August 23, 2003 Saturday

The exchange office organized a group outing to a “Footy match” tonight. Footy actually refers to rugby here in New South Wales, but this game was Australian Rules Football which is called “footy” in Victoria (where Melbourne is). The games are fairly similar, but you can tell which one you are watching by looking at the uniforms and the number of posts in the “end zone”. Aussie Rules has 4 sticks and the uniforms are sleeveless. Rugby (Union and League…I won’t even try to explain that distinction except to say that I am told the private school boys play Union and blue collar thugs play League.) uniforms have sleeves and there are only 2 posts; rugby also has “scrums”, where two huge groups of thick-necked men appear to head butt each other. Aussie Rules looks roughly like our football, but has high scoring like basketball and people run around everywhere like soccer.

The game was between the hometown Sydney Swans and the Collingwood Magpies (2 of the sissiest team names I’ve heard since the Hawaii Rainbows). It was a big game with playoff implications, Collingwood being the Aussie Rules equivalent of the Chicago Bulls of the Jordan era. That’s what the Magpie fan in front of us told me, anyway. Did I mention we were sitting in the Collingwood section? Enemy territory…

The game was played at Telstra Stadium (Telstra is the big phone company here), which is where the opening ceremonies for the Olympics were held. We set some sort of attendance record, most for a non-playoff game/played on a Saturday/during a full moon/in the rain…that sort of thing. Either way, 76,000 people is chingos, as we would say in my ‘hood.

[Brief definition of the word chingos—Chingos is a slang term that represents a huge, astronomical number; To give you an idea, take the largest number you can think of, add infinity, and double it…that should get you close; The amount represented by chingos can be increased by stretching it out when said, for example “Chhhhiiiiiinnnnngosss” would indicate a greater number of things than simply “Chingos.”; Now back to the show…]

As for the game, it is kinda hard to really cheer and boo and the right times when you don’t know the rules or what the referees’ little gestures mean, but we managed. It was obvious even to the uninitiated that Sydney played with their heads up their collective butts for the first 3 quarters. They were down by 6 goals (like touchdowns) when they decided they felt like playing. (During the rally, I tried to explain the concept of “rally caps” to some of my friends from Europe, but I didn’t get very far.) Things finally got exciting when the Swans cut the lead to 2 goals with about 3 minutes to go, but a defensive blunder led to a Magpie goal that pretty much killed the rally.

Oh yeah…and it rained the ENTIRE NIGHT!! I was cold and VERY WET…it wasn’t nice. I’ve got a great picture on Snapfish.com that shows a little of what it was like.