hsquid
Person
North Melbourne - 2024 Hugh Greenwood Player Sponsor
Veteran
North Melbourne - 2023 Ailish Considine and Bella Eddy Player Sponsor
North Melbourne - Bella Eddey and Vicki Wall Player Sponsor - Season 7
North Melbourne - 2023 Aaron Hall and Flynn Perez Player Sponsor
North Melbourne - 2022 Aaron Hall and Flynn Perez Player Sponsor
North Melbourne - 2022 Kaitlyn Ashmore and Aileen Gilroy Player Sponsor
North Melbourne AFLW - 2021 Aileen Gilroy and Kaitlyn Ashmore Player Sponsor
We are all die-hards desperate for the misery to end. Many of us are also struggling with balancing the unbreakable support for the club with the seemingly unending despair and misery that comes from actively engaging with its on-field performance.
How are you dealing with it? How can you combine undying passion with healthy perspective and necessary detachment?
Me, I've started to pay less attention to details. I don't read every thread here. I feel like the mid season draft and even the end of season one is just kind of news rather than something that can have an impact on the club fortunes. We will recover from this. Or we won't. We have reached the point where the big question is the only question, and the minutia isn't going to be what swings it. It will be about the core strength of the club, tthe mental strength of our top-end talent and, yes, the attitude of the AFL. These are things we can't tweak at the selection table or lose with a freak injury. No, from the outside the critical things will be fuzzy, guessed at only by the ambiguous symptoms that reveal themselves. Is that grumpy outburst a good sign that people are "fed up and determined to turn things around"? Or a "sign that they have lost it and the club is coming apart"? Are the smiles on faces at training signs of players staunchly maintaining morale or having checked out?
I will still watch the games, painful as it is. I will still cheer every goal and curse every turnover, as if it signifies something more than it would to simply read the entrails of Boris the Chicken. The Big question is Big, and it's right in our face. But I won't be devastated that we pick A over B in the MSD. No, in some ways the die is cast. We have Sonja, Jen, Clarko. And there is Laura Kane and Andrew Dillon. I will "trust the club". But not because I know anything, with more of a sense of Karma than calm. in the same way I trust the oncoming cement-mixer not to veer into my lane.
And I'll share the gallows humour of all who have lost hope. Thank god for the "Sum up our Season in a Gif" thread.
If it never turns, I will grieve. But if it does, and even if we are going nowhere as a middling team, I will squeeze out and savour every drop of joy.
How are you dealing with it? How can you combine undying passion with healthy perspective and necessary detachment?
Me, I've started to pay less attention to details. I don't read every thread here. I feel like the mid season draft and even the end of season one is just kind of news rather than something that can have an impact on the club fortunes. We will recover from this. Or we won't. We have reached the point where the big question is the only question, and the minutia isn't going to be what swings it. It will be about the core strength of the club, tthe mental strength of our top-end talent and, yes, the attitude of the AFL. These are things we can't tweak at the selection table or lose with a freak injury. No, from the outside the critical things will be fuzzy, guessed at only by the ambiguous symptoms that reveal themselves. Is that grumpy outburst a good sign that people are "fed up and determined to turn things around"? Or a "sign that they have lost it and the club is coming apart"? Are the smiles on faces at training signs of players staunchly maintaining morale or having checked out?
I will still watch the games, painful as it is. I will still cheer every goal and curse every turnover, as if it signifies something more than it would to simply read the entrails of Boris the Chicken. The Big question is Big, and it's right in our face. But I won't be devastated that we pick A over B in the MSD. No, in some ways the die is cast. We have Sonja, Jen, Clarko. And there is Laura Kane and Andrew Dillon. I will "trust the club". But not because I know anything, with more of a sense of Karma than calm. in the same way I trust the oncoming cement-mixer not to veer into my lane.
And I'll share the gallows humour of all who have lost hope. Thank god for the "Sum up our Season in a Gif" thread.
If it never turns, I will grieve. But if it does, and even if we are going nowhere as a middling team, I will squeeze out and savour every drop of joy.
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