Pavlov’s Rabbit

It’s an understatement to say it hasn’t been easy being a Rabbitohs fan in the last 20 years or so. Both before and after readmission the team hasn’t been able to deliver on the field, even as they cleaned up their act and became one of the most professional clubs off the field.

We (yes I speak about the teams I support as if I am one of the players, deal with it) have only made the finals once since 1989, in 2007, when we lost convincingly to Manly at Brookvale Oval. In the last few years the Rabbitohs have finished just outside the top 8, always left to lament the ‘what ifs’ of winning one more game and making the finals.

                                               

As I write this the Rabbitohs sit at 7 wins and 4 losses and more importantly, sit 4th on the ladder and equal on point with the second placed Broncos. However, despite the fact that nearly halfway through the season the team seems destined to be playing finals footy in 2012, Rabbitohs fans like myself seem preconditioned to expect the worst, or at the very least, never get our hopes up.

Fan of good teams go into games with confidence, expecting to win. I know this because some of the other teams I support have actually had some success in recent years. But no matter how good the Rabbitohs are, I find myself going into every game a nervous wreck, just waiting for the other shoe to drop or something to go wrong. No lead ever feels safe; always concerned an important player is about to have their season ended by cruel injury, concerned a simple bounce of the ball will undo us.

Fan of some other teams, the Chicago Cubs for example, know exactly how I feel.

It’s an instinct that is so hard to block out after experience tattoos it into your mind and psyche. You can even feel it in the crowd, that nervous tension, which I think even the players feel and sometimes can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When there is a feeling in the air that a team will blow it, inevitably they do just that... until one day they don’t.

See, as a Boston Red Sox fan I had the same emotions about the Red Sox that I did the Rabbitohs. In fact the Red Sox history of losing was much more disheartening than the Bunnies. But all it takes is the team somehow, inexplicably beating the odds and winning as the Red Sox did in 2004 and again in 2007. Once that monkey gets off the back, it really is gone forever.

If the Rabbitohs were any other team, I would go into each game confident, knowing that we are not only as good or better than our opposition on paper, but we are most likely above them or equal with them on the ladder (after all we don’t play the Storm again in the regular season). But over the last few years the Rabbitohs always lost games when they were the favourite and so that feeling of expecting to win actually makes us even more scared than usual.

Hopefully by next year or the year after, that monkey will be lifted and Rabbitohs fans can go into each game without that fear. It would certainly do my heart a world of good.