I went to rugby. I blogged.

The other night I dusted the spikey icicles off my season pass and dragged my seasoned arse to Canberra's numero uno football stadium. I was wildly anticipating an evening of watching my Super Rugby team, the ACT Brumbies, get their (foot)balls handed to them by the Wellington Hurricanes; a team that is, generally speaking, considerably better than my team. 

It was never going to be about Having Fun or Enjoying Oneself; one just has to support one's team through thick and thin, rain or shine, snow or hurricane, Chief or Crusader, self-annihilation or crushing smackdown. You have to be there and just go with it when we are playing a New Zealand team.

ACT Brumbies versus Wellington Hurricanes. Let's take a look at the matchup on e-paper. A free-roaming feral horse, an animal known for its random roaming usually through alpine countryside for no particular reason, versus a hostile weather system known for its wanton random destruction of stuff in its path.

Well it seems to me that everyone involved just needed to sit down for a planning morning and focus on developing some type of strategic plan for getting through the game with maybe some scones and jam for morning tea if you don't mind. None of this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants entertainment; that's not want the people want.

As it turns out, the wild horse gave the hurricane from UnZud quite a run for its money. Alas, as they say in the classic sports broadcasts, "Are you not entertained?! Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you are here?" Or maybe that was a quote from the movie Gladiator. It's hard to say.   

At kickoff, the opposition started as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds, causing heavy rains that were expected to continue for several hours. Linesmen were down, sponsors were airborne, and there was all kinds of carnage going on at that place that sells cold hot chips, which was potentially not hurricane related though.

Wild horse fan, Jimbo, saw all the action, saying “Everyone was warned to expect catastrophic flooding, and I think we got 6-8 metres of storm surge. Now my cold hot chip are wet”.  I think Jimbo may well have had a few.

But before you could say “that’s a ferocious battering, squire”, the strong gusts stopped, the eye of the storm passed, and the cell was fairly quickly downgraded to a tropical storm. And then it turned into a little rain shower as it continued to make landfall. My team won, which made my head spin on its axis and explode in astonishment.

As the game went on, I turned my attention to all the similarities of professional rugby union and my work as a public servant. Playing for a professional public servant team is a dream for thousands of people. But behind the glamour is grinding hours of hard work:

Desk work
Look, I did see a slew pf people with clipboards parading along the sidelines at the footy. It's hard to say what they were doing, but they looked like they were of great significance; they had pens and they were ticking things on paper. And if ticking things on paper for no good reason whatsoever doesn't constitute a desk job then I don't know what does.

Applause
Every morning, as I jog out of the elevator with meaningful purpose on my face, there is a throng of people who cheer my sudden presence and clamour for a glimpse of me as I head to my position on the floor, and then spend the day marvelling at my skillset - what a skillset! - when I use the printer, and cheer loudly - what a great delivery of that email!

Near the end of the day, they yell loudly - hurrah! - urging me on, to keep doing the impressive things I do. I didn't want this. This life, this dream life, was thrust upon me. I can’t make it stop. They idolise me. Occasionally, after work, I hang around to sign autographs.

Blood bin
Like rugby players, as soon as we have a piece of trash that needs tending to, we can leave the field of play to place it in the blood red bin. But only if it can't be recycled.

Offside
This occurs when you eat your packed lunch before lunchtime. It's not really in the spirit of the game, but some people do it deliberately - and get away with it - when the ref isn't looking. What's that? That doesn't even make sense? Well, look, the cyber universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Nutrition
Every public servant player knows the secret to maximise on-field performance: 'tis cake. 'tis always cake.

Scrum meetings
A key part of the day. Unlike an actual scrum, which rugby players use as a method to restart play to gain possession of the ball, public servant players pack down closely together just for the hell of it. 

The average acceleration at which a public servant player moves forward, out of a scrum meeting, is 29.2.54m/s2. What's that - that doesn't make sense either? That's not really relevant? Much like the minutes wasted in rugby scrums, many scrum meetings are also an officially sanctioned waste of time.

Rugby union for puppies

I've recently added value to my life by getting a puppy. Ellie is easily excitable, often overstimulated, bubbly, bouncy, unrelenting when I’ve relented; a textbook case of puppy.

Every morning – before, throughout and after I’m getting organised for work – we play chase the ball, which mainly involves her making forward passes, consistently knocking the ball on, deliberately obstructing me when I don’t have the ball, making a late tackle after I’ve already kicked the ball away, or some other type of illegal tackle like a head-high tackle around my neck or jaw violently at high speed, which is often my fault because my head is on the floor.

But her tackles are potentially very dangerous and are not sanctioned by the rules of the game, so at this point I blow my whistle to give her a yellow card, but she just bites me. It’s like she doesn’t know or care about the rules of rugby union.

Sometimes she plays fairly, but more often than not she plays the man and not the ball. Like any puppy heading towards the teething development milestone, she loves her chew toys - among her favourite ones being my hands - which often sends me to the blood bin to stop the flow before I can return to the pitch to continue playing.

I kick off from the 22m line, just off the try line, but I’m not going to make any ground because she charges it down when I try to clear the ball. I get it back and box kick over the top of her clear into undefended territory and then try to play the advantage but she ankle taps me with her milk teeth and it really hurts.

I won’t accept it so I call a free kick for myself and stand with my back to her as per the ‘How to stop your puppy from biting you” Youtube videos, but she barks at me for holding up the game, so instead I call a line-out, and she barks at me for holding up the game.

She’s lucky I don’t pull her up on all her impatient puppy barks, let alone all the infringements and technical offences. I’ve got no-one to throw it to in the line-out, but I throw it right down the middle, which is completely missed by Ellie because her hand-eye coordination is not a thing yet.

