SPORTSBALL

Ms “Sportsball”

Anna’s personality is a pneumatic drill hammering away on the Sunday morning of your soul. Her only goal in life is to penetrate your thick skull and enlighten you to what a knuckle-dragging ape you are for enjoying a bitta sports on the weekend. To that end, her work is never done. 

To be clear, she hates every season equally but reserves a special level of irrational hatred for the AFL season. After all, all the pubs she doesn’t go to anyway are filled with gormless party-pie stuffers and the who’s who of Sundee morning bowl sprayers. How uncouth. 

See, Anna views her weekends through renaissance-rose tinted glasses, as one of her many social media posts on the topic suggests, 

“Am I seriously the only one who doesn’t care about sportsball??? Oh yeah, sportsball! Sportsball! Sportsball! Would much rather spend my day talking about philosophy, books, politics, you know, actually using my grey matter”

While she’s waiting for her poignant words to be accepted in the Louvre she gets to work showcasing her higher-evolutionary interests. To kick things off, she gets her partner to take a pretentious black & white photo of her gazing through a foggy window while reading a book with some tea. 

Ah yes, pretending to read for the sake of a shit-eating Instagram post. You’d have to imagine that’s how Plato and others on her higher plane of intellectual existence spent their days. Anyway, surely there is a medal coming her way soon – a fully grown adult utilising a skill they learned in primary school. Roll out the fuckin’ red carpet, we got a gigabrain here. 

Now, one might expect a sports hater to avoid sporting events completely. Not Anna, how can she thoroughly baste these sportsball turkeys in smug butter if she doesn’t begrudgingly attend friend’s events? Especially given how precious her time is given study load she always talks about.

She rocks up to a friend’s footy day with her new partner that she met on her 5th visit to the museum last month. You can tell by their headwear that they ain’t messing around. She has chosen a beret type thing from the month in Paris you’ll hear all about. He is wearing one of those circumcised-dick beanies which pairs well with his thin ‘stache. 

Anna’s facial expression makes a smashed crab look like the Mona Lisa. She opens up a dialogue with an acquaintance dressed head to toe in Eagles kit, “so which sportsball team are you going for? Are they going to kick all the goals? I love all the sport!”

He dies a little inside as he realises he’s about to waste precious life on a conversation with a hostile sports hater. Instead, he deflects to her partner who is sitting quietly, “what team do you go for lad?” You can tell casually dropping “lad” has ripped through both their carefully curated images.

He replies, “as a feminist, I don’t support the AFL corporation”. Well, that was fun. Anna looks over at her man with unabashed lust. She could only dream of raining on game day parade in so few words. 

After the first bounce, she retreats to a sunroom to pursue an intellectual endeavour – playing Scrabble with her partner and a Kiwi bloke who is arguably more anti-AFL than she is. She believes she’d found a fellow kindred spirit until he opened his mouth, “it’s all about Rugby ay, mean as”. 

Blood drains out of her face. She has been tricked into talking to a sportsball fan in a non-condescending manner. Christ knows how many art galleries she’ll need to check-in at to clear this pollution from her air of superiority. 

ON THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM: MR PERTH STADIUM

Documenting the Human Zoo is thirsty work, so if you enjoyed what you read how about buying Belle a beer, ay?

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