That Unfamiliar Feeling

This guy goes alright

As I write this I am sitting on Jetstar flight 513 to Melbourne as I prepare to watch my beloved Rabbitohs compete in the finals. I’m also visiting my sister and her new puppy, but you don’t care about that. This experience is certainly unfamiliar to me and most Rabbitohs fans under the age of 35 or so. Sure everyone knows that the Rabbitohs haven’t won the Grand Final since 1971 and that we have only even competed in one finals match since 1989, but some people don’t realise that the Rabbitohs haven’t won a finals match in my 27 years on this earth.

Now obviously there is no guarantee at all that we will see a victory in 2012, but with a guaranteed double chance, the second of which is a home game, I would like to believe there is a pretty decent chance you will see the Rabbitohs in the preliminary final in two weeks time. A friend of mine (a Roosters fan no less) already texted me suggesting we are already only one win away from a grand final, as he sees it as being nigh on impossible for us to lose both of our next two games. I wish I had his confidence.

Sure I do think we are a good chance to qualify, but there is also a chance we repeat the efforts of 1989 with back to back losses leading to elimination and fans wondering what happened. Hopefully no current Rabbitoh ends up being remembered as the 2012 Steve Mavin.

As I wrote previously, I still am conditioned to be pessimistic about the Rabbitohs, even as we are firmly entrenched into this new era of professionalism under Michael Maguire. Then again, if I thought we were certainly going to lose on Saturday, I wouldn’t be on a plane to Melbourne right now (that may be a lie; after all I’m still visiting my sister).

Anyway, the feeling it seems that I and other Rabbitohs fans have right now is one of excitement, but also restlessness. There is the old saying “Act like you’ve been there before”, but the problem is we haven’t been there before and thus we are acting accordingly. The whole concept of having to wait and find out when our game is so we can book finals tickets and flights etc was completely foreign to myself and my other Rabbitohs fan friends. Within a few minutes of the game being announced, I had three texts from friends about flights and tickets and when we were heading down etc. We’re like kids in a candy store, only if the kids had been driving past the candy store every day without going inside, only now are we allowed to go in and buy a lolly. We just hope that lolly tastes like victory and that the players are better than we are at acting like they’ve been there before.

Glory Glory fellow Rabbitohs. Enjoy your lolly.

About Last Night

No caption necessary

As I write this, it is about 20 hours since Adam Reynolds scored the winning try for the Rabbitohs against the Roosters, in a match where the existence of karma and even maybe Newton’s third law were proven beyond reasonable doubt. Yes I know, we already knew about the Newton one.

When I woke up this morning I wanted to write something, anything, to sum up what being at the game last night was like for a Rabbitohs fan. Unfortunately, I sat down and was still speechless. How does one put into words something like this?

Having been on the losing end of the exact same loss in round 1, I know how it feels to be on the other end of this sense of euphoria and bliss. But, it’s having gone through that feeling, which makes this feeling all the more special.

There is a part of me that feels sorry for my friends who support the Roosters. I can empathise with how they felt last night and today, having been there only a few months ago. However, another part of me feels that they deserve to go through it, as the counter balance to their euphoria and joy from the previous encounter. Plus, they are Roosters fans; I never want them to be happy.

I wrote recently about going through the highs and lows of being a sports fan in a short period of time. That day it was in reference to Cadel Evans' failed attack, but it pales in comparison to the roller coaster of emotion that all 20,000 people at Allianz stadium went through last night.

Rabbitohs fans are not conditioned to believe that those sorts of results will happen in our favour. We are scarred not only by losses like round 1, but years of missed opportunities, bad bounces and players who didn’t know how to win. Not anymore. This really is “new Souths” and the fact that the 13 guys on the field wearing cardinal and myrtle did believe that result could happen; it has now spread to the entire fan base.

Watching the players embrace not only each other, but also the fans in the “Burrow” shows that in an industry where players often are just mercenaries, these guys not only get how much we as fans care, but they care equally as much.

It was fitting that the winning try (and goal) was scored by Adam Reynolds. Not only has he been a perfect reflection of the change and improvement in the club throughout this season, but you couldn’t find anyone in that stadium who was more of a Rabbitoh than he. It was a moment every fan grows up dreaming of and if it couldn’t be me wearing the 7 jersey and scoring that try (because I’m the obvious alternative.... maybe I’ll even fill in when he plays for NSW next year) then I’m so glad it was him.

Whatever happens through the rest of this season, whether we go all the way or simply bow out in the finals series, I will never forget being at that game last night and really, isn’t that what being a sports fan is all about?

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.