Collingwood

 

Collingwood is into the Preliminary Final. This raises the agonising yet ecstatic possibility of finding our way into the Grand Final, with the unbearable chance of winning the Premiership. These prospects, collectively, are enough to keep the anxiety levels permanently in the red zone. What if we lose? Even worse, by one point? Equally terrifying, what if Collingwood wins? The word ‘miracle’ will haunt the mind for the next year, the next finals. People say Collingwood barrackers take the game too seriously, that we lack a sense of humour. What of it? The overriding principle is that Collingwood is the best team, wherever we finish on the ladder. Not only the best team, actually the only team, as other clubs merge into a polychrome cohort of club colours, drug scandals, and bad kicking. That’s their problem! Collingwood’s problem is that it’s a legend, a huge burden to bear, but we manage. The Preliminary Final is a precarious proof of this self-evident fun fact. Which is why Collingwood is perennially accused of hubris, arrogance, and pride, with accompanying disorders of self-delusion, megalomania, and colour blindness. Who’s arguing? When you’ve got it, flaunt it! Whether it’s a wooden spoon or a Premiership cup. It is this supreme indifference to anyone else’s feelings that engenders hatred towards Collingwood. This is not an intellectual proposition but is, so I am told often by those with these feelings, visceral. Hatred that is linked to laughter, the scornful, derisive laugh of those who enjoy watching Collingwood lose the Preliminary Final by one point due to a poor umpiring decision on the siren. Old Four Eyes strikes again! Chrissy Amphlett sings it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain and she’s just your average Geelong supporter. Collingwood, by comparison, is Dantesque. A Preliminary Final is purgatory, a promise of future Magpie misery or magnificence on a scale that, either way, transcends mere mortality. Perhaps this is why slurs are common, for example that the bulk of the Black-And-White Army are alcoholics. This is unverifiable, though there is no question that Magpie fans require a raft of coping mechanisms, especially given we treat Collingwood itself as a coping mechanism for life itself. I say all of this on the eve of the Preliminary not because I doubt the players’ ability to win; this is never in doubt. They are 20 of humanity’s finest. My concern is with the fans, will they survive, given we’re being dangled halfway between Heaven and Hell? You might laugh, but you don’t barrack for Collingwood. They say a Collingwood crowd is the only Earthly sound that penetrates into Outer Space, the acoustic equivalent of the Great Wall of China. It makes sense. Full-voiced expression of our collective psychodrama has no barriers. In space no-one can hear you scream, unless you’re Collingwood.