MCG, Sunday 26 May 2013
Nearly blinded by the Suns
It’s like a kind of unbearable weightlessness, an excruciating limbo, that feeling you have when the Hawks are playing but you have no access to the scores and no way of knowing what’s transpiring.
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| The Opera House lights up, even if the Hawks don't. |
But I shouldn’t over dramatise it; after all, we were only playing the Gold Coast Suns. Even though they were on a two game winning streak, if two in a row can be said to be a streak, those two wins were against weak opposition, whereas with the Hawks, you’ve basically got Mitchell, Hodge, Franklin, Lewis, Sewell, Burgoyne and Roughead against, well, Ablett and a few kids. Even if we’re a bit off our game and the Suns are at their peak, surely we’ll be five or six goals up by the time I can get the scores.
WTF?
So imagine my disbelief when the captain invited us to turn on our phones and I rustled up the half-time score on the AFL app, only to discover that we were losing. How could we be two goals behind? What on earth had been going on? I got that sick feeling in the stomach, the feeling of impending doom that Eddie McGuire must have felt this morning after suggesting Adam Goodes help promote King Kong, or that Wayne Swan must have experienced after spending three years guaranteeing a federal budget surplus only to discover his calculations were out by, well, $12 billion or so.
On the upside, there was more chance of the Hawks coming back against the Suns than there is of Wayne Swan and the government coming back into contention at the election.
“Just saw the scores…WTF?” I texted to Chan-Tha, who was at the game.
“I know. We’re dropping marks and can’t kick straight. Quite sloppy play by us.”
“Birchall late withdrawal.”
“Here’s a stat – 3 out on the full by Buddy.”
I’d read enough. By this stage I’d made my way from the airport to home and the third quarter was underway. I noted via the AFL app that we’d hit the front, but the Suns still seemed to be kicking goals with unwelcome regularity.
Surely they couldn’t run over us. It makes it very hard to hang it on Collingwood fans if we go and get beaten by the Suns. Mind you, it’s still fine to mock Saints fans – getting beaten by the Suns is nowhere near as embarrassing as being beaten by the Bulldogs.
“Sorry Phillip, not lots of updates, too stressed & frustrated” texted Chan-Tha.
Footy fidelity
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| I'll never be unfaithful to Hawthorn - photo hot-scarlettjohansson- wallpaper.blogspot.com |
Meanwhile, the Hawks were maintaining a 4 to 5 goal lead throughout the final quarter. Not great, but really, a win is a win. Melbourne and St.Kilda wouldn’t be quibbling over the margin if they could get a win, so really, we should be thankful that the Hawks had the ability to turn it on and turn it round.
Buddy had shaken off whatever torpor had affected him and slammed on five goals, including a trademark long bomb from 50 out on the left-hand flank. Sammy was working the ball forward and was on hand when we needed him most; trailing by 17 points half way through the third quarter, it was Mitchell who started a forward move with a long handball, and was eventually in the right place to take a handball from Hill and turn onto his left boot to get us going again. Then Burgoyne slotted two over his shoulder and we were back in front. Phew.
“What an absolute disgrace of a human being”
Nicky Rowsell on FacebookI saw these highlights online after the event, safe in the knowledge of victory, but I’m glad I didn’t have to squirm through it all. Even so, I was shocked to read later that Hawthorn fans had given Buddy bronx cheers after holding a mark. You can’t turn on Buddy people! No matter how many marks he drops or kicks he slices off his boot. OK, so I wasn’t there and didn’t see how he was playing in the first half, but presumably he wasn’t the only player performing below par. And we don’t want to annoy him or give him a reason to leave. Are you mad! As if he doesn’t have enough reasons to leave Melbourne.
He’d had enough abuse during the week. The week wasn’t going smoothly for Buddy as it was, and I don’t mean the story on the front page of the Herald-Sun about him abusing a girl at a night club, I mean the shirt he was wearing in the accompanying photo. It looked like something you’d buy at Ishka, a sort of Incan Hawaiian shirt, if that makes sense. It doesn’t? Well, you’ve got it. Teamed with a brown brimmed hat – was it a cowboy hat, a leatherette trilby? – either way, you know it wasn’t taken on the night as there’s no way he’d have been let into a Chapel St bar wearing that.
“Rude, obnoxious, arrogant, sexist, a pig and an all-round rude human” sayeth Nicky Rowsell of Buddy. I notice she says nothing about his questionable dress sense.
