This is the fourth year I've been out of Australia at Grand Final time. In China, the Aussie expats watched it at Blue Bar, an Aussie establishment in Wuxi. The (small) crowd was pretty half-hearted and it was difficult to drum up enthusiasm. Last year, my mum was visiting and we desperately tried to jump online to view it (twice due to the draw), but in both cases, we gave up and went to bed in order to get an early night for our next-day hiking adventures. This year, C and I will be joining every other Australian in Calgary at Bottlescrew Bill's to watch the Cats beat the Pies (although I do have soft spot for Mick Malthouse and wouldn't mind if the Pies got up for him). To create a little bit of finals atmosphere at home, I've been listening to podcasts of the Coodabeen Champions and listening to a lot of old footy songs, such as this one, my favourite:
To combat my feelings of homesickness for the footy, I've also been introducing 11 year old B and 7 year old R to the joys of the sport. We've been doing all our Maths around AFL - logic puzzles involving the ladder order, dice games simulating goals and points, and probability investigations into the 'fairness' of the finals structure. They won't be there on Friday night, but you can bet that the first thing on Monday morning we'll be doing is singing the Geelong theme song. We are Geelong, the greatest team of all ...
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