New football fan?

This isn't a photo of us watching Sydney FC play on Friday night.

One excellent example of optimism is taking a three-month-old baby to a second soccer match after missing 80 per cent of the first game she went to because, at various stages, she was cold or hungry or had a wet nappy or didn't like the noise and needed to be walked around.

It was almost worth it though: at her second game, Winnie only needed two new nappies, one feed and confined her screaming to 20 minutes. She did spew on my nearest neighbour who asked to hold her for a while* but, on the upside, she fell asleep for the final 15 minutes and had to be woken up to go home. I reckon I saw 30 minutes of the game.

*probably also a season tickedtholder. I wonder if she'll be back...

NOT sulking

In case you're wondering, I'm NOT upset that the Socceroos were beaten by Japan in the Asian Cup quarter final.

I'm NOT cross at Vince Grella for getting sent off, leaving his team mates to struggle on with ten men for a really really long time.

Really I'm not.

Let's just look at Winnie's favourite toy instead of talking about it anymore.



Scary, isn't it?

She looks up at that for ages and shakes it by its crinkly skirt.

She'd eat it if she could.

Twelve weeks old and already I don't understand her!

Four Bloody Nil*

Looks like I was WRONG yesterday about the Socceroos crashing out of the Asian Cup.

But I really really really don't mind.

Lucas Neill is still a twit though. Wish I'd got the mini-Viduka instead now.


* With apoogies to Michael Palin's Gordon Ottershaw.

No hope

Wish I'd waited till AFTER last Friday to order Beloved a Socceroo figurine for his bithday.

Then I wouldn't have caused us to have a miniature Lucas Neill at home who'll constantly remind us of his pointless RED CARD against Iraq and how Australia won't actually have any defenders when they take on Thailand tonight* and we'll crash out of the Asian Cup and soccer will go back to being slightly behind LAWN BOWLS in levels of spectator interest** and I won't need to fret about taking Winnie to the next WORLD CUP in South Africa because we're not going to qualify for anything ever again.

At least I didn't decide to order a mini Mark Schwarzer.

*I mean GOOD defenders. We'll have people there but they won't stop many of the other ones from running along wherever they want to be.

**Beloved keeps saying that the Socceroos weren't fired up because there were only about three fans at each of the games they've played. We'd talked vaguely about going over but soon realised we had absolutely no idea how to take a newborn to a stadium much less how to get her to Thailand without a truckload of things babies need. It was all too hard. But that doesn't excuse the other 10,000 people who went all the way to Germany last year. They can't all have had kids.

Che's Boys?

Last night, we went to see Sydney FC play against the Urawa Red Diamonds in the Asian Clubs Champions League - a strange offseason competition that they got into by winning the 2005-06 season even though they didn't do so well last season. In the first stage, they have to play teams from China, Indonesia and Japan.

This team is from Japan, probably from a place called Urawa. I know almost nothing about them (and can't really get much info from their website because of tragic monolinguism) except that they're the richest club in Japan, have a wages bill for players of $15 million and Sydney was expected to lose this game. (They didn't!! It was a draw!! hurrah!! But that's not the point of the post.)

One of the good things about the game was that about 1000 Japanese fans seemed to have flown in to be there at one end of the ground in their red shirts (the local Japanese fans were scattered throughout the stadium).

They were great to watch because, like every other group of Japanese fans I've ever seen, they take it all terribly seriously and are very um committed to helping their team's performance any way they can. They all seemed to wear ALL the team regalia - shirts, scarves, badges. They had three times as many banners as the Sydney fans in the Cove (even though our fans had two very fetching banners with half of the Harbour Bridge on each side that they passed over their heads until they joined in the middle. Excellent work!). They sang a dozen different songs in at least two languages IN UNISON for several minutes at a time. They had coordinated arm gestures. They had drums. In the second half, the front three rows took their red shirts off and waved them above their heads. If fans can really help a team, the Red Diamonds should have won 6-0. (Which makes me think my footy watching strategy of sitting down most of the time, paying attention to the game and occasionally shouting out useful suggestions like "pass it that way, twit" is likely to be just as effective in motivating the teams I support)

Anyway, one of the Urawa Reds banners just didn't seem quite right. It was an enormous picture Che_Guevara (like on all those tshirts from the Korda photo) with "BOYS" underneath. It could have meant Che's Boys or Red Boys.