“You are nothing more than a cashed up bogan that can kick a ball” she added. Is the rest of that sentence “out on the full”, because there are some footy fans who would find the barb about being able to kick a ball to be the most outrageous accusation in the whole litany.
Of course we don’t know what provoked Buddy to say anything to this girl, let alone anything abusive, as the Herald-Sun, that noted organ of truth and justice doesn’t provide this perspective. They had to leave space for the lurid “Exclusive Buddy Boozer” headline. Are you automatically a ‘boozer’ by virtue of being in a bar? And is it an ‘exclusive’ simply because there’s no actual story and no other reputable newspaper, or even The Australian, would print it?
This is journalism of the trashiest kind, but the most shocking aspect is the byline of Lucie van den Berg…surely no relation to the ex-Hawthorn captain!
Followers of Buddy’s Twitter feed did get the odd hint as to what had transpired, and it seems there might be another side to the story. I’m just glad that the self-confessed “5 ft 2 petite girl” (a fact you might include if you were writing a singles ad perhaps, but hardly relevant in a tirade against someone else) Nicky is not such an ‘absolute disgrace of a human being’ or so ‘rude’ and ‘obnoxious’ that she’d ever abuse someone publicly, by say, publishing a personal attack in a global forum like the internet or a daily newspaper…oh wait, she did.
“Man machine, super human being”
Kraftwerk at the Sydney Opera HouseThe reason I missed the match was because I was in Sydney to see German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk who were playing at the Sydney Opera Hose as part of the Vivid festival.
So while Nicky may see an “absolute disgrace of a human being”, I’m with Ralf Hutter from Kraftwerk, who in the opening song on the night sang of the “Man machine, super human being” an obvious reference to Buddy’s prowess.
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| "Kick it to me" - photo: au.timeout.com |
Racism Round
As it happens, Buddy’s apology to Nicky Rowsell would turn out to be of little interest to anyone by Friday night. It wasn’t even the most widely reported apology of the weekend. Or indeed the week that has followed.
Indigenous round seeks to highlight the tremendous contribution to Australian football of the indigenous community, as well as celebrate the great indigenous players past and present. It’s one of the AFL’s better ideas for a concept round, given that most supporters can look to their own team and applaud a great indigenous player. Or several in Hawthorn’s case, including Buddy, Burgoyne, Cyril and Brad Hill.
It’s a shame then that this year Indigenous Round has simply highlighted the entrenched and endemic racism in our society. First there was the 13 year old girl in the crowd who vilified Adam Goodes but who ‘didn’t mean it in a racist way’, then the footage of the bloke in the crowd ranting about perceived favouritism to aboriginal players. And then today, Eddie McGuire’s comments. Despite the current evidence, racism isn’t confined to Collingwood supporters, as reports of comments from Hawthorn fans directed at Majack Daw illustrate.
Eddie McGuire may well protest that he’s no racist, and I believe him, but it didn’t prevent him from making a flippant racist remark. It’s possible to know how you should behave while still doing the complete opposite. Of course what makes Eddie’s remarks doubly hard to understand is that they come just five days after he displayed such forthright leadership on this very issue when he stood up to commend Adam Goodes.
All I can think of to explain the strange disconnect between Eddie's actions on Friday night and his words this morning, is that on Friday he was in the role of club president, whereas this morning he was just being a buffoon on a commercial radio breakfast show. These two roles are perhaps incompatible.
Perhaps what Indigenous round has shown us this year is that it’s not quite time to hang the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. Perhaps we need to do more than pat ourselves on the back about our inclusiveness, design special jumpers or stage special matches. It might be that these things will eventually play a role in bringing about reconciliation, but there’s a bit more reconciling to go for a large number of footy fans.
Of course I tend to view most issues through a Hawthorn prism, and this is no exception. Eddie’s remarks, if nothing else, make some of Jeff Kennett’s more outlandish statements as president of Hawthorn sound quaint and innocuous by comparison.
Sunscreen warning
It may be true that our victory over the Suns could have been more commanding, but then it might be equally true that the Suns are actually becoming accomplished.
This is their third season and many of their younger players have now played 50 games or so, which is about where Buddy, The Rough and Lewis were in 2007, their breakout season. Given that, we might need to break out the Factor 15 to protect ourselves from the Suns in the coming years, so perhaps we should bask in our victory while we can.
Final scores: Hawthorn 18 10 118 d Gold Coast Suns 14 8 92
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