EGG and I have been together for a very long time and mostly it has been a happy time, except for one glaring little fault that EGG has (and it drives me mad)--he's a fair weather fan. Now he loves his sport, any sport, but he has been known to jump on the bandwagon of whatever sport we are doing well with.
Now we can mean anything--it can be an Australian team, a Queensland team, a Brisbane team, a worldwide team with a single Australian member (even if they only lived here for two weeks of their entire life)--it doesn't matter, just so long as we are winning. The Olympics sends him into a frenzy--he's an expert on judo, badminton and the high jump--any sport that might win us a medal. What he doesn't know about water polo since the Sydney Olympics? To his credit he sticks with his new team and its sport for a long time, but the thing that sends me crackers is that he never watched, read about, discussed that sport until we started doing well at it.
So it was a no-brainer really when I took him off to Q is for Queensland Roar because we are in the finals. Yes, Queensland with a long and lengthy history of two years in the comp, was in the finals. EGG had been talking about it all week and about how well we we doing.
So off we went with SSS in tow (she like her mother is not adverse to watching good looking boys run around a field for 80 minutes). But alas it almost fell through as a massive thunderstorm struck a half hour before kickoff and it looked like the Alphabet Family was going to be enjoying Q is for Queensland Rail for that is where we spent the first hour of our outing--stranded at Milton train station.
But it cleared and we joined the massive crowd for the kickoff. The atmosphere was tense, the crowd was cheering the home team and booing the opposition--gosh it was exciting, for about five minutes. I'm sorry, I just don't get soccer. I kept asking EGG why no one defended anyone and he tried to explain but then he gave up. The game must have been a bit too much for some of the players because they kept getting injured and then lay down on the ground trying to get the referee to wave around a piece of yellow paper. In fact that piece of yellow paper should have been an Academy Award considering all the acting that was going on. They called it injury, the fans called it milking a penalty, but me, I think they were just tired and needed a rest.
And why does the referee write all the bad things that the players do down in the little notebook he carries. It's 2008, surely they should use a Blackberry, or a PDA or at least a dictophone. Why don't they just look at the video replay?
Don't get me wrong though--I learned a lot. I learned a really cool chant that goes "North, south, east, west--this ref is dumb and deaf." I learned that when the goalkeeper from Queensland has the ball everyone chants gooooalllllkeeeeeper in a deep voice but when the opposition goalkeeper has the ball everyone yells "throw the ball you Sydney wanker". I learned that one from the delightful 9 year old fishwife sitting behind me. She's going to make some man very happy one day.
Anyway Queensland won 2-nil. EGG was beside himself. We'd won.
Q is for Queensland Roar--soccer is so boring.
