Guernseys of sackcloth and ashes

15 July 2008

My Football Team Is Hopeless My team's motto is 'Born to Disappoint'. Well, it isn't really. But it ought to be. We measure our losing streaks in decades. Junior members ask grandparents when we last won. There's more silver in my teeth than in our trophy cupboard. Gravestones bear witness to our only premiership. Every year we leap for the heavens and flop in the gutter. Fortune despises us. Injury dogs our stars. Battlers make the side week after week while our best stagger about on crutches. If King Lear ever turns to umpiring he'll be assigned to our games. Should some unhinged bookmaker rate us hot favourites, we are moral certainties to collapse on match day. Our guernseys are of sackcloth and of ashes. We are depressed. We drink too much. We eat too much — except those who threw their false teeth at an umpire. I told the president to register the club as a charity. My membership is under review. The members wonder why they do it. I wonder why I do it. Life's hard enough without this mob to fret about. My football team is hopeless. But sometimes, just sometimes, after the pundits proclaim we'll be murdered, we go out and clean-up some outfit of silverspooners, pampered creatures who outspend us ten dollars to one, and play like it's the Grand Final of Armageddon. Then the defeats of all my seasons are lost, left to stumble through the ragged forests of our pennants, their naggings inaudible above the pounding waves of our songs, their sorrows forgotten in the rapture of a winter's afternoon made now, and forever, ours. Liniment Mist I knew him from his glory days when he flew along the wing borne on gusts of adulation and the ball seemed his alone while opponents plodded at his heels but now clutching a morning paper he shuffles across a road dusted with frost his quick breaths making little white puffs and he shivers like those blonded girls in short skirts who lingered on frigid evenings in scented shrouds of liniment mist outside the changing rooms of youth. B. N. Oakman writes poetry and short fiction that appears in literary magazines, newspapers and anthologies. An academic economist, he lives in Central Victoria and has taught at universities in Australia and England.

ARTS AND CULTURE

Guernseys of sackcloth and ashes

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