JOY OF AN ARMCHAIR AUSSIE RULES FAN

Yvonne Fein is a playwright and novelist, editor and lecturer. Her writing has appeared in journals and newspapers locally, in the US and the UK. Among her works are the novel, April Fool, published by Hodder, and the play, Celebration of Women. She's also a Demon fan and has penned this essay on following the footy -

JOY OF AN ARMCHAIR AUSSIE RULES FAN by Yvonne Fein

With the advent of laptop computers and the internet, vicarious living of the armchair variety took a great leap forward.

Armchair travellers can now go anywhere in the virtual universe, armchair warriors can fight battles of the future as well as the past and armchair fashionistas can visit the latest haute couture parades as they happen.

No longer do that have to resort to buying ruinously expensive magazines or waiting a whole season for the trends to reach all the way down to the Antipodes.

I confess I have never been a great fan of the armchair mode of experience. I like my travels to be replete with sensory experience, and I have no interest in wars past, present or future, except perhaps with a view towards working out how best to avoid them.

Nor have I ever been a fan of watching fashion. I'm more from the trying-it-on-and-buying-it-whenever-possible school.

I admit, therefore, to a certain amount of surprise, at the immense enjoyment I find myself gleaning from being an armchair Aussie Rules follower.

Although I barrack for Melbourne, I have only ever been to one match. Persuaded to attend by my beloved in our courting days, when he was still trying to find out what really excited me, by half-time we had both worked out that live footy wasn't it.

Nevertheless, these days I will happily join him in front of the telly to watch the final half hour of any given match. Not that I'd ever watch alone. Where’s the fun in that?

One of my chief pleasures is delivering a running commentary on the state of the game and basking in the surprise my beloved unfailingly exhibits at my profound knowledge of tactics and statistics.

(My daughter, who occasionally reads over my shoulder as I write things, generally providing moral and creative encouragement, has just informed me that she's about to expire from acute boredom and is walking way in profound disillusionment. All I can do is continue in the hope that my readers will not be similarly afflicted).

An even greater surprise came to me when I found an even more intense way of enjoying the play. And I use the expression, "the play" advisedly, for it is high drama indeed.

I made this discovery having arrived home one afternoon after driving into Caulfield from one of Melbourne's outer suburbs and realising that for the duration of the entire journey, I'd been listening avidly to a match being called by the ABC’s Radio 774.

Yes, believe it or not, even better than the televisual experience is wireless footy.

The gentlemen who call the game infuse it with a great deal of personal excitement and passion. At slow moments, they exercise a wonderfully laconic wit that seems to me to be quintessentially Australian and, best of all, they know their subject so well - and, I suspect, also have the information of internet statisticians at their fingertips - that they can regale their audience with fascinating snippets of trivia.

Like what happened to Dustin Fletcher in Essendon's clash against West Coast at Subiaco Oval. Or what the penalty was that was given to Alistair Lynch after his fight with Darryl Wakelin during the 2004 Grand Final match?

They can even tell you the name of the Sydney trainer who died due to a heart attack in the final quarter of the Swans match against the Kangaroos.

None of this sounds all that riveting as I type it now, but at the time, I was absolutely captivated by and immersed in this radio world of blokedom.

It was friendly, it was good humoured and even if my time might have been better spent listening to a political digest from the BBC on the ABC's News Radio station, it was surely a victimless crime.

Even this morning, in the aftermath of Geelong's grand final victory, there I was, on the way to my parents' house, tuned into Lindy Burns in conversation with a reporter out at Kardinia Park who was interviewing football tragics queuing up to make sure they got in early to an event no one was sure was actually going to take place.

Would the Geelong team make a morning-after appearance on their home ground? No one knew but they were queuing up just in case.

And I was listening to them giving their reasons. I heard a teacher from the Alice, who had come down for the weekend to see her beloved team take the flag for the first time in 44 years, admitting on air that she had had too much to drink last night.

I heard old men saying it was the best day of their entire lives and I heard young men weeping with joy.

I'm not sure what it means, this vicarious pleasure I take in a game I've never played and only once gone to the MCG to watch.

I don't understand why it fills me with such pleasure or why I feel so entertained when I listen to its aficionados expounding its finer points. Still, there it is.

It's not such an intense experience that I'll miss it in the off season, but maybe that's because I know I'll have many long, lazy summer drive-times to listen to Radio 774’s broadcasting of the cricket.

Bring it on!