I’ve found inspires the best coffee. From the baristas’ side, they must make certain assumptions about their customers. These boys know I work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I wear sculpted black. I flick the Herald rather than the Telegraph while I wait.

Last Monday, I waited in my usual position and listened to a boisterous conversation between Mr Trainer and Mr Ginger and another female client, who preferred her coffee familiar.  She was talking about the weekend and ‘the game’ and it being out at ANZ and not liking to travel out to Homebush on a Saturday because it made her feel depressed. Both Trainer and Ginger chimed in. Ginge was going. Trainer was anxious for his own team on Sunday. North Melbourne. Amazing that this had never come up between us, not even on a Monday morning, when I may have rested the sports pages open at the AFL, not altogether unnoticeable in New South Wales. The boisterous female called out, ‘Oooh I’ve got a feeling it’s your year!’ And he made a joke about the weekend’s result as she was half way out the door.

I risked it.

‘Clearly she didn’t see the game.’

They both paused and looked up.

‘And I tipped you guys,’ I added.

‘Everybody did,’ said Trainer without skipping a beat. ‘The guys on Wednesday night said we were a sure thing.’

I nodded. Ginge handed me my coffee.

‘It’s ok. Let’s put it down to Goldstein’s shoulder,’ I offered. ‘Structure was upset, Petrie out of position. But Thomas looked good. Kicked straight.’

I made sure I was almost out the door as I finished my assessment and turned back to see both of them standing stock still with vital smiles across their faces, half unsure, half thrilled. The coffee was the strongest and best that Ginge has ever made. And I’m not sure what the conversation will be on Friday or Sunday or Monday, whether I will be able to maintain the same kind of aloof detachment anymore.

*

It would be hard not to have noticed that there’s a new boy come to supplement the stocks in Sydney town. Buddy this, buddy that. Buddy hell up here!

When he was 17 and I was 30, I, like all blue blooded girls, watched his skinfolds with more intent. I too focussed myself in front of the telly, on those green green eyes and long limbs and on that pure skill and hutzpah. Franklin does add a certain tension to the season for long term Swans supporters. The myth of Buddy coupled with the knowledge that we’re in a long term thing from now on, a second marriage of sorts. We will need to get to know him, and the frisson may or may not give way to familiarity and it may take time.  

I have made a conscious decision since he’s come north, to refer to him from Round 1 only as Lance. I decided that the maternal approach was what was needed for my relationship with Franklin. I don’t want to know who he was at Bondi with while his girlfriend was away, or the races or how he is fitting into Sydney life, who he is lending his car to and whether his puppy is missing him, where he spends his Wednesdays and how he puts his bins out.  

I just want to see how he is going to fit. How are they going to use him? Like some exotic stitch embroidered on a gown, how will they work him around for maximum impact? How will they allow him to shine in the context of the background and still allow the background to do its work without being impeded by the feature? How will they find the right balance between showing everything he’s got and hanging him back quietly at the counter, exposing what is expected of him and then twisting it with the unexpected.

I’m interested in his movement and the new, supposedly straighter arc of his kick. I’m interested to see if Rohan and Jetta can stream towards him on either wing, if Reid can drag a defender, while he takes two, and Tippett can out-wait them in the goal square. Or if McGlynn will eat the crumbs before the lot of them. Saturday night at Stade Australie will provide a field undivided by camera angles, a proposition unmediated by commentators. Boys and grass and ball and a few hours to encounter Lance performing Buddy on home soil for the first time.

Tiger Diary 16.9.13

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DUSTOUT MARTIN

No one player makes a team.
No two wrongs make a right.
No three prongs make a pitchfork satisfyingly big enough to stick in Dustin's butt on his way out.
No four months of contract wrangling could hide themselves on-field.
No five 'n' dime to come back to Jimmy Dean.
No sixpences left unspent.
Jack of it.

Tiger Diary 9.8.13

Seventh is not as good as sixth, right?

Is it the alphabet that's against us?

Is it that defence is less important than attack?

How is it that, with identical percentages, we are relegated to seventh, behind THEM!!!? Mortal enemy #1. Grrrrr.

Ok, ok - a further decimal place - but if you work out percentages in a truer way, namely by dividing the (For minus Against) by Against,  Richmond would by 6th.

The season had better not come down to this kind of DRS-esque fiasco.

So, Sydney, all is forgiven for thrashing our tiger hides two weeks ago.

Just get on and do in those Magpies this weekend, good and proper will you?

The huge Battle of the Big Cats tomorrow should see the Real Richmond turning up to win a great game.

I don't know if I can stand it ...

Go Swans!

Tiger Diary 26.7.13

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Seems this Tiger has been completely lost for words:
Several weeks asleep on Blighters Rock.
Interrogating time.

And so let's turn to what others have to say ... We are not yet sure how the following applies to Tigers versus Swans this weekend in Sydney. Footy as a metaphor for any form of struggle is not unfamiliar. Politics ... war ... endurance ... hopes and plans fulfilled or vanquished.

The art of politics consists in knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt.

The quote is powerful coming from Konrad Adenauer as he guided a devastated post WW2 Germany back towards stability, respectability, success and strength. Kevin Rudd has certainly been using it recently with practical success! Adenauer also had this to offer:

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

Throwing love into the mix as poets are want to do, The Chancellor's contemporary George Bernard Shaw assured us this:

Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Feminist author Marge Piercy though is the one we need to turn to this week. 

When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.

22 angel tigers please, roll up!  

From the Archives

Here is the bulletin produced in anticipation of Round 14, 2009

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? (Recall Barry's SMH column anyone?? - ed) 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.’