Defeat

Well...here it is the post you would have expected after last weeks success.

I think I have already established my familiarity with losing. I don't think of myself as a loser, never have, too much self love for that. But given my propensity for it in the fields of sporting endeavour you'd think I would be more able to talk about, flesh it out and give it the same attention to detail as my beautiful piece on Victory, which I have always felt estranged from.

I haven't lost out in the important things in life. I have a beautiful, spirited, sexy wife. Three wonderful, healthy, spirited children (see a connection there). Both my parents are still alive and my Mother in law lives outside walking distance from my warm, spacious home. I know what you are thinking, it hasn't all been rosy. My Brother in law is a Kiwi, but in the grand scheme of things...

But when it comes to sport I feel I am on the wrong side of the ledger. Sure I've had my moments. A bottle full of ribbons, many of them blue for being able to propel myself around a bumpy dirt track faster than most kids my age. A screamer of a catch that I watched all the way into the back of my glove when playing right field for the Moorabbin Panthers. Grand Final wins for Hardies Heroes, Super Ted and Eric and a boundary that flew off a top edge and soured over the slip cordon whilst filling in for the Naval and Military Club. But by and large I've always felt like an also ran in sports race of life. Actually documenting my successes like that makes me feel more accomplished than I did 10 minutes ago, but I digress.

We lost. A fuller compliment of "fit" players this week left me the option of having a few well timed runs (any more that about 3 minutes and I was shagged). Unfortunately I realised this too late after one of theirs ran around and away from me to score un-contested. It was time for the first of many interchanges. The game continued this way and we were down 3-1 at half time.

I felt we played better football (see I'm learning) in the second half. Neither team could penetrate the others defences for the first 15 minutes although many chances were offered and taken and play moved up and down the pitch. The final 5 minutes saw us run out of steam and the game was lost in a flurry of late shots 7-1.

Two quick paragraphs...and I really had to work to pad that out. Imagine how I would have regaled you with our magnificence had we been on the opposite side of that ledger. We still sat afterwards drank amber fluids, belched, farted and laughed (not always in that order) but without the same gusto as when we last met. Still the cares of the world were abandoned for a few hours, the retreat to boyhood that only comes with the company of men, stripped of their worldly encumberances. Defeat however is not so skilled as victory in banishing the concerns of my paternal friends. Life intrudes again until next we meet to chase that elusive suitor, Victory.