She prances off to get the ball and does a grubber kick, her favourite, which makes the ball tumble and roll along the ground, making it bounce all over the place. It’s literally the only bit of this game she’s good at. She runs down the blind side straight past me, dummy passes the ball, and goes on to score a try in the corner of the lounge room. Well, there go the blinds.

Instead of taking a kick to convert the try for extra points she runs up the field of play with her bed, shaking it furiously in some weird post-try celebration, which is not in the rule book so I’m not entirely sure what the infraction is.

I decide to have a scrum, because that’s always a great idea with a puppy. We crouch, bind, set and then she tries to scalp me because she sees my hair dangling in her face.

I call a red card on her and she sits and looks at me with puppy dog eyes, which are the only eyes she has admittedly, but still doesn’t get her out of the penalty.

And then just for funsies we have another scrum, because I hadn’t learnt my lesson, which collapses, but then we have a rolling maul, because if the ACT Brumbies can do it, so can we.

I grab her by the head in an illegal spear tackle, and she rolls around on her back trying to be cute as we both scrap for the ball. She wins obviously because teeth but I award myself a penalty try because I believe she illegally prevented me from probably getting over the try line. So many professional fouls.

We’ve been playing 30 minutes – not even half time – and it looks like she’s going to take a kick from the centre line but then she lies down and goes to sleep.

Sharknado hits Bruce Stadium

Last night a freak storm hit Bruce Stadium in Canberra. It was so stormy that it caused a football team amount of sharks to be scooped up in water spouts and flood the place with shark-infested water, as often happens when sharks infest waters. We in the movie industry call that a sharknado.

Like all great cinematic disaster films, only the shit people drowned. Unfortunately, as has been the case with all the sharknados I have survived, it's nearly always the vulnerable and the people I push into the eye of the storm that are the first to go. It's very sad, but you can't fight nature.

While most people survived the flood, you'll be very pleased to know that many of them got eaten by sharks in a dramatic, cinematic fashion. I suppose that was sad in a way, for them. But worse was to come. 

Tragically, my team, the home team, the team that didn't cause the sharknado, lost the game in a deeply traumatic way and now I have all the sad feelings. I shall seek therapy to cope with it all.

I went onto the Sharknado's website to see where in the world they are from. Turns out it's somewhere in South Africa. I would do better research if I cared. 

Their cheerleaders, as is often the way with the cheerleaders, are dressed in blah fashioned into blah blah blah with their deep neckline fashioned into a sharkbite. It's technically really hard to explain, but I could probably do it justice by describing it as Skanknado chic.   

I went to Brumbies rugby. Naturally I blogged about it.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in ancient 1996, people in the Southern Hemisphere decided that there just weren't enough gladiatorial sporting competitions involving balls so a new one absolutely needed to be created forthwith. Thus, the dawn of the Super Rugby.

There were originally 12 teams involved in this new rugby ball tournament and thus it was aptly named the Super 12. And then more teams wanted to play with the balls so it became Super 14. 

And then some smart minds decided this was a bit silly, wasn't it, so best call it Super Rugby, which means 18 billion more teams could participate if they wanted to with no name change required. There's a lesson in there for everyone.

Watching rugby union is my new shiny thing. Who knew it was so entertaining.  Here's how it goes: there are two teams, and one wins. The other loses. 

There are no encouragement awards for the losers. They just have to get back on the horse and give it their best shot the next week. Because that's how life works. Sometimes you win; sometimes you don't.

Speaking of horses, my local rugby union team is called the ACT Brumbies. A brumby is a free roaming feral horse that roams the Australian alps. With that in mind, the ACT Brumbies are remarkably good at ball control and passing in general with all those hooves getting in the way.

I understand about 3.7% of the rules of rugby union, but I appreciate that my home city is very good at it. For example, I've been to two games and they have won all of them. I have heard a vicious rumour that they don't always win every game, but I call that out as conjecture until I see this loss situation take place.

I have worked out that the aim of the game is to get a ball from one end of a field to the other while grunting and piling of top of each other. The rules of the game seem very complicated but I guess I will begrudgingly learn them because they seem important to the fans who yell about them loudly and endlessly to no-one in particular.

Things I noted:

• My heightened awareness of my condition - of being unremarkable and ordinary.  No-one expresses such approval of being entertained when I send an email at my work in the Australian Public Service. No-one wears a business shirt with my name on the back of it. There's no-one on the sidelines yelling at me to send the email straighter, you goose.

• The brumbies running around the paddock are built like double-brick stables constructed to withstand a herd of marauding wildebeest. Next time I need to lift my jumbo jet and store it in the overhead aircraft hangar I'm calling the ACT Brumbies.

• Abs City (see above).

• It doesn't matter if you don't know the rules of rugby.  As long as you show your support for the home team through fist pumping and random heckling of the opposition players, occasionally your own players, the referees, the team doctors, the ball kids, the TV camera guy, the guy who carries the camera guy's cord, the guy who carries the camera guy's microphone or the guy who rides a quad bike out to deliver a little sand castle for freekicks (which is never not hilarious), you are accepted and acceptable.

• Never, ever look at the bright paddock lights above you to see how bright they are. They are brighter than the sun (if you are from England, see picture. This is the sun).
  

• I thought there would be many interesting and varied peoples who would attend rugby union matches but, on the whole, they were well civilised and not one soul tried to pick a fight with me, probably because they have jobs and aren't on parole like football fans from other codes.  It's also possibly because I'm just like a scary bikie, except without the muscles, anti-social behaviour, sleeve tatts, criminal rap sheet, harley or drug dealing ways.  I did give two panadol to a colleague the other day, but she swore she had a headache so I was just administering some light first aid.

• The hot chips from the catering are strangely delicious. Life continues to smack me in the mouth with it's darn surprises.