by Miriam Sved
At school he has a double period first up with his year ten group, which would usually be good sport after a big win. All the kids are footy nuts. They make a point of watching Ant’s VFL games and giving him shit about them – the better Ant has played the harder his little bastards rib him.
‘I reckon Crawley was all over you in the second half, Mr Ehlroy,’ Zac Reynolds shouts when all the kids are grouped in the PE block, ready to go out and run off some of the hormonal overflow.
‘Yeah, Mr Ehlroy,’ Tony Haddad says. ‘That mark you took on him in the third quarter was pretty soft.’
They are meant to be standing in rows in the cavernous concrete space, but Ant is not strict about that sort of thing and instead they are bunched together in a skittery mass of shorts and lank hair and enthusiasm, their upturned faces showing clearly what their big talk amounts to: hero worship. He would normally stand his ground and give something back for them to chew on; tell them, for instance, how Jordan Crawley kept trying to win the marking contest with an elbow in Ant’s solar plexus, so that Ant spent the whole game attacking the ball while defending his gut. They’d love that. But something about the whole thing sours in his throat today – their adulation, and his responding impulse to show off. Ant likes teaching. He is good at it, especially with the help of footy, which has always given him a leg-up in the psychological warfare of winning over teenagers. Other teachers have to battle for their respect, but every year, every new group is the same: as soon as Ant reveals he is a footy player they are his. He sees now that in winning them over so effectively he has also won himself over, and lost some crucial edge of desperation. These boys with their petty dreams have convinced him that he’s already a winner. He doesn’t tell them anything about Jordan Crawley, or about the week of prep for the grand final or the meeting with Cob on Wednesday. He sends them off running laps of the oval, and when they come loping back around the near bend he shouts at Michael Richardson, the fattest kid in the class, who always lags behind.
*
There is only light training for the week leading up to the big VFL game – strategy with some cardio on Monday night, easy field sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. No morning sessions. This is unfortunate; it leaves Ant with nothing to distract him from the state-wide echo chamber of hype about the AFL finals.
Every footy show – and it seems there is a footy show on every moment of the day – every talk show and newspaper and news bulletin, even the normally dull safety of the ABC evening news: all of it blares with competing headlines about the last fortnight in the year’s AFL season – much of it centring on his, Ant’s, AFL team: whether they will keep the same players and structure, whether they can maintain the intensity after their brutal, rocky season, whether Cob has anything new up his sleeve. And every time Ant switches on the radio or the telly to this chorus of speculative hype, he gets a complicated rush of adrenalin. Those desperate fantasies, almost sexualised in the heat they generate throughout his nervous system, have returned. He watches the same two commentators discuss possible changes to the defensive structure of the AFL team, and running above their quasi-religious musings about zonal defence versus man-on-man, Ant aurally hallucinates a whole different conversation, in which the ferrety bloke says, Of course it’s time that Cob looked beyond the same tired list of players and drew some fresh strength from the talent in his affiliated VFL team, and the piggy commentator, nodding vigorously, says, It’s about time Ant Ehlroy was given his shot in the senior team. Personally, I don’t understand why they’ve kept him down in the VFL; he should’ve been elevated back in ’06 or ’07.
Interrupting this intoxicating fantasy, Mal calls out from the kitchen, ‘D’you want onion on your hotdog?’ and Ant is slammed back into the reality of his life, his destiny jolted out of him, floating free. At these times he could almost cry from the powerful longing, almost like nostalgia, for all he doesn’t have – which often leaves in its wake a dark hatred for the whole AFL complex, the whole thing. He has stopped taking his father’s semi-regular calls, unable to tolerate the old man’s self-congratulatory tangents about his glory days in the League. He can’t talk to Mal either – can’t talk to her about sport at all, and is careful to take evasive measures as soon as she brings up the AFL finals or the grannie or the VFL team. His team.
