Say Something...

As you can probably tell from the title, I decided to trudge my way to the footy last night. As is my want, my sis and I left the house late and showed up at the Dome near the end of the 1st quarter. As we approached the giant screen outside the ground, I squinted into the distance to try and figure out how much we were losing by... little did my eyes realise that I indeed was not suffering some sort of severe brain hemorrhage when the scoreboard read 7.1 to 0.4!

At this point in the narrative, if you happen to be reading this from some place that isn't Australia, you may be wondering what the hell I'm on about. You see, around this neck of the woods, the dominant form of gladiatorial combat is Aussie Rules Football, or Footy for short, due to our tendency to truncate any name to two syllables or less that ends in an 'a', 'o' or 'y'.
With most forms of football, the aim is to kick the ball between a pair of posts at the opposite end. But with our form of the game, you get a consolation prize should you fail to kick straight, which is where that little number after the dot comes in.
Why do we reward people for not being able to kick properly? Beats the crap out of me, quite honestly. But once you get past that minor tidbit, you can really begin to enjoy the game for the spectacle of the contests as the players struggle to gain and keep control of the ball. And if one thing's for sure, you don't argue the finer rules of the game with a rabid toothless diehard fan who's too drunk to be coherent. Top marks if you can identify the club I'm thinking of...

But anywho, back to my original topic. The game itself was very entertaining, with the Swans only being able to claw a goal back right until the 4th quarter, when all hell broke lose and they came within a kick of taking the lead. But some brilliant defence from our boys saw us home.

All in all, the match was pretty damned good, if not for this one kid who kept staring at me throughout the game. At first, he was looking at the delicious bag of food we had brought in to prevent ourselves from suffering a horrible physical death at the hands of starvation, as well as the even more excruciating demise of having to pay for food inside the stadium itself. I mean, paying a premium for hot food at a sporting event is considered the norm, but when you end up paying $12 for what can be barely described as a 'serving' of fish and chips, you really wonder why you bothered going in the first place.
Even after we had finished our food, he still found ways to pivot his face in my general direction. Sometimes he appeared to be looking at some of the North fans sitting behind me, but more often than not he ended up staring at me for no apparent reason.
At one point, after we had kicked a vital goal to prevent Sydney from coming back, I just decided to scream something along the lines of, "Yeah that's right, turn around and look at me now!" (I should've screamed all that in capitals, but really that's way too much... the Internet has enough people misspelling [hmm, my spell checker tells me there are two 'ss'es in that word... shows what I know...] words and capitalizing words or letters that need not be)

After the final siren sounded, the Sydney fans were the first to leave, as you could expect. I managed to snap a pic of my serial starer as he departed with the rest of the vanquished... there he is, in the striped top jogging down the steps (allegedly of course, 'Ach, you wanna get sued?').
Overall, it was a pretty good night to be at the footy, and it was definitely a good one for the 'Roos to win against the odds, if you believe everything you read in the papers. Personally I tipped them to win, which shows off my ability to foresee insignificant sporting events - a rare gift, I'm sure. Though I failed to tip the Hawks and the Pies... another so and so week in the tipping comp... 'sobs'. Hmm, this post is getting a bit long, must consider cutting it up next time, haha.