Either way it seems strange to think of the richest club in Japan endorsing the Cuban revolution. Wonder what would happen if they took that banner to games in the US.

Staying out late to watch telly

Some days I feel very idealistic. I dream about reducing my footprint on the earth even further below the Australian average than it already is because I can go weeks without using a car, I live in a flat, I buy Safe toilet paper and I'm too indecisive to buy new clothes very often. (Please bear with me. I realise this assessment is delusional and can't be fixed unless I install a worm farm on my balcony to compost household waste, persuade the cat to live off local insect life, work out how to isolate the air conditioning from my office and convert to green power even though it will double the power bills).

Other days, high faluting principles seem a bit too hard.

One of the principles I've been persuaded to adopt is not to get Pay TV (evil mind numbing commercialism, think how many books you can buy for $50 a month, we watch quite enough dross on free to air etc etc.) This means that the only ways we can see Sydney FC play when they're not at their home ground is to travel long distances to away grounds or find a pub with Foxtel. And I haven't actually kept a running tally of how much we spend on beer in the interests of saving money on pay TV.

Usually finding a pub is ok unless they don't want to swap their tellies over from the cricket or rugby or fashion TV. Usually SOMEONE will agree to show it and, if it's an important game, we can go to proper offical club screenings at the casino. At least they turn the sound up.

But last night it was all a bit hard when the team was playing in China. From 10:00pm. On a school night. When I was tired. I couldn't help but wonder why I was hanging on a bar stool when there was a perfectly good telly all on its own at home that could show me the game if we weren't so very PRINCIPLED. And it wouldn't notice if I wore pyjamas.

To change the subject entirely, last week I read a gently wonderful book called The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg. It was about the way people love poetry for different reaons and whether poets' intentions matter and how myths about poets can arise. It's also about finding love in odd places and being brave enough to change the direction of your life. I quite liked the cover (which is this picture above) because all the things on it are important to the plot (and goldfish are cute) but the colleague who lent it to me thought that it had made the book not sell very well. You also learn an awful lot about Emily Dickinson and her work.

Spectator sports

Been a bit despondent since having a bird's eye view of this "brawl" on Friday night. One of the Sydney players was sent off for a shove of less force than I get from strangers on train platforms every couple of weeks* while the ref didn't seem to notice half a dozen punches and headbutts from Newcastle players.

And then the extremely parochial crowd started to yell "go home Sydney" (all right, two people near us) and I suddenly really really wanted to drive straight back down the F3. It was so unfair! We didn't say that the previous week when they visited us! So now, even though I thought they deserved to win and have had a brilliant comeback this season and have the best designed team colours and supporters' stuff in the A-League, I really hope they lose really horribly next week.

Can't imagine what it would be like to be in the sort of football crowd where they use teargas and people die.

The good news is that now we don't have to worry about trying to get tickets to the final.

My mood lifted a bit today when I went to a reading by David Malouf at the newish library in Customs House. Very civilised people go to book readings. Even though there weren't enough chairs, there were no fisticuffs at all. Everyone smiles and listens quietly then claps at the end. Maybe football games should start with a bit of poetry reading.

*inadvertantly, I'm sure, at least some of the time, maybe. But they're usually from young men with headphones in their ears pretending they can't hear the pushees' protests. When I'm a whitehaired purple-wearing octengenarian I plan to pull headphones off these young men and tell them they should have better manners. At this age I'm worried that they might punch me.