Not everyone feeling grand
“Adelaide fans clapping and booing Dangerfield off the field. It’s a scum city.” —Text from Cats fan at Adelaide Oval, sent 9.09pm last Friday
I BELIEVE it was tennis player Boris Becker who attempted to put sport into some sort of perspective when he observed, after a shock exit from the Australian Open, that it was not a war and nobody had died.
Such logic will probably be of cold comfort to those fans on the wrong end of tomorrow’s AFL Grand Final scoreboard.
Just how raw that emotion can be on the last day in September — or preliminary final time if you’re a Geelong supporter — was sheeted home to me 40 years ago this weekend.
I was sitting in the Jamieson pub with relatives for a grainy TV broadcast of the North Melbourne-Collingwood grand final — the first in history — and watching while one of them all but broke down in tears at the thought of his beloved Magpies falling at the final hurdle. Again.
He was not so older than me that he’d witnessed a Collingwood premiership for himself (nor could he know that the Colliwobbles would endure for another 13 years). Like a generation of fans he’d had to rely on second-hand accounts passed down through the years since 1958 — coincidentally the year he was born — and he was convinced that the heartache was going to continue. It is history now that Collingwood’s “Twiggy” Dunne then snatched a draw out of the jaws of defeat with a pack mark and torpedo punt goal in the dying seconds. Peter Landy rightly called it the “pressure kick of the season” and the black and white army earnt a reprieve. For seven days anyway.
If there is such a thing as a silver lining in a grand final when you’re team isn’t in it — and statistically that has to be more often than not, no matter how hard Hawthorn tries — it is that you can watch the game objectively and agree that the likes of Martin and Rance, Betts and Sloane are indeed something special without feeling like a traitor to your own team.
But that’s not why I want Richmond to win.
I’d like a Tigers victory if only to hear that penultimate line in their club sung shouted with raw emotion by the best part of 100,000 voices. Is there a better sound in world sport?
It won’t be a war tomorrow and no one will die. For some fans it will just feel that way.