This is my first column for The Adelaide Advertiser since last month’s South Australian election and as such I feel duty bound to reflect on the wash-up from the result. But not for the first time, I’d rather write about footy.
Just to keep the political tragics happy, the shorthand version of the SA poll is that almost one in every 10 voters abandoned their support for Mike Rann because they find him kind of annoying, but he got back anyway because Labor had such a strong majority.
Which brings us to the Adelaide Crows. History shows that when a successful footy club goes bad it can shed around 10 per cent of its membership. Like Labor under Rann, the Adelaide Crows enjoy a comfortable buffer in terms of their support.
The Crows’ membership is among the strongest in the AFL, they are financially robust, and are unlikely to go under if every 10th fan fails to pay their dues.
To plough on valiantly with this tortured analogy, the Adelaide Crows are also kind of annoying. As much as it pains me to write this as a fan, the Crows are growing more annoying by the day.
Abandoning support for a political party is a victimless crime. It is your right as a voter to act in a fickle, reckless or impulsive fashion within the privacy of the ballot box. You owe those people nothing.
Abandoning support for your footy club is in a moral category all its own. I’m not sure if there is any greater form of betrayal - to walk away from a team which has brought you moments of unadorned joy, purely because it is now subjecting you to nothing but frustration, sorrow and anger.
Abandoning your club takes four forms.
For the casual fan it simply means you’ll plan something else for your Friday night or Sunday arvo rather than subjecting yourself to the likelihood of a humiliating and predictable defeat. This is the category I’m close to entering, which I guess makes me potentially that lamest of supporters, a fair-weather fan.
The second and more formal mode of betrayal is the club member who fails to renew.
The third form of abandonment is to feign a sudden interest in a so-called “second” team, a shocking form of opportunistic fence-sitting, which finds its worst expression in those who laughably claim to back both the Crows and the Power on patriotic state-based grounds, even though it makes as much logical sense as cheering for both Israel and Palestine.
The fourth and most treacherous form of rejection is to ditch your team altogether and hitch your colours to the mast of a new one. Most of us can remember those annoying kids at school who would suddenly announce that they had abandoned their losing team and arrived in a brand new duffle coat festooned with the livery of whichever mob happened to be top of the ladder. I can recall a couple of deluded youngsters who turned their backs on Sturt after the great illegitimacy of the 1978 SANFL Grand Final and, without wanting to sound too dramatic, there is a special place in hell for them.
So here we are. We’re just about to kick off round three - there’s a lot of footy left for the year, to use a sporting cliche - but already our thoughts are turning to straying.
To help clarify things I’ve distilled my thoughts into the following key areas:
1. Being almost good enough is psychologically worse than being no good at all.
This is easily the most annoying feature of being an Adelaide supporter. Imagine being a Freo supporter right now - their fans know that they’re almost a joke team in the competition but right now they’re two from two, and probably feel the same way we did after 1997-1998. The difficulty Crows supporters have is that every year we think (and often play) like we’re the real deal, and then go nowhere. Just as Richmond is preordained to come ninth every year it appears to be our lot in life to come fifth and then lose to Collingwood, despite being several hundred goals in front at half time. It wouldn’t matter if it was any other club, but the Crows’ chief function in September seems to be to give Eddie McGuire a chance to punch the air for joy throughout the final term of the preliminary final. This is unacceptable. We have all seen it enough.
2. As a footy coach, Neil Craig makes a terrific PE teacher:
I’m all for fitness and it may well be a cause for pride that the Crows have the best cardiovascular systems in the southern hemisphere, it’s just they can’t win finals and, this year, can’t win anything. If Craig was less interested in star jumps and more interested in actual tactics we would probably be a bit more competitive. At present we have a team that is well-placed to remake the Richard Simmons aerobic workout videos but can’t win a game of footy. Personally I would be happy to see some old-style coaching, none of this zen-like contemplative business, but something more in the David Parkin mould where the coach vomits, faints and then smashes his own head in with a Bakelite telephone in the final minutes of the game.
3. Crows fans can be kind of annoying too:
Apparently the Crows kicked two goals in a row in the third quarter against Sydney on Sunday, as evidenced by the flurry of crocheted knee rugs in the outer as old ladies started talking about “momentum”, even though we were still some six goals behind. More than other club, we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to our own performance, and will often regard a 30 point loss as close, sheet it home to bad umpiring, a couple of funny bounces, when the reality is we were gone for all money and no excuses can be made.
4. You can do a lot in 60 hours:
As we start round three, this is really the point which tests your loyalty. With another 20 weeks to go until September, and knowing the utter psychological devastation that would be wrought by another preliminary final loss to Collingwood, or worse, a sputtering Richmondesque limp towards ninth, do we really want to structure every weekend for the next five months around guaranteeing our own misery? 20 games equals 60 hours, and that’s not factoring in the other matches that you have to watch, especially later in the year when we’re a “mathematical chance” of making the eight.
These are treacherous thoughts and obviously if the Crows win the next few games we shall never speak of them again. But treacherous as it sounds I don’t know if I want to devote a minimum of 60 hours to keeping myself annoyed, frustrated and ultimately gutted at the end of the year.
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