Friday Afternoon

Sometimes I am so freaking dumb it beggars even my own belief. Incomprehensible the things I think, do and say when I'm anxious and under a time constraint. When I get a little calmer - say, AFTER I've sent a last-minute job application on behalf of my partner because he is at work - I realise that I've listed his work position wrongly, plus a bizarre "time in corresponding position" answer based on I know not what, and then neglected to list at all his previous experience that's most applicable in the cover letter.

So I hope he didn't want that job too badly.

I have rolled around all day flapping my hands and feeling like I have turpentine running through my veins and feeling unable to settle on any of the 1317 things and seriously, this must be what it's like to be a demented old woman

I feel dumb as a box of hammers, a few fries short of a happy meal, as thick as two planks. If you're not too attached to your own functionality, though, even being a dill has its pleasures. I still think good thinks. It's just conveying them outward that's a little more difficult for someone whose brain is filled with gurk and splinken dopf, neither of which are meant to be there.

I couldn't get back to sleep after I woke at 4.30 this morning which was why I was texting my local radio station at 5am about the footy. (If you're in Melbourne at the end of September you are accosted on all sides by the football, which must be frustrating in the extreme for those who hate it. If it's any consolation, the AFL is accosting us with Tom Jones as half-time entertainment so perhaps you can feel some appeasement with that). The radio station was playing a fun game of "pretend you are the person who kicks the winning goal in the grand final". I sent my text in which Libby Gore declared beautiful 'cause she knows sensational writing when she sees it. The producers then called me and asked me if I would go on the air and commentate my text and I said I was too tired and I write better than what I speak and no. Because clunk. I am seriously as thick as a brick, as dippy as a roller coaster, as vague as a 170 year old, as deadshit as a not-alive piece of faecal matter when I have to say anything coherent at 5am.

I'm also pretty smart and whippetlike but that only appears between 6 and 7.12pm of an evening, and on Tuesday mornings
I have been writing this entire status update lying in my side in the bathroom with coffee up my arse and you will never, ever be able to get that visual out of your head.

Hawthorn by 16

The Price and the Power of Passion

In a culture that’s a little fractured in meaningful shared narratives, sport dishes up stories for us to eat together, and to replay afterwards.  Stories that make us soar or swoop.  Hawthorn’s win over Geelong (and itself) last Friday night to make it to the Grand Final is a prime example.

I came across a brochure in my papers the other day.  From 1996, it’s printed in glossy four-colour and titled Why Hawthorn and Melbourne Should Merge.

Seems a little incongruous now, with the Hawks in the Grand Final on Saturday.  But merger pushes came at a time when there was much less cash in the AFL’s coffers, and where the expansion from a Victorian-based league to a national team was only 10 years old.  The AFL felt that Victoria simply could not sustain its current amount of teams.  Hawthorn, though with a proud on-field history, was in financial trouble, while Melbourne had little on-field success but was doing well financially.  Hawthorn foresaw that on current figures it simply would not survive.  To do so, it would need a membership base of 20,000, a minimum turnover of $12-14 million, a minimum annual profit of $1.5 million and a competitive team that was capable of playing finals and winning flags.  Both Hawthorn and Melbourne’s stats reflected at the time that neither of them met that criteria.  It seemed wise to combine the on-field success of Hawthorn with the off-field financial success of Melbourne and make something viable out of the two.

There was another big narrative game that year, 1996.  As luck would have it, Hawthorn and Melbourne played against each other in the last round.  Jason Dunstall kicked a lazy 10 – and his 100^th goal of the season – the Hawks won by a point to give them a chance to play finals, and after the game Chris Langford famously tore off his guernsey and held it over his head.  A week later, Hawthorn would be beaten by Sydney by six points and no one would know whether that was the last they had seen of their club.

It’s easy for us to be critical of the club’s stance 17 years down the line.  But the truth was that at that time there was some complacency amongst the less passionate of the brown and gold supporters at Glenferrie.  While Hawthorn’s membership in 2013 reached 63,353, in 1996 it was just over 9000, before the efforts of Operation Payback brought it up to 12,484.  Essendon’s was almost double that, with more than twice the number of attendances at its games in the ’96 season.

From a financial perspective, Hawthorn obviously thought that there simply wasn’t enough interest left in its supporters to be able to stay viable alongside the big boys like Essendon and Collingwood.  But whatever the figures were, they were overridden by the level of passion on the night of the extraordinary general meeting, when so many Hawthorn members came to vote that they spilled out the doors of the Camberwell Civic Centre and down the road.

It was a night of passion and fuming anger.  Members were so upset that they bayed at an ashen-faced board.  It was scary.  I think Peter Hudson was perhaps the first example I’d ever seen of a live person whose face was as grey-coloured as his suit.

Don Scott got up at that meeting and told people to shut up, and to have some respect for the people making up our board.  He tamed the angry mob.  I don’t know what was scarier that night – Don Scott or the crowd.  In a famous gesture, he held up a prototype of the proposed Melbourne Hawks guernsey.  “What have you got?  A velcro hawk and a Melbourne guernsey,” he said with disgust, ripping off the hawk, removing Hawthorn from existence.

