How do people react when the world is relentlessly beating them down again and again and again and again without any gaps for oxygen?
Sometimes life feels like you’re caught in a strong current at a surf beach. You continuously fight your way to a place where your toes can touch the bottom only for another wave to crash over your head and the current to drag you back to where you started – again and again and again and again.
What if you took that scenario, and added a crowd of 1,000 odd people cheering their hearts out in support of the waves?
That’s what it must have felt like to be the Bay Roskill Vikings as try after unanswered try was scored against them by their opponents, the Howick Hornets. After each try was conceded, they gathered together under the goalposts to wait for the conversion. The hurt and humiliation was written all over their faces. And each time, someone in the group had to come up with something to say that might have some small chance of picking everyone up.
After seven or eight tries, cliches like “heads up!” and “unlucky boys…” no longer have any positive impact and tend to get replaced with stone cold silence – the sound of utter defeat. Unless somebody can think of something a bit more attention grabbing that might lodge itself in people’s consciousness…
“There’s no place I’d rather be!” certainly lodged itself in mine.
There wasn’t the slightest hint of sarcasm in his voice. He absolutely meant it. Maybe it simply proved the old adage that the worst day fishing is better than the best day working. Or maybe it was something more than that…
“Stand up like men!” was another almost pleading instruction to the group after unanswered try number nine, accompanied by the backing vocals of the home team’s numerous and frenzied fans still demanding more blood.
How would YOU respond in that situation? I know what I’d do. Walk off the field, get straight into my car and go home to curl up in a nice hot bubble bath with a big block of chocolate and my rubber ducky. I don’t stand up like men. I stand up like shellfish.
But then, deep in the second half, it happened.
All the tools a footballer can possess were deployed in one attacking movement like all the tools a musician can possess are deployed in the third movement of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata.
He skips through a tackle, jinks around another. A side step, a faint, a dummy pass, a goose step, then an explosion of speed. A swerve left is followed by a big sweeping arc right before he drops the ball to his right foot for an exquisitely weighted looping chip kick that eludes the despairing reach of the last ditch defenders blocking his path and nestles itself snugly at the back of the in-goal area. The race to meet it is four against one but it’s our man who wins it.
The whole crowd erupted like an ever so slightly more working class version of a packed out Theater an der Wien audience that’s just been treated to the premiere of the most extraordinary piece of music ever written.
They might have ended the match 40 points in deficit, and the newspapers might tell you they lost, but in my mind the Vikings won.
Howick Hornets 48, Bay Roskill Vikings 8
The Fox and the Crow 