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What we see and hear about behaviour in and at sporting event rarely adds up to anything other than a pile of over-heated perceptions.
Today I will attend the ‘Gabba for a one day international, my first in a long, long time.
Here’s what springs to mind when I ponder what I’m in for.
Bars will be full en route. Bellicose, sweaty blokes will be squeezed up against temporary balustrades erected to prevent them stumbling drunkenly into the path of oncoming traffic.
They’ll be belching profanities through Winfield exhalations. They’ll be wholly unaware of the children within earshot. They’ll be ogling female office workers unfortunate enough to have opted for that particular route back to the Yaris.
And all this before a ball is bowled in anger.
My point?
It doesn’t take much to assume the worst.
And so to the much-maligned A-League.
Just a few days back the Wanderers and the Victory faced up and finished off with ne’er a dodgy moment between the 15,000 who attended.
But what were people sweating on?
More of what happened at the earlier fixture when a pair of ridiculous posses made up of fashionably tough-stickered, creatine enlarged torso-waxers all decided to chest-pump and spew childish vitriol in the name of clubs who never invited it.
Of course, the media lap this hoo-haa up.
The imagery it offers is news gold.
Of course, it’s helped on its way by horrible paranoia on the part of A-League fans who are always so awfully quick to condemn it all as some sort of conspiratorial code-bash.
Take it from a supporter of AFL club, St Kilda: there ain’t no plot. Put simply, some institutions simply offer incredibly convenient editorial fodder.
Just as the post-season burning of a dwarf’s shirt-tail titillates as much as a flash of Kardashian side-boob, so too the exotic intoxicant that is flares pluming coloured smoke and rioting youths going feral.
We’ll run that off the top at six, Hendo. You bet we will. Just as we would a burning factory, a counting cat or a kid up a tree in a flood.
Why? Because it looks awesome.
And in the end a perception sticks. But reality is far different.
Few, if any, get hurt. Has anyone ever actually seen injury stats on errant flare burning? How would they stack up next to, say, alcohol-induced injury among the Barmy Army after day 1 of the first Ashes Test? Entirely favourably, I say.
The same paradoxes of perception exist on-field too.
This week The Age published a piece by philosopher and academic Christopher Cordner. His argument, paraphrased, was that the current stable of Australian cricketers are graceless bullies who drag down a game that, for genteel historical reasons, deserves some kind of built-in purity.
What he failed to consider was that we only ever hear the thin edge of the sledge wedge.
Most cricket banter is well-humoured and wholly disposable. Most of it comes and goes with the same regularity as English tail-end batsmen.
In fact, sledging’s contribution to the broader vernacular of the game is similarly irrelevant. What we see and hear is the endpoint of a highly technical, highly pressured game played at a slow burn pace.
Usually it’s irrepressibly hot. Often there’s been a string of near misses. Often the last barb will be the punctuation mark on a longer conversation – Michael Clarke’s suggestion that Jimmy Anderson might brace for a broken arm, for instance, was less a threat than a warning about what might come if Anderson’s persistent yappiness didn’t measure up to his batting ability.
Australia, it’s worth noting, had been on the receiving end of Anderson’s down-the-nose smartarsery for quite a while.
In sport, memories inspire a little heat. Sometimes it spills over.
Not often, though.
In the end, once the consistency of 150 km/h grenades can finally be relied upon, they tend to do all the necessary talking regardless of anything else.
A blabbering slips cordon imparting a form of mental disintegration?
Hardly.
Just silly, reactive stuff that happens in a long-winded game. As the recent Ashes showed us, the players quickly tire of it. By day three in Adelaide most of the overt fire-laden blab was gone.
Still, a picture is painted. Column space becomes devoted to it. All of a sudden it becomes an ethical challenge requiring rehabilitatory massage.
But it all self-corrects in a jiffy.
Pity our perceptions aren’t as willing to move.
And no doubt mine will at today’s second one day international when the likelihood of me of enjoying the company of a delightful family of five from Ashgrove all zinced up in green and gold far outweighs the prospect of my teeth being knocked out by a random drunkard’s fist.
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