Oh, I want to be in that Rumba, when the Saints go over there! Oh over there!

Oh When the Saints…!

Having been – quite frankly – spoilt and sucked up to for the first two weeks of my adventure almost everything about the Saints experience has worked out a little wrong by comparison.

If you have been following the Saints saga, you’ll know that I’ve already commented several times over about the general reticence of Saints fans to convince me to join them. The fan forum over at Saintsational has seemingly flat out refused to approve my registration or even answer my emails after about a week. So all the banter and dialogue I had with the Bombers fans last week and has been pretty much non-existent. The handful of Saints fans that have contacted me have been using words like “disappointment”, “tragedy” and “despair” and made it very clear that supporting the Saints is not something you go into lightly and probably isn’t something that you go into at all if you take the time to think about it.

I managed to find Kylie, my guide for the evening, shortly after i arrived at the Dome and she immediately informed me that YES, i did look ridiculous in those shorts and NO, you couldn’t even tell that they were meant to be Saints merchandise. By this point i had decided that the best and worst thing about Saints fans is that they are honest to a fault.

Saints fans!

After (justifiably) insulting my togs Kylie told me that she had tried to call the club to get some passes to the rooms afterwards so i could have the same kind of experience that the Roos and the Bombers had provided. Apparently, The Saints club had told her that there was nothing that they could do for us this week but if i came back next week they’d look into it. Now, I am not sure whether this was a deliberate effort to demonstrate my growing point about the Saints culture of resigning themselves to be happy with almost-good-enough or whether it was a ingeniously clever plan to make me come back again. Either way, this train can’t stop here two weeks in a row (there is NO WAY i am wearing those shorts again for a start!) and i will be moving on to another team next week so i will be in no position to take them up on the offer.

HOWEVER if anyone from the Saints marketing department is reading this, I think a visit to the rooms would be the least you could do for Kylie and I would be more than happy to report on her adventures in the rooms for a future edition of the blog should anyone find their way clear to find her a pass. (hint, hint, hint…!)

Kylie waves the flag! (she wouldn’t let me wave it again after i hit the guy next to me in the head with it!)

Despite all the evidence and all the warnings, Kylie and thousands of people like her are the reason I am seriously considering supporting the Saints. In this era of fancy marketing departments, few real “home” grounds, and players on squillions of dollars drafted from places thousands of kilometres away the passion of the fans is what makes a club. The Saints club is incredibly fortunate to have this small army of noble, long-suffering, honest-to-a-fault, decent people who give everything to a club that has given them very little back by way of on field success (or marketing department efficiency). Without wishing to take anything away from anyone i have met or anyone i will meet, there simply can be no better fans than Saints fans. They are all, by definition, insane and i love them for it.

Kylie was originally a Fitzroy fan before the Lions name relocated to Brisbane forcing her to pick another team that was going to be around week in week out. Unlike the Saints fans that were born into it and didn’t know any better, Kylie knew exactly what she was getting into when she picked the losingest club in the history of the competition to support.

To put this in context, Kylie’s husband is an Essendon supporter as is most of the extended family – unfortunately, they’re up there with Carlton as the winningest team in the history of the VFL/AFL. That simply can’t be the easiest thing to face day in and day out. Most weeks, Kylie gets along to the Saints games by herself (a friend who went to a few games last year has apparently become a little nervous about it due to Kylie’s unbridled screaming of support, flag waving and general over-the-top enthusiasm for her team) and shouts encouragement to every last player by name for the whole game.

Maybe it takes an outsider to say this, but lift your game St Kilda! You know you don’t deserve these people! Every single one of these people has to suffer the indignity of your mediocrity from their Essendon supporting husbands, their Collingwood supporting brothers or their Carlton supporting friends. Actually, given the ratio is currently 27 spoons to 1 premiership, just getting to mediocrity would require a considerable improvement over the historical average. Isn’t that the least you could do?

Our view of the dome…

As a game, it was my first night game of the year, and i loved the atmosphere – the brass band boys playing “When the Saints go Marching in” (the Saints do have the advantage of being the only club where i already know the words to the song!) on the way in and out and the sense of occasion made the evening work for me.

On the field, to my untrained eye The Saints performance appeared to be the most ruthless, complete and accomplished performance by any of the teams i have seen so far. While they were coming off a disappointing loss against Brisbane the week before, the Saints of April 14, 2007 looked the part and they were an exciting team to watch. They outscored the Bulldogs two-to-one from very beginning of the game and apart from a brief period in the third quarter when the opposition strung a few goals together back-to-back (causing the waving of the roasting finger pictured below), they controlled the game from start to finish and their 17.14.(116) to 9.12.(66) victory looked pretty impressive to me.

A brief moment of optimism for the enemy…

My friend and Saints fan, Mark Davis posted in the comments here last week that if i was to become a Saints fan i would need to “Be prepared for the full roller coaster ride of tragedy, heartbreak and bottomless despair, sprinkled with moments of hopeful elation and wildly misplaced optimism” and maybe i just caught the best bits of that roller coaster. But even though recent form wouldn’t indicate it, there was that sense that a Saints fan appreciates every win just a little bit more than their complacent counterparts from the successful clubs.

Kylie waves goodbye for the long trip home..

This is a long quest and i have no idea yet where it will end, but i can say one thing: When the Saints win their second premiership (and i am in my 30s, so there is no reason historically to assume it will happen in my lifetime), regardless of which team i end up supporting, i can promise Kylie and all the Saints fans that I will gladly celebrate it with them!