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I’m not ready. This morning I woke up with no more time to put it off – the AFL season starts today. And it just doesn’t feel like time.
It’s not just about Round 1. They’ve been running around having warm-up matches for weeks. I’m pretty sure Carlton played Wawrinka in the Australian Open. The NRL season proper is well underway, and given the number of games my Rebels mate has invited me to, Super Rugby must be close to mid-season.
In the meantime, outside, Melbourne (the city, not the Demons, Storm, Heart, Victory or Rebels) is hanging on solidly to the tail-end of summer, with warm and humid days interspersing the few cooler ones. I thought football, football, that other football and official football were supposed to be winter sports.
There’s not much winter about any of this. Guys will be playing with ice-vests and zinc cream on. Chest marks will be taken at long on. When I drove down to Torquay over the long weekend, I was thinking about a bright session in the surf, not watching the Cats train at Kardinia. There were no sad footballers at the beach doing the obligatory cold-water recovery work of August.
They would have been having too nice a time.
Don’t get me wrong, I love AFL season. I’ll become as deeply absorbed in this as I have in any, following the form, watching each round, keeping an eye on the bogey games or classic match-ups, the new upstarts and the old stagers, the overhyped media darlings.
I’ll complain about soft umpiring rulings, lopsided draws, the Brownlow being a midfielders’ medal, and Essendon truthers nominating James Hird for sainthood when they’re not busy pushing the innocence of Schappelle Corby.
It’s just… for me footy is about chilly mornings, showers of rain, cool mud on the ground, wondering how blokes in singlets can calmly sit around on the bench while I’m in the stands wearing three rugs and doing a Hi 5 dance.
I love footy, but not while I’ve still got sand between my toes.
Mind you, it’s not like the cricket is any less confusing. Since July last year I’ve been living it – over to see five Ashes Tests in England, on to the mammoth one-day series in India, back for a couple of cheeky Shield games, into the return Ashes. The disappointment, anticipation, disbelief and jubilant vindication of that stretch.
Then when it was over, we were basically straight into South Africa, which was like following up a three-hat dinner with a Wagyu steak for dessert.
Damn it was good. I loved every minute, every mouthful, every sympathetic wince as poor old Ryan Harris flogged himself to the crease, or Michael Clarke wore another short-pitched missile.
But when all was done, when deep breaths had been drawn, when the hyperventilation of that last-minute series win had subsided, and the vision of it had been irrevocably etched in our minds like an early silver nitrate plate.
Somehow, some form of cricket was still going. The Shield resuming. T20 internationals as an anticlimax at the end of the African series. If you had told me in 2005 that about a decade later, a 39-year-old Brad Hodge would be winning seven-over games for Australia, I would have told you to stop staying up so late for the Ashes and have a good lie down.
But that’s what’s happening. In about a week a miniature crash-bang World Cup will take place. I’m not sure anyone will notice. A Shield final will happen while various football codes play about their 15th game. I’m not sure anyone will notice.
I’m lost. I don’t know where anything is anymore. Everything is happening at once, Christmas is in August, the grand final is on Australia Day, there’s a federal election every New Year’s Eve, and Chinese New Year is only happening in Uganda.
Humans crave structure. As much as we rebel against routine, we need a little of it, some external navigation points that help us plot our own position. Road markers across the desert, so we don’t just find ourselves doing doughnuts or waiting for a mate in the arid salt flats of Lake Eyre.
Schedulers. Please. Would it be so hard to, say, finish the cricket by the end of February, then give us a month before all the flavours of football start to melt together? Would it kill to give us a bit of routine we can rely on?
Would it really empty your coffers, ruin your media plans, and surrender the proactive competitive attainment of key performance indicators in your digital and grassroots strategies of moving forward to maximise brand awareness, or whatever the hell the remora suckerfish in your marketing departments tell you?
Summer sports in summer. Winter sports in at least the bits that conclusively aren’t summer. With no navigating markers, we die in the desert, disoriented and confused. Give us a context, and we’ll make it to Darwin.
Though at this rate, we’ll get there to see Richmond versus the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, celebrating Canada Day with a summer solstice reggae reimagining of Jane Eyre.