Month: April 2009

I might be in need of some strong coffee this morning, but I’m nevertheless very happy with my decision to stay up into the small hours to watch Everton secure their place in the FA Cup Final early this morning. When I made the decision to stay up for what was a 1AM kick off here in Australia, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of the game going into extra time and penalties, and thus depriving me of an additional hour of sleep, but it was all worth it in the end. Roll on the 30th May, when I’ll have to find myself a pub somewhere in Melbourne to watch the final (it’ll be a midnight start for us, but at least this time on a Saturday night…)

Earlier in the day I’d heard a news report on one of the main Aussie channels describing it as a clash between Manchester United and “Tim Cahill’s Everton”, as if the Australian midfielder is manager and owner as well as being just one of eleven players. I wonder if they’ll be playing down his involvement when they cover the game on tonight’s news, given that he was the only Everton player to miss his penalty…

After the final penalty had gone in, and after I’d finally finished (quietly so as not to wake anyone) jumping around the living room, I noticed that the cameras had picked out a despondent young United fan–maybe about 10 years old–still sitting in his seat next to his dad.

For a second, I wondered what it must feel like to be a United fan when they lose a big game like that. As an Evertonian I’m well acquainted with what it feels like to watch the team I support lose–they’ve been doing it to me for years–but for a young United fan it must be a strange new sensation. Perhaps for the first time that young lad in the crowd would be coming to realise that life isn’t quite the way he’d thought; that your team doesn’t always win; that you can’t always get what you want; that life is full of small disappointments.

But then I remembered that, in the words of the BBC:

For United and manager Ferguson, there was only disappointment and they must now turn their attentions back to the pursuit of the Premier League and Champions League.

Oh yeah. They’re only top of the league, having already won two trophies this season and with a Champions League semi final coming up. They must be gutted.

It’s fair to say that the aussies like the odd bit of sport. Although cricket might nominally be the national game (at least when the aussies are winning), and although there’s a growing national interest in “soccer” since the last world cup (at least when the aussies are winning) and while folks in Sydney and Queensland might like a bit of Rugby, down here in Melbourne there’s only one game in town. Aussie Rules. Rules.

With the new AFL season kicking off a couple of weeks ago, vast swathes of newsprint and television time is now being devoted to coverage of this funny game played by guys in short shorts throwing around an oval ball on an oval pitch.

I can’t pretend to understand the rules. Sometimes I can’t even understand the newspaper stories. Many of the articles in the aussie press (at least the ones that aren’t just copied out of UK or US papers) seem to be written with the assumption that the paper’s readers will understand fully the context and history behind the story, which makes reading the papers a confusing business for a recent migrant.

The stories about AFL are no exception–for someone who didn’t grow up with the game they can be utterly baffling. A few weeks before the season started, for example, the papers were full of stories about “the bump” after an incident in a pre season game in which a Collingwood player broke the jaw of an opposing player. The offending player was initially banned by the AFL for four matches, but then this was somehow overturned on appeal, prompting the Herald Sun to ask: “Is The Bump Back In Footy?”

But no one ever explained what “the bump” was. To make matters even more confusing, some people even wrote to the papers to say that it was all the other guy’s fault–the guy with the broken jaw–for getting his face in the way of the first guy’s elbow. Apparently these people were not joking either (something to do with teh kids no longer being taught how to respond to “the bump” these days).

I still don’t understand what this bump is or how it can be the fault of the guy with the broken jaw (who of course was out of action for the first half of the season…) but this weekend I went to my first live AFL game. I did see one on the telly a few years ago when we inexplicably got up in the middle of the night in London to go to a pub, eat meat pies, and watch the “Grand Final”, but this was the first time I’d been to one live, joining Ad and Andrew in a half empty Etihad Stadium to watch Essendon play Freemantle. As an introduction to the game, it wasn’t exactly the finest example of Aussie Rules–I’m not sure what I’d think of football if my first game had been something equivalent to a goalless draw between Hull and Stoke on a wet Wednesday evening, but I could see flashes of entertainment in there in the midst of a lot of dull play. The AFL seem to like changing the rules of the game every five minutes, so perhaps I should write to them and suggest they shave off about 30 minutes from the playing time, at least for the games between the rubbish teams…

Whatever they are, it will be some time before I really get to grips with the rules (I couldn’t tell you, for example, if the home crowd’s annoyance with the ref every time he gave the opposition a free kick was justified or just the usual supporter’s tunnel vision) but perhaps the funniest thing for me coming to the game at this late stage in my life is the way the scoring system is set up. There are four posts at each end of the ground: you get six points for kicking the ball through the central rugby style posts, but if you miss those you still get a point for either hitting the post or getting it through the outside posts. Surely this is the only sport in the world that rewards failure by giving you a point even if you miss.

Perhaps it’s a consolation for the fact that you can expect to have your jaw or neck broken at any time (and it will probably be “your fault”…)