There’s a dapper old bloke who sits a few seats away from me at the footy. He has neat white hair and a crusty moustache that probably could be carbon-dated to about 1950.
In some ways he’s like any footy fan. He groans when we all groan, he buries his face in his hands when we all bury out faces in our hands, and he looks skyward for answers when we all look skyward for answers. But he faces calamity with a calmness that most of us lack. Yes, he curses the umpires occasionally (at one point on Saturday I swear he yelled ‘you green piece of snot!’), but a chuckle is never far away, nor a smile on his face. He covers his knees with a crocheted blanket of red blue and gold and sits as straight as a teacher’s ruler.
After the second quarter on Saturday, when the Crows had just been stomped on again, this time by West Coast, he glanced my way. Maybe I wore a look of despair, because he said, ‘don’t worry, they’ll come good.’
‘In our lifetimes?’ asked a bloke behind us, who tends to take a dark view. He doesn’t hold back on expressing those views, either, so loud they can probably be heard at the Mount Lofty lookout, which we can see from the stand. He has a ruddy face and wears a Crows’ cap, circa 1998.
‘That depends on how soon you have your coronary,’ said the dapper bloke, twisting in his seat to eyeball the guy. There wasn’t much play in his neck and he had to turn his whole body. ‘But it could be next quarter.’
‘Could be next century,’ said the dark-viewed bloke.
The players from the 12th AFL Women’s National Championship had paraded onto the ground.
‘Here’s an idea,’ said the dark-viewed bloke, his voice rising. ‘Let’s get a few of those sheilas to play for us.’ He cupped his hands and yelled. ‘Hey Rendell, are you watching this? Sign up the blonde one with the big boobs!’
Sexist? Probably. Funny? Well, the dapper bloke laughed. We all laughed. It was good to laugh.
‘Nah, they’ll come good,’ said the dapper bloke, settling back in his seat and looking at me.
‘I like your optimism.’
‘It’s not optimism, it’s logic. There’s blokes out there playing way below their potential. There’s blokes out there who can be stars of the competition. They just don’t know it yet.’
‘What about Craigy? Reckon his time is up?’
He was pouring himself a cup of tea from a thermos. He took it black, possibly with a sly slug of whisky. He shrugged.
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. All I can do is look at the evidence. They just played a lousy quarter of footy. They were in disarray; they didn’t do much right at all. They looked shattered. That’s a black mark against the coach. Now we wait to see how he responds. He needs to be strong. He needs to rebuild their belief system. He needs to make them believe they are good enough. They’ve got no confidence at the moment - you can tell by the way they’re double-fisting the ball instead of marking the damn thing. Let’s see how they come out after half time. Let’s see what the coach can do in fifteen minutes.’
As it turned out, the Crows played a fine third quarter and cut the margin from 34 points to eleven at the final change.
‘Looks like Craigy did a nice little re-build,’ I said as the players huddled in their huddles.
‘Won’t last,’ said the dark-viewed bloke behind us.
‘Maybe it won’t - yet,’ said the dapper bloke, twisting in his seat again and looking at him. ‘But we just learnt two things. That the coach is strong, and that these blokes can actually play.’
The dark-viewed bloke got his way, and the Crows relapsed in the last quarter. There was a long list of problems - mistakes in the backline, no one up forward, more West Coast takeaways than you’d see in a Chinese restaurant. The dark-viewed bloke left early (but he’ll be back - he likes being right too much).
By the time the final siren sounded the crowd was half-gone, but the dapper bloke was a stayer. As he folded his blanket he caught my eye, one last time.
‘Don’t worry, they’ll come good,’ he said.
Sarrey’s first novel, Prohibited Zone, featuring a fictional ex-Crows player, is now available at Wakefield Press and in bookstores.
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