Almanac: Storm v Sea Eagles
In the end it was money that stopped me.
Travelling interstate to watch the boys battle out their prelim had looked the goods… but was a dream eventually dashed by harsh fiscal reality.
Between airfares, cabs, tickets and hotel room to crash in – not to mention beer money – I figured on being out of pocket at least a grand over the course of 48 hours.
And to be honest, it looked a hefty price to pay, especially considering I didn’t like my chances of coming away from the stadium with a smile on my face, anyway.
You see, the Preliminary Final is a strange beast.
It’s one step from the ultimate match of the season and can be enough to convince fans and scrutineers alike that the year has been worthwhile.
But it’s not the ‘granny’. There’s no lasting glory to be derived from a winning prelim.
In most cases, losing in the penultimate week isn’t a fantastic look, either.
It smacks of hastily spruiked intangibles like ‘guts and determination’, ‘passion’ and ‘spirit’, but can equally see the loser marked as a ‘dud’ or worse, a ‘choker’.
And with all this taken into account, in the days leading up to the 2012 preliminary finals, I was close to being a nervous wreck.
Consternation coursed around my body.
I spent far too many daylight hours (as well as valuable nocturnal time) thinking deeply on every last permutation that could impact the outcome.
Would it fall my way? Who knew? Definitely not the TV pundits. Maybe the bookmakers?
But even then, their analysis deals with fixtures in the cold, callous manner you might expect from a market analyst… they don’t consider the potential for romance or fairy tales in sport.
I do, but normally that fairy tale aspect takes on the same look. My team wins.
Sometimes I imagine they’ll win in the last minute. Sometimes I convince myself they’ll win by the length of the straight. Sometimes I get it right….
Just not this time.
But it’s not like it was going to be an easily done thing, anyway.
Compound the ravages of two previous finals hit-outs, an interstate road trip and the unquantifiable impact of players carrying injuries into a big match and the odds were pretty heavily stacked against.
Does that sound defeatist?
How about the fact my side was packing a first year coach and had lost our previous flag-winning boss to a cross-town rival?
What about the arse-clowns in charge of the video referral system?
If they hadn’t shanked us in the liver with their bullshit and buffoonery it might have been a whole different ball game!
It might have been. But it wasn’t.
And for all of those reasons, my decision to stay home on prelim weekend was prudent.
You see, the Swans were preened and purring whereas my Collingwood boys didn’t really move beyond fourth gear and were never going to worry the hosts who now face Hawthorn in the decider.
And there was you thinking I was talking about Manly the whole time!
But, that the contest was one-sided is just one of the similarities between the AFL match in Sydney pitting the Swans against the Pies and the NRL equivalent played in Melbourne between the Storm and Sea Eagles.
On the surface there were numerous parallels, the very least of which was them sharing the same slot on free-to-air television – allowing me to ‘look away’ from time-to-time as it became increasingly obvious the Pies were done for the year.
Going in favourites, the Storm (and Swans) spent large chunks of the year flying high, wobbling somewhat towards the back end of the home-and-away season before surging through the finals with barely a care in the world.
They went in to the Grand Final qualifier as heavy favourites having won the right to host their prelim after success in the first week of September action.
Manly (and Collingwood), however, had battled throughout the regular season, sometimes playing well but often relying on recall to get them over the line.
They are both recent champions after all, and on occasion it is little more than that ingrained grit and knowhow that chalks up the ‘W’.
The Swans veritably leapt from the blocks, leading to my first channel change of the evening after only 20 minutes of play.
Happily, I found that the Magpies weren’t alone in their struggles.
The Storm had taken to Manly in no uncertain terms and could have been out by further at the half had Cameron Smith not duffed a trio of conversions.
Manly, for their part, played horrible football during the first half hour.
If I had been told they’d done away with using resin on their hands to grip the ball, replacing it, unthinkingly, with personal lubricant, I could have believed it.
Tony ‘T-Rex’ Williams couldn’t catch cold, more through sloppiness and inattention than having tiny and immobile arms (like his namesake), while Jorge Taufua looked absolutely nothing like a professional footballer as he set about racking up four errors for the night, including a brace of early howlers.
The Storm, meanwhile, strung together a number of impressive passages and now look capable of bringing another (legit) premiership to Melbourne.
But as a contest, this one wasn’t long-lived.
Manly were in it – on the scoreboard, at least – until the early stages of the second half, but they never truly threatened.
The Sea Eagles fell further behind as the night unfolded.
And so did the Magpies.
Photo courtesy of Mark Nolan/Getty Images AsiaPac
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