The only relief from this stew of fantasy and resentment comes from thinking about the meeting on Wednesday, with his coach, Larkin, and the senior coach, Cob. He knows the meeting will be about making adjustments to the VFL game in the lead-up to the AFL’s prelim final. Putting the VFL team to its primary use, as a testing ground. Tactics get practised and refined; rookies get blooded. Ant has often resented playing for an AFL-affiliated team, envied stand-alone VFL sides who are able to fight for their own wins with the tactics and players that work best on the day; but now the fact of his AFL affiliation is a lifeline with which he hauls himself through the anxieties of this week. That meeting on Wednesday: the meeting with the great man around whom all his fantasies turn. He has pinned some big hope to it. He can’t quite look straight at this hope, knowing that it might waver and collapse. The next few weeks will be crucial to the club’s draft decisions. He trains hard on Monday night and does gym work on Tuesday, unable to follow Larkin’s advice to go easy, to rest and fuel up. He is training for Cob and McFadden. They will get wind of how hard he has worked, and he will say something to Cob at the meeting on Wednesday. He is not sure what; something that makes the coach stop for a moment and look at him, really consider him. He may never be the most skilled player on the list but he is hard-working and determined, and he has such clear-eyed insight into the game – he was practically brought up in the game. He is an asset.
*
Of course when the Wednesday meeting comes it is not as Ant imagined at all. He is not feeling like an asset. After a long day at school, wrangling with the kids who are all on a gabbling high about the AFL finals, Ant feels deflated and grey and overwhelmingly grown-up. And anyway, it is not a proper meeting, just a couple of minutes grabbed in Larkin’s office. Ant and Larkin are there first, and when Cob arrives he doesn’t even sit down, just hovers near the door bobbing like some grim marionette. He is a surprisingly small man – surprising because there is a patina of power around both his person and his reputation as a hard nut. His brows are furrowed. Ant thought that was just an expression, but there is no other word for what Cob’s eyebrows are doing as they cling close together.
Cob says, ‘I want you to switch the backline to a zonal defence this weekend.’
Larkin, sitting behind his desk, his body alert and rigid, says, ‘Sure, Cob, sure.’
‘We might mix it up in the prelim if they put two talls down front. Allows the defenders to cover more ground.’
Larkin nods vigorously. ‘We mixed it up early in the season. Ant’ll keep the backline to the structure.’ Nodding at Ant, who is hung up on the two coaches’ body language and watching this meeting flood quickly away into the gutter.
‘Good,’ says Cob. ‘Right.’ He stands in the doorway for another moment, shoulders slightly hunched. Ant wonders if he will ever retire, and if he will drop dead from it all the moment he does. Then the senior coach straightens up, encompasses them both in a minimalist nod and is gone.
Larkin looks frazzled, as if he has had an encounter with live electricity.
‘You got that, mate?’ he says. ‘I’ll give the guys a heads-up before training tonight but you’ll have to stay on ’em on the field. Zonal defence.’
Is there a hint of seditious disappointment in the coach’s voice? A zonal structure will not work well for the VFL boys, who have got good results all year from man-on-man. Larkin walks the same line as Ant and all the rest of them: the line between playing to win, and playing to help another team, the AFL team, win. Ant feels tired looking at the coach.
He says, ‘Got it. Zonal.’ And stands up to leave.
Larkin looks up and focuses properly on Ant. ‘Maybe this year, eh?’
Ant doesn’t know which of the two of them he is talking about. Larkin is also doing this job with the hope of scoring a role in a senior club, coaching at AFL level. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he says, feeling his destiny shrink from him like the wrong skin.
