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Roger Rabbits with |
What to do? Blue and gold or gold and blue? That’s the dilemma.
Go with the head and back the Steamers? Or surrender to the heart and cheer Otago?
What a quandary. And don’t tell me to get over it, that it doesn’t matter. Cos it does.
As Bill Shankly, the legendary Liverpool manager, wisely remarked: “It’s not a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that”. And so it is for NPC semi- finals.
Split loyalties are tearing at my conscience. Steamers or Otago? Otago or the Steamers?
Those amiable paid tonsils, Country Sport Breakfast radio host, BK – Brian Kelly – told me I have no right to feel torn.
“You don’t qualify to be loyal to the Steamers. You’re an import from Dunedin. You need to have been in town 40 years to be a bona fide Steamers fan.” So not in my lifetime then – bummer! The fact BK’s from Whanganui seems to be irrelevant.
‘Dick’ them over
But I owe it to the Steamers because they promised me, and delivered, big time.
I was sitting in a cafe on a recent Saturday morning when a sturdy set of legs walked in, legs that could have doubled as bridge piers for a new harbour crossing. The Steamer was one big boy. I politely asked if he wouldn’t mind “dicking over” Waikato at Tauranga Domain the following day because I didn’t like Waikato.
“Exactly our plan,” smiled the legs. “I’d be delighted to.” And he did, 41-5. Oh, the joy! So Steamers, go to Dunedin with my blessings. That should be all they need.
The other side of me needs to remind you that the big, bold gold ‘O’ on the chest of the Otago shirt doesn’t stand for Otago. It stands for optimal, outstanding, out of this world, outlandish, outrageous.
And so, If I had a heart, I suppose a chunk of it would stop in Dunedin, my birthplace. Because while I sit here reveling in Tauranga, the words of the bard Robbie Burns, whose bronze portrait statue presides over that city of Scottish roots, ring loudly. “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here.”
Snap frozen testicles
But as much as I love Dunedin, I could never live there.
I have painful memories of sub-Antarctic sou’westers blowing hail, snow and sleet sideways up the leg of your school shorts as you cycled home. Testicles are snap frozen into icicles. It was cruel. And it always made me wonder why the pioneering Scots who left their homeland to escape hardship simply swapped one God forsaken cold place for another.
The Steamers won’t have to worry the weather – no squalls wind or rain at Forsyth Barr, a real indoor stadium and a far cry from The Domain. The worst of it will be the students going off in the ‘Zoo’ – reeking of smoke from incinerated couches and pre-loaded Speights three star. It can get feral.
And it grates – because Dunedin with 132,000 people and a static economy, has an enviable, enclosed, all weather, natural grass stadium. Tauranga 160,000 people, a flourishing economy, but the Steamers play at a hotchpotch athletics venue with no floodlighting. Great!
But even The Domain is a Shangri-la compared to my rugby nursery of Carisbrook – a stinking quagmire, some grass, but mostly mud. Cold, windy, wet, miserable. When they put in new drains at the scoreboard corner a few years ago, they dug up a whole lot of old jerseys and boots from the mud – and probably the bones of a few chirpy visiting Canterbury fans who had disappeared without trace from the terrace.
How romantic
Then I broke ranks. And hearts. And was I just about ostracised. I forsook the family’s long connection with one rugby club for another. And just for aesthetic reasons. I preferred the new club’s strip – black, red and yellow. Romani myth says those colours mean out of darkness, through fire, into light. How romantic. Added a whole new intellectual level to a game of rugby I thought.
And all quite prophetic – because ‘Zingari’ is borrowed from the Italian for gypsy and was adopted by English cricket teams that had no home ground. And I would continue the Zingari tradition in my own way- wandering from job to job, city to city, supporting and enjoying various ruby unions. The ‘Zingari’ was in me but as Burns said, the heart stayed in The Highlands – The Highlands in this case being the seven hills of home, not Edinburgh, not Rome, but Dunedin.
The family
So BK may be right – I can’t claim loyalty to The Steamers. They, according to BK, are a “closeknit family”, and you just can’t just bust into the family because you choose to. But I like Richard Watt – what I have seen, watched and read of the man. He doesn’t grump and grunt like other coaches. And like wise Kurt Ecklund – a hardball kind of guy from all accounts, and now nursing 60 stiches in his face. He still managed to smile and chat through that mutilated face after the game. Bigger tougher men might not have bothered. Like the style. And a thoroughly pleasant and personable man I understand, from that “nice Steamers family”.
So – I want the Steamers to win. If they don’t, I won’t mind. I can’t lose this weekend. There are only degrees of winning.