An Explanation (of Sorts)


It’s hard to accurately capture what it was like watching this Geelong team claim its third premiership in five years. I waited for my thoughts to crystallize, to put the performance in context, to give it relevance. I got the next day’s papers and watched the TV news, both full of recaps, interviews and superlatives. But nothing seemed to evoke what I had experienced. It seemed disconnected and disparate, as though the photograph had stolen the soul.

That relief was, ultimately, the overwhelming emotion once the game was in hand, is telling. Maybe victory seemed the natural outcome, expectation being a by-product of success, and thus achieving it was merely a case of travelling the road most likely. Or perhaps it is that the joy of victory is not equal to the pain of defeat, that an opportunity lost is double an opportunity taken.

I still have vivid memories of the 1989 Grand Final. I was 10 years old. I ran out to my backyard cubby-house, wounded. I probably cried. But we fronted up to the Town hall that night to welcome the team back. The town was proud and the team seemed drunk. I clapped along, unaware at that age that platitude in victory is hollow but support in defeat holds honour. It has only been in the past few years that I have re-watched that game, pre-2007 our favourite Grand Final. I was finally able to recognize the bravery of that Geelong team, of just how close they were and how different things may have been. I also recognized how outgunned that backline was, how willing but unqualified Tim Darcy was.

The 1990s Grand Finals remain, and will remain, unwatched. The Eagles teams of that era were the Ivan Drago of the young AFL: foreign, blonde, robotic in their precise devastation and loaded up on steroids (probably). They made the Cats look second-rate. Which left the ’95 Blues to make them look about sixth or seventh rate.

The free self-expression of the Malcolm Blight Era had given way to the grim self-destruction of the Gary Ayres years, their concepts and careers summed up in their handling of Ablett Senior: One man, driven by the courage of his creative convictions, rejuvenated him; the other, cowardly unable to push, broke him in the VFL until his inevitable jump. I guess Gary Ayres never believed in God.

The new millennium arrived with my adulthood (21). And as friends and acquaintances sometimes distanced themselves from football, seeking to perhaps establish a more sophisticated self-image, I stuck with game and stuck with the Cats (and, somewhat stubbornly, the town itself). And they stuck with me; to this day I have a “Rain Man” like ability to conjure the playing numbers of obscure and below-par Geelong players from the past 20 years (Geoff Miles wore no. 2, for example).

The game got younger and I got older. Childhood and childhood heroes were long gone. Toby Bairstow was training horses back in Perth. Barry Stoneham was limping his way around Collins Street. Paul Couch was selling cars or running for Mayor of Colac or something. Shane Hamilton (no. 25) faded into obscurity. I presume Darren Forssman was, and still is, selling security systems door to door.

I saw Joel Corey at the Geelong Hotel once, it must have been his first or second year. He was taller than I had anticipated and I remembered that he was drafted from W.A. somewhere. I wondered what it meant to support a team that would soon be younger than me. James Rahilly was smoking PJ Supers like he was in prison. I think Boris was there too. How strange, I thought, that they’re all here at the GH, smoking and drinking. I almost walked up and wished them well for the season. And I remembered then that we, as residents, had our own responsibility. That we needed this team and if the town couldn’t provide anonymity we each had to do our best. I remembered Buddha Hocking collecting my bins, Gavin Excell selling my Dad our memberships and having a kick with Gary Senior in my street; a neighbour at one end kicked to me, me in the middle kicked to Gaz and the great man kicked the 60 metres over my head to the end again. I remembered I was drinking Cointreau and V, and wondered why I was at the Geelong Hotel.

In hindsight it’s remembered as a “super-draft”, but at the time the 2003 crop looked nothing more than good, honest plodders. Certainly I didn’t see Jimmy Bartel turning into the most reliable big-game player of a generation, Corey Enright becoming the best half-back in the league and the above-mentioned Joel Corey turning into an all-day running and clearance machine. And they weren’t that, at first. James Kelly looked a class above, I must admit, and I once compared him to James Hird before he was duly injured. It ended up taking him, and the team itself, years to get their confidence back.

Matty Scarlett didn’t stand out as a school footballer. Steve Johnson was a drunken screw-up. Mooney kept belting people. Ling was no athlete. Brad Ottens was wrongly maligned (“All of you... All of you”). But there is spirit in the struggle.

Sometime in the Lips Thompson-era Mrs Watson and I became friends, bonding over a mutual love of The Cats, cynicism and a possibly heroin-addicted, Melbourne-based, indie-pop band: More tenuous connections have been responsible for more. In 2006, we started Big League as an extension of our email conversations that inevitably turned to football and the potential of Matthew Spencer and why Kane Tenace couldn’t kick and wanting to throw pies at Peter Street (and how it would be a Balfour’s, as we were unwilling to part with the now tragically defunct Beaumont’s) and Nick Davis and why God (not Gary) hated Geelong. Typically when the football became too much, the losses too hard to swallow, we drank and turned to music or other abstractions that had no scoreboard, no outcome as nakedly definitive as wins and losses. From spilled marks to Built to Spill, we’d forget, temporarily at least.

While watching the 2006 pre-season cup, I superstitiously, and, as it was a gift, quite impolitely, turfed a brand new beanie from my head in frustration. The Cats kicked away and the beanie was never worn again. W and I celebrated. Looking back, perhaps the players did too. Regardless of the failure of that season proper, we had picked a good time to start a blog about the Cats.

There’s been something perfectly and uniquely endearing about each of Geelong’s flags: 2007 was the drought-breaker that I will always hold as particularly special. The game was beyond doubt 10 minutes into the second quarter but the players kicked on obsessively, as if each goal would make up for the lost years, as if the margin could grow so great as to be able to stretch back to 1995, ‘94 and ‘92. And maybe even to ‘89. I was glad for their fervour.

2009 was the heart attack, as the stronger bodies and harder minds, forged in failure the year before, imposed themselves on the second half of the contest. The high-scoring Cats out-defended the all-defence Saints, and the only era ended was the one never started.

2011 was the perfect blend of both; neck-and-neck for three quarters before a glorious, vindicated, victory lap in the last. The impossibility of sustained excellence in the modern, salary-cap, draft-concession era extended to a fifth year.

After Varcoe’s fourth quarter goal I relaxed and looked around the bar at my drunk and happy friends, glad to have the context to appreciate the feat, if not the words to describe it.