I hadn’t slept all week, due partly to jet lag. They say that the body adjusts to a change in time-zone at the rate of about an hour a day (or 1.5 hours per day, depending on which direction you travel). Since Quito is 14½ hours behind Adelaide, that’s 14½ days of adjusting to do. I was only there for six.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Quito is about 3000 metres above sea level, so there is a chronic lack of oxygen. A flight of hotel stairs had me breathing like Darth Vader with emphysema. And I also had a stomach virus.
Some people might think that being weakened and sleepless in another country would distract even the most avid Crows’ man from his club’s ups and downs.
It’s true that Ecuadorian culture is colourful and energetic, an extraordinary mix of Amerindian peoples, Spanish colonialism, and much else as well. The country also has spectacular physical beauty - think the Galapagos Archipelago, the Andean mountains and the Amazonian rainforest; imagine giant tortoises in the seas, alpacas in the mountains and jaguars in the forest.
Yet when I saw, on the internet, the result of the Showdown, my stomach sank like the Ecuadorian currency (it plunged so low in 1999 it was eventually replaced by the US dollar). It might have been the lingering effects of the virus, but I don’t think so. It was the knowledge that the Crows had let slip a realistic stab at the finals.
There were always going to be stumbles for this team. It is young, and this year the power of its aging warriors has waned. After a disastrous start to the year and a casualty-ward-full of injuries, the team had come good in a rush. It was never going to be smooth sailing. There were always going to be little slip-ups.
But did there have to be one against Port?
In hindsight, I’m sure Craigy was right when he hinted at an emotional let-down after the euphoric win over Geelong. The youngsters in the team need to learn to deal with that - they need to learn the secret of consistency. They will, and hard lessons like this will surely speed the learning. The key to success in any sport is to front up, week after week, with the same vim and verve, the same iron-hard determination, the same dour desperation, the same intense energy and commitment.
From the distance of half a planet, it seems like some players didn’t do that this week. There wasn’t enough vim and there was a shortage of verve. The young Crows had altitude sickness; against Geelong they went higher than they ever had and they didn’t cope with the lack of oxygen.
The good news is that, eventually, time spent at high altitude makes you stronger (personally, I’m counting on it!). As the Crows’ young and youngish players improve they will learn to cope better with both spectacular victory and crushing loss. They will confront each with the same honest self-appraisal. They won’t believe the overblown praise they receive after a big win (okay, this blog might have gone a little OTT last week) and they will apply themselves to every game as if it is a 50:50 proposition and of desperate importance in the scheme of things.
After a horrible loss like this, the planet doesn’t seem quite big enough. But there’s no point in hiding. We swallow this loss - and the snide comments of Port supporters - and move on. Or, in my case, back.
