What would Jesus do?

Some things you just can’t change. You tell yourself to forget about it, that’s it over. You tell everyone else that you’ve given up. And you have. For the most part. But there’s still that part of you that refuses to face facts, the part that ignores the 99% and instead focuses on the 1%. And that part, strangely enough, is often the loudest and the most insistent. And no matter how much you have come to despise the phrase, ‘mathematical chance’, you still end up thinking, ‘well, I’m not gonna rule anything out until it rules itself out’. The heart wants what the heart wants. But then Collingwood scrape in on Friday night. And then the Bulldogs pull one out.

I was at Kardinia Park on Saturday, along with Mrs. Watson and our respective hangovers, and boy, did it look a much easier game in person than it does on television sometimes. As far as I can tell, this is Sydney’s game plan: When they have the ball everyone run down that end. Then, when we get it, everyone run back to our end. They’re like an overmatched soccer team who stack their defence and attack purely on the counter. And sure, it would be easy to blame Paul Roos for turning the AFL into an almost continuous game of stacks-on, but they won a premiership last year, so it’s probably up to the other coaches to come up with a game plan to combat this. Otherwise they’ll probably win another one. Although it could be argued that bad luck, (Daniel Kerr’s foot injury sustained early in the 1st quarter) the AFL’s intervention (ridiculous tribunal decisions) and West Coast’s idiocy (playing Gardiner at full forward when Quentin Lynch, Andrew McDougall or even Jamie Graham had done it all year) contributed significantly to Sydney’s premiership last year.

The Cats were good though. They pressured hard enough that it was difficult for Sydney to score on the rebound. And I guess that’s difference between our game and soccer, or basketball; the threat of getting legally and fairly nailed. And while we’re on the subject, I think I kinda like Cam Mooney belting people every now and then, but do you reckon there’s some way we could get him to announce who it’s gonna be during the week? You know, just to kind of get in their head a little bit, the same way Glenn McGrath singles out his ‘bunnies’ before an up-coming cricket tour. Imagine that, and tell me that wouldn’t rattle the opposition player; I think it was Confucius who said, “Fear of death is worse than death itself”. Well it was either him or that Grasshopper guy from Kung-Fu. Or, even better, perhaps they could take some kind of poll of GFC.com to decide who Mooney is going to punch. Sure, Amon Buchanon was a worthy recipient, but, had I been given the choice, Ryan O’Keefe would have gotten my vote. No question. Hit him twice, please.

You see, this type of tom-foolery is needed to distract us from the real issue: No matter how many heroin addicts Sydney has, they also have a football team who will be playing in September. And, as I alluded to in the beginning, this is what I was still refusing to accept.

There were 22,000 people there on Saturday; are they too, I wondered, in self-denial? Or had they given up on finals and turned up knowing it would be a meaningless, hollow victory? Perhaps that’s why K-Park was so quiet. So quiet in fact, that I actually heard an umpire award a 50m penalty. Not that I was complaining; after all, in my hungover state, I appreciated the peace.

Geelong was challenged and answered the call, going on to win by a handy margin. And the crowd eventually warmed up to the contest. But I left the ground no wiser, no more disappointed, uplifted, hopeful, philosophical, or anything else, other than resigned to the fact that the season was done. I was tired. And the voice of any unlikely hopes, of that 1%, was finally quieted. And who wants to write about that?