Staggering ahead

dispirited outfit on the brink of Game of Thrones‘ Battle of Blackwater.

In this minor piece of TV history, Tyrion sought to minimise none of the backs-to-thewall bad news. He detailed how outnumbered, unimpressive and ill-prepared they were compared to their steely foes, who had shown up battle-hardened from a string of victories. He spoke, too, of how how the other guys had a stronger legal and moral claim to righteousness, so that even the onlooking gods had every reason to favour them.

And somewhere in the midst of what started more as a confession and lamentation, he contrived make the oppressive weight of it all sound, if not cosmically unfair, then at least enough to make a man feel angry.

Concluding, as so many viewers will long remember, with the surprisingly stirring words: ’’Those are brave men knocking at our door . . . let’s go kill them.’’

Which they did. By dint of some technical and tactical smarts and great outpourings of what might have been bravery or might have been a weird alloy of desperation and over-it-all exasperation.

Frankly Tyrion’s army was by some measures in better shape than a Stags team that has lost its first six games by an average margin of 31 points for precisely no competition points points. Things have reached the stage Rugby Southland has apologised to the Southland public for the assorted unacceptabilities of the season so far.

All right then. So far, so horrible. And next they face Tasman, so that’s just peachy. Much as we all like to think of Southland as a province that stands by its team through thick and thin, heads aren’t being held high. But they may yet be.

Perhaps it’s not so much a problem of the team lacking skills, or heart, or commitment, or other of the sport’s much-cited virtues. Perhaps it’s just time for them to add an extra stimulus; those peptic squirts of displeasure that can be, in their own way, adrenalising.

The Stags and their supporters have had a hell of a time. How’s about they go out there and, without breaking the rules or the laws of physics, see if they can find out how it feels to make some innocent third party pay for it all, leaving them to be the ones wondering what the hell just happened?