You clicked the link thanks to the catchy title but being an internet veteran, there’s a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Some ancient, primordial instinct, honed on the fields of the Serengeti in ages past, is screaming at you from the depths of your being.
That’s right – this is an article about Fantasy football. (Argh! Run)
There are only two things every footy fan in the world claims to hate: 1) When people start talking about their fantasy footy team, and 2) Formulaic, clichéd answers given by players and coaches during press conferences and interviews, and 3) Manly.
(That’s already three things, and there are a lot more.)
Somehow I managed to confront and combine the first two things on the list above in one sickening moment of epiphanic self-disgust like being the meat in a sandwich made of two slices of wholemeal horror.
I play fantasy footy on a little forum called VNRL. It’s my preferred comp because the selection process is an actual draft where we can’t all pick Paul Gallen, Corey Parker and Cameron Smith, plus 14 nobodies.
My team has had a decent year and will probably make the top-five playoffs, just.
However last week I was close to losing the must-win, second-last game of the season against a bloke who hasn’t logged in since Round 9 and has Kurt Gidley as his goal kicker.
On the forum there’s a general thread called ‘Season Discussion and Whinging Thread’. Surprisingly, this thread is mainly concerned with discussing the season and posters therein generally like a good whinge.
“I’ve had a particularly tough draw”, “I’m really unlucky with injuries this year”, “State of Origin stuffs our comp”, “Please send help I’ve been held captive in this basement since Round 9” are typical posts in the thread.
So, there I was calculating the scores of last week’s match with mounting horror because it seemed like I was going to lose by a good margin.
A part of my mind immediately started composing a post I would make in the ‘Whinging’ thread.
In a mindset of frustration and anger I wanted to tell the other players exactly why they were so lucky that fate had intervened on their behalf and kept me down.
And what excuses did I, the ‘coach’, catch myself drafting? What were the actual sentences I’d semi-consciously composed?
“We wanted to go back to basics this year and just concentrate on scoring points. I think the boys have tried hard but just a few things haven’t gone our way.”
“The referees haven’t helped, State of Origin needs to be looked at, the season is too long, there’s not enough talent to go around in this comp, I won’t speculate on whether I’ll be coaching again next year.”
I got to “the effort has been there, it’s just our execution that’s letting us down” before it hit me – I was using every cliché in the book to say pretty much nothing.
I was regurgitating the very lines heard just about every week by just about every losing coach that causes us all to hurl the remote across the room and kick our dogs.
Except it wasn’t really like that at all. These weren’t stock answers to be fed to a hungry media pack. They weren’t coached into me by some media advisor.
These were sui generis: real, considered opinions on what I genuinely thought had gone wrong with my team this year.
Once the shock of catching myself using the very lines that have lost me countless remote controls over the years wore off, I wondered if in fact these lines that we hear repeated over and over aren’t just the regurgitated, empty ‘quotables’ we all assume they are.
Perhaps the language used by these people in these moments are indeed their genuine, best attempts to explain a very uncomfortable set of circumstances summed up best by one of those clichés – “this year just isn’t our year”.
In other words, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to send our remotes into orbit when we hear dreck like “rebuilding phase”.
Maybe we need to allow for the possibility that the coach means what he says?
As it happens, I won that match thanks to Cam Smith kicking 10 goals. At the press conference after the game, I was thoughtful and considered.
“We played well today, but we have a lot to work on if we’re going to go far in this comp.”
And you know what? It’s true.
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