That EGM did more than stay the club’s execution.  The passionate core of the club voted against the merger and it became the catalyst to rouse the supporters who’d become complacent.  Ross Oakley, CEO of the AFL, responded to the vote by saying, “It's all very well for people on the fringes to come out and rant and rave;  they will have to carry the responsibility.”

And they did.  Hawthorn’s membership doubled itself the following year, and the rest is history.  Hawthorn is as professional a unit these days as anywhere else.  The days are long gone when us volunteers would come through the doors of the club at Glenferrie each evening to enter memberships into databases to save the club the cost.  But you will still see volunteers at every game in the beginning rounds of the years selling memberships. In an age where football is so professional, and money plays such a central part, It’s heartening to remember that Hawthorn Football Club would not be here contesting for its eleventh flag on Saturday arvo at the G without us.  Volunteers and members matter.  And while we sit at games gnawing our fingernails because we know that there’s nothing we can do to change the outcome of a game except cheer and will our hearts, what we do off-field make a difference, in ways that simply cannot be reckoned into the bottom line of an Excel spreadsheet.

Pic mine.  CC attribution/share-alike

Waaah Waaah

We fade to grey. (Fade to grey).

My football team won the premiership last year. Some say we stole it. And it's true, our opposition were the better team for the year, but they collapsed a little on the day. We were brave and fortune favoured us.

But then we've collapsed for most of this season, with injuries and a reduced preseason and all sorts of bother. No gloating swagger for the Hawthorn faithful this year. We've had all sorts of issues but in the end I wonder if the biggest bother hasn't been the stuff between the ears? I wonder if the psychology of the general consensus that we "stole" the Grand Final last year has maybe had an effect? The disorientating feeling that they went all the way and went ahead of expectations and schedules and whatever and did it, and won the thing everyone aims for and now ... what do we do now?

Maybe. Our heads come up with all sorts of bizarre discombobulations to define our realities for us, after all, don't they?

Oh well, Hawkies. And now you've kicked yourself out of making the eight, and time is running out for you, isn't it. How difficult it is to play as well as you can play when you're trying to make the eight and time's running out. Suddenly you don't have the turning circles you had when you were in the zone in '08. Maybe it's better to miss the finals altogether. Who wants to just make up the numbers? Better to go away and have a good long soaking preseason at the end of round 22. Maybe missing the finals completely will give you a bit of a sniff and a hunger and a focus for next year.

Just make sure you thrash Essendon in round 22 to finish it off.

(Being philosophical about things covers over a multitude of yukky experiences. But still - oh, Hawkies - waah! waah!)

Entitled Football Supporters

Some of the Hawthorn supporters I sat near tonight were such a dismal pack of entitled little bastards that the evening was 20 times more hellish than it needed to have been.

My team got comprehensively beaten by our arch rival. It was never going to be a pleasant experience. But these dudes added a lovely patina of barely contained fury to my already rather dismal viewing experience.

Seriously, there's some blokes out there with real bad anger management problems. I understand why such a thing could be prevalent in today's society. I think men oftentimes feel lost, not exactly sure of how they should be behaving in a post-feminist society where women have somewhat found their voices in some ways. Sometimes it seems that men have been left feeling a bit emasculated. Maybe a bit like women have found their voices and men have lost theirs. Or at least had them stifled under waves of political correctness and lack of social cues on what is acceptable and what isn't. Sitting at the football is one of the few places where you get to yell and scream and vent your spleen and it's fine.

To an extent, though, surely. Because surely in the end, losing a game, playing like poos, being outcoached and outmuscled by the team you hate the most really doesn't entitle you to behave like petulant brats, does it? Some sort of perspective has to come into play at some point. In the end, you know that ultimately it's just a game, no matter how you doth love it, and it's only one game within a season, as thoroughly disappointing as the episode was. Your team has many injuries. And if they are playing a shocker, at some level you know that the players are not losing just to make your weekend start off all wubbly and wascally.

Several amongst the bunch of males surrounding me this evening called our team c***s. The guy next to me screamed his guts out the entire game and abused basically every single player on the team whose colour he was wearing. Some other dweeb threw away his scarf in a fit of childish rage at the end of the game.

I understand the whole anger thing. I was angry myself. But maybe some men need to consider why their self-identities are so flimsy that they can feel entitled to behave like a big tantrum bubby simply because their team has had a bad night at the office.

Their team, and identifying with and being part of that team, gives them that lovely little winning feeling. We all love that feeling. But if you need it too much, then the players, the individual people who are talented enough to be playing professional Aussie Rules, are lauded and loved and exalted but then ripped down when they don't perform to scratch. As if they are just wind-up robots that give you a nice feeling, like rats pressing down on the lever for more drugs, rather than living, breathing people.

And a living, breathing entity. A sporting club to which many people belong, or at least identify with. Part of that adherence involves loyalty, doesn't it? A willingness to stick with your team through "thick or thin"? To be willing to go with the losses as well as the wins, rather than smacking away the drug dealer when they don't give you your fix.

Some Hawthorn supporters need to lift their game even more than the playing list. The playing list has interrupted preseasons and half their backline missing. Some supporters behave like they have interrupted psychologies.