[The Roar, April 25, 2017]
My son wanted to watch some “soccer” on Saturday (we’re
American; can you tell?), so we turned on the English Premier League. West Ham
United and Everton. To say the game was boring is to insult paint drying.
Nil-nil, and even that overstates the scoring chances the two teams created.
I’ve long considered myself a sports gourmet. The
Olympics are my favorite event of the quadrennial calendar, because so many
sports we see rarely are featured over a seventeen-day period. But there are
reasons those sports aren’t seen the rest of the time: much of the excitement
we get watching them during the Olympic Games is that tension that comes from
knowing that “these athletes have worked for four years to get to this
one moment for the gold medal!” The other 1460 days on the calendar wouldn’t be
nearly as exciting to the rest of us.
Soccer,
true “foot”-ball, is the best example I know of a sport which is amazing to
play but incomprehensibly dull to watch. My sons all played enough for me to
testify to this fact: Watching my child play is wonderful; watching other
people play is not.
There’s quite a range of team sports which fall into this
category. I find both baseball and cricket to be far too much standing around,
and I’ll watch and enjoy the four-minute highlight package of either game much
more than the full game. Oddly, the same can be said for American football: if
you only show the actual plays, you can condense a three-plus hour game
into a half-hour time slot and still show plenty of commercials. (There’s a
reason the rise of padded football in America coincided with the advent of
instant replay on television!)
Sports like hockey, softball and ‘soccer’ suffer from
another damaging trait, which is the over-inflated importance of a single score.
Since one mistake can produce a score, but that one score may be all that
occurs in the game, wins and losses rest on not the general tenor of play but on
one, maybe two moments of brain lapse. In baseball, it manifests as the “one
big inning” syndrome, where in the American Major Leagues, the majority of
games have this peculiar trait where one team scores more in a single inning
than the other team scores the entire game. Basically, one pitcher’s bad inning
ruins the game for his team.
Basketball doesn’t have that problem, but it suffers from
another issue: incessant time-outs.
The NBA used to have an expression about not needing to watch until the last
five minutes of the game; now, those last five game minutes take forty to play
out, and the final sixty seconds take half of that.
The
other issue with basketball is that in order to play professionally, you have
to have won the genetic lottery and be at least two meters tall to compete. Rugby
and American football require men of inordinate mass up front, others of great
speed out back. At least the ‘foot’-ballers are usually of a normal build,
something that the majority of us can aspire to.
All of which leads me to MY sport: Aussie Rules Footy.
There are enough scores that one mistake settles only a very closely fought
match. There’s action going virtually all game long; my novice Yank friends are
always aghast that the trainers come out onto the field and action usually
works around them when a player is hurt. There aren’t any timeouts to slow the
momentum of a team: the opponent’s going to have to find a way to do that
themselves. And while there are positions where height is a significant advantage,
the majority of footy athletes are simply well-balanced physical specimens who
run well for speed and endurance, jump high, catch, punch, and kick with skill,
and must use their brains around the pitch to excel. Leads are rarely insurmountable
before the fourth quarter, even when they require doubling your team’s output
for the day to do so.
And
most importantly from my perspective, the team that plays better on that
day almost always wins, but that doesn’t mean that the team that was favored
always wins! All it takes is for one team to believe their press clippings, and
the other to put forth more effort, and an upset can take on epic proportions.
Had
Brisbane been able to hang on Saturday against the Bulldogs, the first half of
that game would be Exhibit A; as it is, it may still be Exhibit B. The Bulldogs were favored by almost fifty points; for the first time in my memory, literally 100% of the fans on a website I followed picked the same team to win. Yet in the first half, it seemed like a Disney movie: Brisbane could do no wrong; and there was plastic wrap over the Western goal. By half, unbelievably, Brisbane led by 38 points. Late in the fourth, Western finally passed them and won going away.
Hawthorn’s
thumping of West Coast might be a lot of things – a last gasp by a proud team, flat track bullies floundering at the ‘G –
but it might also be one team just playing harder than the other on a
particular day. And that’s what’s so great about footy. You never know what you’re
going to see when you go to a game, no matter how lopsided it looks on paper,
but you know that most likely, the team
that plays better on that particular day will win.
My Weekly Wanderings: Another thing I love about the AFL is the value placed
on traditions. Milestone games mean something (congratulations, Bob Murphy!). The
entry banners are important (as long as they can spell “Ziebell” correctly!).
Hitting 800 goals means a lot (congratulations, Lance Franklin!), but not as
much as reaching 500 and winning the game (congratulations, Jarryd Roughhead!).
You mob the fellow who scores his first AFL goal. You back up your teammate who
gets knocked to the turf by an opponent. A goal counts for six no matter how it’s
scored, but when it’s a thing of beauty, it’s admired forever (Eddie Betts’
name is stapled to this spot). So is a magical mark or a tremendous tackle. The
numbers don’t have to be the same from year to year, but the skills that were
important for Gary Ablett Sr are just as important for Gary Ablett Jr.
Of
course there are flaws in the sport. We’re human; we can’t help it. But don’t
lose sight of the forest of beauty of the game for the nitpicking in the trees.
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