If you’ve played sports you’ve probably stuffed up as majorly as Richmond player Bachar Houli did on the weekend. You watch the ball get immediately intercepted and within a few seconds it is flying past you and it’s all your fault.
You stand there in humiliation and then walk back to your starting position in disgrace.
Most people have more than thirty seconds left to keep striving for redemption. Most are also not shown on TV and dissected by two cities with a combined population of five million people.
Most of these mistakes also arguably don’t cost you a season’s premiership ambitions.
Saturday’s match, Richmond versus a technically but not in-spirit ladder-topping Fremantle, was one of several key matches leading up to September. This game would reveal if Richmond were a legitimate high-finals team or if Freo were a bona-fide resilient champion.
I would argue Richmond passed the test, outplaying Freo on winning the ball and number of attacks, although clearly not on the execution of their skills and decision making.
Richmond missed their chances to bury the win before needing to hold on to a two-point victory with 90 seconds to go. Houli saw an open Richmond player fifty metres out, dead centre. Fifty-metre kicks have hang time, giving four Freo players time to converge on the solitary Richmond player who was supposed to mark the ball.
Forty seconds later Chris Mayne was able to drop the ball straight and follow through his kick without worrying about the consequences of the most minute mistake – the definition of professionalism.
As I drove towards Richmond in the falling darkness I saw the exodus of Tiger fans and imagined their sense of emptiness, streams of them funnelling down Swan St carrying with them one of their most terrible losses. They would have wondered why they had braved the outdoor winter for an entire afternoon only to be rewarded for it with emotional crucifixion.
I sort of imagined Houli’s desolation too, but his wasn’t in front of my face. His was was less immediate, abstract. We lost an entire afternoon of desperate effort on my mistake.
They had also lost it on 18 shanked behinds, but the ending defines everything, story-wise and emotionally. He would have sat in a cold dressing room having lost the match on his mistake, before driving home losing the match on his mistake, heated up dinner and still in his mind losing on his mistake, and maybe in his case performed his prayers while losing on his mistake.
I thought the kick wasn’t the worst one in the world – you could see the player free and the idea set. But anyone who knows their VFL history knows of Collingwood’s Gubby Allen’s horrific pass across the face of goal against Footscray in 1984 which was intercepted by Simon Beasley and became part of defensive gaffe folklore.
It was a lesson to never do it again – stay along the flanks and you win the match.
Houli didn’t. I’ve seen a teammate stuff up and you just have to walk off the stupidity because they are always trying their damndest and a part of you knows that, even in the worst circumstances. You drive home frustrated for a day or more but he’s your mate and you’ve just got to live with it.
I liked Houli’s Sunday-morning chat to a loiterer with a mike next to the Richmond training grounds. “I’ll take the first kick-out next week, I can guarantee that,” he grinned.
People, I imagine AFL-following Muslims, are proud of Houli. Naturally; he’s setting a path towards the integration of the human race, a trail blazer we may look back on in a few millennia when our species is a uniform colour who all harmoniously do the same things.
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