I’ve heard of cricket season referred to as “waiting for footy” season.
I’ve heard some of my non-sporty friends refer to footy season as “oh no, we’re losing half our friends for six months” season.
When I first met Wanda, she had a firm foot in the second camp. But she saw the light, and learned to appreciate the drama of a three-hour contest with an outcome often less predictable than a James Bond film.
The bounce of a ball, the decision of an umpire, the accuracy of a kick or a pass. Sport can work in mysterious ways.
She did it of her own accord. Coming from a family where sewing and knitting was the accepted pastime for the fairer sex, she found football liberating – an escape from day-to-day humdrum for some edge-of-your-seat thrills and unabated emotion.
I confess, the first time I heard Wanda shouting the names of players from her recliner had my ears pricked like a meerkat on a sand dune.
“Get up you lousy fool and support your team mates,” with octaves piercing enough to wake snoozing neighbours.
“Did you see that, Wayne? It’s a game of inches at times,” she said to me once.
Then they came. More and more. Cliche after horrible cliche slurred from the mouth of a girl whose mouth was once a place where butter wouldn’t melt.
During last year’s grand final, she cussed more than once. The commentary was rubbing off so poorly that bad English was creeping into my once-proper wife’s vocabulary.
Which begs me to ask why many a footballer was never taught to speak – eloquently, that is.
I understand they spent much of their youth chasing, throwing and kicking an angry piece of leather from one end of a grassy knoll to the other.
Yet, I think back to my schooling days. And it wasn’t all they did. We all spent equal time in the classroom, as we did on the football oval.
Granted, some enjoyed their running time more than the rest of us, and the occasional few stood out as being particularly skilled at it, able to retrieve a dribbling ball from their toes with the precision of a lab technician – then able to deliver it to a team mate with unwavering accuracy.
The bell would ring, and we’d all follow into class where together we’d recite lines from Shakespeare or To Kill a Mockingbird.
The skill of the football player, as evidence would have it, was in direct contrast to their ability to place adjectives and adverbs into the right place of a spoken sentence.
I’m yet to understand how that correlates with the right side, left side brain configuration because I’ve seen some elite football players who are equally woeful at art as they are at solving the delicacies of a spreadsheet.
Trade negotiations are handled by managers. As on occasions are their media statements.
But today’s world is an interactive one. No longer can the captain of a footy team pat his boys on the buttocks and creep in for a rendition of the team song and a shower.
They are, as part of their contracted position, required to talk to the masses. Where is Harper Lee now, when you need a well-constructed line that doesn’t make you look like you’ve emerged from an episode of Planet of the Apes?
You see, “youse” was never uttered in Shakespeare, not ever referring in any well-written word to the plural “you”.
Cliches sometimes crop up in sports reporting and that’s okay, but “we went out to get the job done, and we got the ‘w’ today” is superficial. “It’s a game of two halves” is logical, but mindless.
Surely there is someone responsible for letting players know that I, as an educated tragic of the game, would like some insights into your methods.
As a fan, I’d like to know why you decided to pass to a marked player when you had three other options. Commentators will refer to it as footballing intelligence. I have other words for it, all unfit for print.
“We’ll learn from that and come back next week” isn’t the answer I was looking for. That explains “what” but not “why”. Oh, never mind.
I badly want to be kind, to help others understand that players have directed their energy into learning a craft, not into explaining their craft. While the rest of us honed our socially-acceptable tongue at school, you were in the trenches learning to juggle balls the size of buckets.
Hey Wanda, you know who’s playing tonight?
