Karma police, arrest this man / He talks in maths he buzzes like a fridge / He’s like a detuned radio – Radiohead
It started with Malaysian children’s television on the second floor of an Irishman’s sports bar in Hanoi.
The show, featuring bald, bulbous-headed children speaking an eerie fusion of English and Malaysian, was being watched my 20-month old son. He sat there quite happily on a precipitously high bar stool, little legs jutting out in front of him.
This is one of the many reasons why I like South East Asia. While I sat downstairs reading the paper, one of the waitresses had whisked my son up to the second floor to coo over him. It happens everywhere. I turn up at a café and a gang of Vietnamese women will inevitably descend to play with my son, take photos, and feed him chocolate.
So as the starting time for Sharks versus Manly approached it was just me, my son, and a doting waitress.
Until that is, a bear-like figure shadowed the doorframe. The shoulders of a WWF wrestler and the beard of a lumberjack, the big man looked around at the five screens on the walls, confusion and disgust on his face. I figured he hadn’t come to watch bald cartoon babies babbling to each other in Malay.
“You here to watch the league?” I asked, hoping to placate a man than looked like he could crush a Timber Wolf with his bare hands.
He glared at me, “yeah.” In one word managing to emanate complete disdain for anyone who would be here to watch anything other than league.
And that included Malaysian children’s television.
In any case, my son was soon whisked away by my wife and replaced by a half dozen hard-core footy fans.
The telecast started with a paean to Paul Gallen. I have mixed feelings about Paul. When he’s captain of the Blues and leading the charge in the State of Origin, when he’s holding the refs accountable for their clear anti-NSW bias, and most of all when he’s giving Nate Myles the old one-two – well, in my view he’s a legend.
When he’s the carping captain of Cronulla, the 7th tackle specialists, well, I can’t stand him. More generally when it comes to the Sharks, whose contemporary controversies are well-documented, I’ve developed an acute dislike.
On the other hand the Sea Eagles, the silvertails, are my age-old League enemy. I came from an era when hating the big end of town was part of the culture, and the Manly Sea Eagles were seen (rightly or wrongly) as both the richest and the grubbiest of them all.
As such, watching Cronulla and Manly play was like watching Rupert Murdoch’s papers go toe-to-toe with Clive Palmer. You don’t like either of them, but you quite enjoy watching them beat the crap out of each other.
Yet as the game progressed and the teams did indeed play it tough and hard, I found myself confused as to the rules. You see, in the modern game it is sometimes hard to keep up with the changes and tweaks to the rules made during the season. As such it was not entirely clear to me why, when the ball was knocked from Taufua’s grasp, he lost control of it, and it hit the corner post, that this was still adjudicated a try.
I’m not sure if this was the karma police acting on behalf on the Queensland Cowboys, but I do know with certainty that John Morris had some sort of giant karma explosion right at the end of the match. Paul Gallen was headed towards the line for a barn-storming equaliser in the final moments, and Morris commits a bizarrely blatant foul by pulling down the marker.
Gallen had an argument along the lines of ‘why don’t you just give me the try and leave it up to the video ref to make the decision’? A novel approach to be sure, that the ref rightly demurred.
So as I staggered out into the sultry Hanoi night, with more than a few dollar-fifty beers under my belt, I swore I heard the strains of Radiohead floating out from a nearby karaoke bar:
This is what you get
This is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us