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Josh Dugan is blowing a kiss on the cover of Rugby League Week in a St George Illawarra jersey and I know now all the Foucault or Fitzgerald in the world won’t make me question the universe as much as this one image.
I fear it will squat like a toad in my consciousness for the rest of my life, and it will come and get me in my sleep.
Last year, when Blake Ferguson scored a dazzling try against his former club after an inglorious and as I now understand deeply insulting exit, and celebrated by pointing at the cameras like swagBOOMbitches while waiting for Sandor Earl to arrive on the scene and climb him like a tree, a Shark fan – not Buzz Rothfield, the other one – took great offence at the audacity of this display and told me, “It’s like he was pointing at me!”
I did not understand at the time, and in any case an elimination match is neither the time nor place for inter-team empathy, but the big wheel turns and I now know his pain in a very profound and personal way.
Dugan becoming a Dragon has definitely coloured things. Challenges have been posed. It’s become more difficult to watch the Dragons, for example.
Dragon games were largely unendurable before and they remain that way, only now because it’s hard to see what’s happening what with the tears and the nostalgia-tinged, Ally McBeal-style hallucinations.
All those years at the Raiders and they never once cut to a shot of Dugan’s dad, Dave Dugan, sitting in the stands in all his florid glory. But they immediately anoint him on the big screen at Kogarah like he’s a Hillsong preacher or some kind of holy deity (which he obviously is because, hello, his son), but it’s galling and obnoxious nonetheless.
Anyway. Another stain on the Raider organisation’s collective consciousness. There will be more, of course. There is no imminent shortage of players who act the fool.
But that cover, and that kiss. My mind has snagged, I’m not getting past it.
Meanwhile, the Raiders have some newly blooded players, boys whose names, positions, hair and playing styles I cannot recall.
The pieces on the board may have been rearranged, but we’re still playing the same game, and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly toward September.
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