The bit I forgot

You might be wondering what I meant by the title of the previous post, but probably aren't.

I'd meant to ramble on until I reached the subject of football when I started, but I got bored and pressed the publish button.

As I said, I'm a foreigner, but an Australian so the football is next to irresistible. I fought it as hard as I could, but mostly because of the way in which football in this country intrudes so rudely on the cricket season. But since summer is such a lame thing, and so many cricket matches are abandoned, and since the English are so totally crap at the game any way it might be better if you (they) give up and cede the pitch to us - except for 'Ashes' tours down under every for years, purely for historical re-enactment purposes.

Then one night in the pub (as it happens the Orange Tree in Richmond in Surrey) which is better known as a rugby pub) I underwent a Conversion. I had been attempting for some time to forge an emotional connection which as any real football fan knows is the foundation of a life-time affiliation. I'd been failing but on that night a great club, a proud club, a front-running club poised to nick the title simply imploded. On that night I fell in love.

There was little bit of very belated teenage rebellion in this too. The family club, the club my grandfathers and grandmothers, my parents and uncles and aunts supported and support is one of the old VFL's* founder clubs and in the period up to 1964 one of the competition's most successful clubs. Since then not one pennant. Hm. Arch enemies and long term rivals wore a strip in black and white vertical stripes. Their name, reflecting their inner Melbourne base was derived from the part of the world wherein the club I fell in love is based. And the name of the Melbourne suburb was given in honour of a son of the North East. I fell in love with Newcastle United.

But I'll never be a proper fan and now I know it. Roy Keane is an animal (and if you don't believe me consult the poor bugger he crippled with that tackle Keane boasted about in his biography). He's also a grizzled old misogynistic sod who can't recognise that a wife's views have validity in any matrimonial decision making. But I have to concede however grudgingly that to this point he's not done a really crappy job in managing Sunderland**. You'll not that I'm uncomfortable because of the vile things Keane's done and said rather than his association with Sunderland itself. And that just goes to show how completely foreign I am.

Oh well.

* This is a reference to the Victorian Football League, precursor to the Australian Football League. The football played is Australian Rules Football - a game that isn't soccer or gridiron or rugby (of any code) or even Gaelic football. It is aerial ping-pong or ballet or mud-wrestling or licenced thuggery depending on one's perspective and the time of year.

** Never the less I cannot resist point out that the Blogger spell checker doesn't like Sunderland, but insists it should instead be Sunder Land. What ever that is.