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Let’s imagine for a moment that an alien from a distant galaxy managed to land on earth, somewhere, possibly, just beyond the Blue Mountains, sometime earlier this year.
In order to integrate into human society, the alien decides to follow the masses to what seems at first glance to be an army assault drill, where the survivors get picked to defend the earth when the alien’s cohorts decide to launch their takeover bid. The alien discovers they call this thing rugby league.
The alien likes what he sees. He reads up on the game, goes through the statistics and the history, finds out there was some sort of “war” within this physical ritual somewhere around 1995 to 1997 earth years.
Eventually the alien forgets why he started watching this game in the first place and just gets to enjoy the spectacle. But come September, specifically, this third week of September, confusion sets in.
The alien has picked up the nuances of the game and knows how points are scored and how teams beat other teams, but suddenly, tries are being awarded seemingly on the imagination of some unseen figure lurking high above the ground who keeps being referred to as the “video ref”.
The alien notes that the house he himself has set up doesn’t even contain a video, it has a Blu-Ray HD 3D player with beautiful crisp pictures. Video was so last millennium.
While this is but a momentary confusion, as the competition he has grown to enjoy enters its final battle, which he knows is called a grand final, a greater confusion begins. For one of the teams in this grand final is the Melbourne Storm, a team the alien has really got into over the course of the year.
Having read up on all the governing body’s statistics, the alien knows that the Melbourne Storm hasn’t won a premiership in this current earthly millennium. Yet every TV show he watches and every report he reads talks about how the Storm have nine fierce combatants that he knows are called “players” who have already played in three of these grand finals.
He sees one of these players, who must be absolutely the best of the lot because he has the number “1” on the back of his playing attire, say that he’s already won two premierships “in my mind”. This confuses the alien because the player looks very stable and mentally sound, so what is going on in his mind?
He sees articles talking about the Storm’s fifth grand final in seven years and frantically consults his NRL almanac to find evidence of this, but only finds curious gaps in the recent history of these contests with “not awarded” showing up twice, although, yes, he does find the Storm name a couple of times in the runners-up column.
In the end he decides not to worry about statistics or history because this and the curious habit of awarding teams with four points for trying hard by the unseen video ref (he assumes this is why it is called a “try”) are simply momentary confusions.
Instead, he contacts his home planet and tells them to delay any sort of invasion as the written history of his new home might contain other inaccuracies that might not make the place as enticing as it would seem.
Besides, he’s looking forward to this grand final and really wants to see the Storm win its first premiership this earthly millennium.
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