*
The week before a grand final – even a VFL grand final – would usually be taut with tension and excitement, but for the rest of the week Ant finds he cannot access much of either. He goes through the motions of training that night, and another light session on Thursday, keeping the encroaching knowledge at bay through an emotional squint, not focusing properly on anything. Mal, sensitive to the psychological trials of approaching a big game, treats him delicately, not pushing him to share much of anything at home, doing an unusual amount of cooking and cleaning. The fact that she is approaching her own big game the week after the VFL grand final – approaching it with the hard-working equanimity that is her hallmark – is not lost on Ant. It presses on the particular pinpoint within the broader sore spot that is his playing psyche: the suspicion that Mal is better than him. That inherently, constitutionally, despite his lofty genetic destiny, Mal is the one more suited to a winner’s life.
Mostly, though, it is not too hard to think nothing, to walk through this loaded week in a narrow mental corridor, only peripherally aware of the acoustics of his life beyond. The walls of the corridor hold through two training sessions and all the desperate footy banter of the kids at school, through the escalating pitch of anticipation about the AFL preliminary final, through to Saturday, game day, and the pre-game pep talk from Larkin – a confused effort that swings between dream-building (‘You boys do this for your families, for your pride, for yourselves’) and uncomfortable pragmatism (‘I want you to remember that you’re part of a bigger campaign to win the AFL flag. We have to fall back into a zonal defence, that’s your primary responsibility this game – one of your primary responsibilities’). The stadium is half full – more people than Ant has seen at the rest of the VFL games combined. Mal will be up there somewhere, in the team seating area, watching him chase down his destiny. His destiny. His destiny.
It is only after the first bounce that the walls of the mental corridor start to show signs of dissolution. Running around in the first minute of the game after a big lug of a full-forward – a guy called Stewart Ramsay, part-time AFL player – Ant thinks, What am I doing here? His body plays on capably, deflecting a high mark over Ramsay’s right shoulder then peeling off to cover his defensive zone as the head coach instructed. Cob, leaning on the doorframe during that blink-and-you’d-miss-it meeting, his eyes darting from Larkin to some nightmare to-do list floating in his own field of vision. He never properly looked at Ant, not once.
Still his body plays on – spoiling another mark and shepherding Ramsay so that Riesling, at half-back, can get the ball forward – while the realisations come at him. Cob barely knows he is alive – registers him, if at all, as a disappointing father–son vacancy. The vacancy where Ant thought his destiny would take him. Ramsay gets a run on him of a few steps and takes an overhead mark, and lines up for the easy goal Ant has given away. Ant waves his arms frantically in front of the big full-forward, as if he could distract the future from its course: his own future, marked by the ball’s clear path through the central posts. A cold stone of truth is waiting for him at the other end of that kick: the stone that has been sitting hard in his gut these last few days. He will never be drafted.
He is twenty-eight years old and this season will be his ninth playing for a second-tier team. He will never play for the AFL.
For a few seconds or maybe a minute he stands gasping with it, a temporary void in the flowing movement of the game, which goes on around him oblivious. But no, not oblivious: now there is a runner, the yellow bearer of deliverance, an older guy Ant knows from the locker rooms who bounds up to him and whispers theatrically, ‘Larkin wants you on the bench.’ Of course Larkin hasn’t missed the disastrous run of play, and now Ant standing like a spare prick while his defensive zone languishes. He jogs off behind the runner, not really caring. This shame is only a theoretical thing that cannot touch him in his freeze-dried moment of realisation. He will never be drafted.
He gets to the benches where Larkin, down from the box, gives him a long look that might be meant to convey anger but only manages incomprehension.
He checks the scoreboard: four points down.
‘Have a rest,’ Larkin says. ‘You obviously need it.’
What would Cob say or do in the face of that bald defection of duty out on the grounds? Ant thinks, Larkin will never make it either. He will never coach AFL. And then, while he watches a run of play around the near boundary, he examines this proposition from above, and his own reaction to it. He doesn’t feel sorry for the coach, who will never achieve his dream. Doesn’t feel much of anything. Experimentally, he tries the same with his own realisation: placing it behind his eyes and stepping back. He will never be drafted.
