Grand final week is when sport hits its critics for six.
Think about it.
Australians who live thousands of kilometres away from each other in Perth, Townsville, Brisbane and Melbourne are interacting with each other in a way only sport can enable.
In this case sport being AFL and NRL, our two biggest football codes.
Everything has its place in life, but what other activity can produce something that’s talked about across this vast land for an entire week?
Other than national politics, that is.
Art exhibitions of all kinds, even the most wonderful ones do not go anywhere near the impact they have on the national psyche that sport does, especially on grand final week.
Think about it.
It doesn’t matter where you are in Australia right now, whether you are in a pub in Camden with mates enjoying a beer or at home in Glen Alpine watching the TV, listening to the radio or reading online news in your Liverpool office, only one thing seems to matter.
Well, two to be exact, because there are two grand finals, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney.
All the talk, the focus, is on who will win: Hawthorn their third in a row or the interstate raiders from Western Australia.
In Sydney at the Olympic Stadium, two Queensland clubs will clash for bragging rights in the NRL.
Will the Cowboys finally break their duck and win a premiership or will the Brisbane Broncos maintain their perfect grand final scoresheet by making it seven from seven.
[social_quote duplicate=”no” align=”default”]The actual fans of the four clubs will be doing it tough because they just want their team to win; but the rest of us are very relaxed and want the game itself to be the winner.[/social_quote]
In 2005 our local team made the NRL grand final and won it, beating the North Queensland Cowboys as it were, who counted among their troops a very young playmaker called Johnathan Thurston.
Leading into the ’05 grand final the focus was on the teams, but also a lot of it was on the geographic areas that supported these clubs.
In the case of the Wests Tigers I remember there were a lot of media stories about the south west, Macarthur and so on.
It just goes to show that there’s a lot more to sport than just sport, but it’s not always acknowledged.
As a matter of fact, when the spotlight is on sport these days it can be mostly the negative side of it.
That’s fine, but surely the time has come to give credit where it’s due and admit sport has been a wonderful unifying force in this great country of ours.
