Point

Arthur Streeton. ‘The National Game’ (circa 1889)

That there is all the time in the world, springtime and its rite, then summertime blues, to recover simply by reflecting on other phenomena, experience itself, upon the difference that is made through the difference, either way, of one point. That this season of multiple tactics and strategic breakouts, of inflated bladders and projectile egos, enacted with purpose from early and very close to perfection in daylight and nightlight, a time warp in which every day is a Saturday, now more literally than ever, should come down in the dying moments to a difference of one point. That the hopes and fears of all the years since first the promise of September victory entered the childhood perplex, are met in the turmoil and sponsored highlights and unstoppable pattern of run and snap and tap and knock leading to an exceptionally close thing one straight kick could change forever from down one point. That they would do it in that devil may care fashion, not just before, but now in the preliminary, not give in but take it up to the chancers in a furious spectacle of miraculous coordination, only to know it in the nerves, the seconds ticking to the siren, and that the gap, people, is one point. That the fantasy contests of boyhood, colossal scoreboards and towering marks of desirous dream, translate into a lifetime of reckonings with record book margins, their close alliance with the truth of experience, the closest of contests short of a draw, in which two forces of remarkably equal excellence must scramble in the final shadow stages to be the one on the winning side of one point. That hyperbole, all those slavish enthusiastic columns week-in week-out home-and-away to say they climb the heights, they stacks on the mill, they blind-turn the pass, they play the four quarters, they never surrender except for a patch there where they for a moment lost control slightly of the narrative, in spasmodic adjectives and limited verbs and select clichés, would come an end with but one point; not a summary, or even an ellipsis, but after all those delirious deadlines, those heady headlines, one solitary point, one effing point, can you believe it mate tell me I’m dreaming one point. That it takes but one panting pent-up player, pint-size or pontifical, to put one punt between the big sticks, is a far far better thing to do than not kick the big six: do it please, for all of us, just one straight as a die punt to pass by that imminent defeat by one point. [Part 2: ‘Point’ of the two-part poem ‘One Point’.]

Image: when Sir Arthur Streeton exhibited this work at the 9 x 5 Impressionists Exhibition at Buxton’s Gallery in Swanston Street, Marvellous Melbourne, in 1889, Australian football had been going over 30 years but the Victorian Football League still hadn’t been invented. It is therefore a matter of local chutzpah for Streeton to title his small painting ‘The National Game’, given the game had only just started infiltrating across colonial borders. The painting is historical proof that at the time only goals counted; behind posts and therefore the counting of behinds (aka those make-and-break single points) was introduced in 1897.