Amazingly, there is a rush of fresh air, a door blown open somewhere inside his skull. He will never be drafted. He actually whispers it to himself, quiet enough so that no-one around him in the busy stasis of the dugout can hear. I will never be drafted. There it is again: relief.
The run of play he has been watching has looped back on itself, the ball being fought over just metres from where he is sitting, until one of the rookies, Dooley, breaks from the pack and gallops it into the half-forward. He dodges around two defenders and executes an amazing kick to himself, barely inside the boundary, before booting it to their full-forward. On the benches the guys around Ant are on their feet, clapping as the full-forward, Lewis, kicks the easy goal, and Ant finds that he is on his feet too, cheering and watching the celebratory leaps of Dooley and Lewis and the rest of them out there. The explosive joy in those players’ bodies, the boys who have just put together a goal to pull them back out in front of the contest. Ant feels it in his own body, a shot of adrenalin. When was the last time he felt such joy in the game, on or off the field? Maybe never.
The boys maintain their intensity for the rest of the quarter, pulling away by three goals. Larkin finally lets Ant back on in the second, his legs springy and fresh, arms a crucial inch longer than his opponent’s. He spoils a high ball overhead and chases it down, sprints it into the midfield – a slight misdirect on the handball, but it doesn’t matter. He is done berating himself for mistakes on the field.
By halfway through the second they have an untouchable lead, the boys around him playing with undiminished energy, his own revelatory momentum strong. Fuck destiny. The zonal defence collapses and Ant does not try to police it – the team has been playing one-on-one all year, it is a structure learned in their playing bodies, the parts of the brain where only instinct matters. Instinctively, Ant covers the full-forward as he tries to get a run, and when the AFL player gives up the chase and turns to wander back towards the goal square he looks exhausted. Does he have a destiny? Poor bastard. The ball swings back into the defensive fifty and Ant runs for an overhead mark and then boots it, thinking of what his dad is likely doing now. Down at the local, an AFL game on in the background but the old man not really watching it, using it only as backdrop to whatever story he is telling about his glory days. The angle of his dad’s shoulders, which has become more oblique with resentment and disappointment the further he has moved from those days, from the only part of his life that has mattered. Ant will call him tonight and encourage him to water the dying tomato plants in his yard.
They win the game easily, convincingly, without giving up their early momentum – the siren goes when the ball is being fought over in the midfield, and all the boys converge on the circle in a sweaty mosh with Ant near its centre. Half the crowd is on their feet. Ant looks up from the swarm of players: Mal will be up there somewhere, hooting and stamping with abandon. She would have made a terri
ble WAG.
The celebrations decelerate and the boys go around shaking opposition hands, patting backs. There will be speeches in the locker room afterwards and Ant thinks, uncharacteristically, that he will make one. He will say to the boys that they are top-shelf players. That none of them, today or into their futures, should think of themselves as second-tier. They are champions. He ranges over the many possibilities of his life: his kids at school and the wonderful shit they will give him about this game on Monday; and Mallory tonight, in her long unfeminine nightshirt, and Mallory out on the field with stick in hand, charging down the side line. And the surprising, obvious thought that overlays these: he and Mal should have a baby. What a beautiful, strong baby they would make together. He will say this to her, after she has talked him through the triumphs of this game. Jogging a slow glory lap around the field, slapping hands, waving at the respectably sized pockets of supporters in the stands. He will say to Mal that they should have a baby, soon, and he can look after it while she trains for the Olympics.
Game day
Grand final
I always get to the grounds early, even for an ordinary game. This morning I received a provoking text message from Tony O’Brien, the head fitness coach. It said, Be early and buckle up, gonna need all your potions for this one! The reference to potions seemed insulting, as did the inference that I would not have been early had I not been instructed by Tony. It was not entirely surprising, as Tony seems to have identified me as his enemy, possibly since I requested a meeting with the head coach, Leonard Cobar (‘Cob’), to discuss the team’s injury load going into the finals. Tony likes that kind of discussion to go through him.
