The rumour mill. Good mail. The juice. So and so reckons. Don’t tell anyone, but I heard the higher-ups saying.
In conflict, as in football, rumours abound. This does not mean that the rumours are always wrong. In fact, they are often right. The rumours that Gary Ablett Jnr would leave Geelong were correct. As they were with Tom Scully to GWS.
The constant that connects footy and conflict is that old truism that war is long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror. In footy we only have two and a bit hours a week for 23 weeks a year when football is actually being played by our team, a few more depending on finals.
That’s a lot of time where we are forced to find ways to involve ourselves in the world of footy without actually watching. Thus we talk about it. And when people talk about something they have an emotional investment in, they lie.
The flow of information in the football world is very similar to that in a military situation. Clubs tightly control who can and can’t know or discuss certain thing. And they also actively spread disinformation, about potential draftees, player contracts, possible selections, injuries, gameplans, everything.
But then of course nothing is hermetically sealed. People talk and leaks occur. So it is that for footy fans and soldiers alike, rumours are what keep us going.
There are those who like to take the high moral ground and claim that they don’t do footy rumours. This is of course crap. In many cases rumours are but facts that have yet to be proven.
Who hasn’t walked to a ground and heard information pass like spreading fire through the assembled throng – Player X is a late withdrawal! – and once in the ground anxiously scanned the players warming up for Player X?
That’s a rumour.
There are of course those who engage in rumour spreading so much they become bullshit artists. Their rumours are worthless, and mere objects of derision, much in the same the British public used to listen to Lord Haw Haw simply to listen to his wildly outlandish claims.
The worst rumour is that which surrounds a matter of genuine truth, but where there is still doubt. Australian troops in New Guinea in the dark days of early 1942 were hugely vulnerable to Japanese air attack, as there were no Allied planes in the theatre that could compete with the legendary Japanese Zero.
But the soldiers on the ground knew there were P-40 Kittyhawk fighters that could match the Zeros on the way. They just didn’t know when. So rumours abounded. The Kittyhawks were coming next week. They’d actually been delivered already and were in that shed. Or worse, they’d been shot down on the way over. The soldiers ended calling the Kittyhawks “Tomorrowhawks” and “Neverneverhawks”. Of course the planes did arrive and were warmly welcomed when they did.
Every footy fan has been in the same position with a player with a long term injury, the type were according to “official” injury lists, said player is 4-6 weeks away with a “quad” for the whole season. That is clubs providing fertile ground for rumours.
Soldiers talk to pass the time and distract themselves from the fact that they are in a crappy position.
Footy fans talk about footy to pass the time and distract themselves that often real life isn’t crash hot all the time.
And if sometimes we make up things to make it better, well, where’s the harm in that?
