I received an envelope in the mail last week, toughened with a sheet of cardboard, marked from the Sydney Swans. Inside was a certificate, cursively congratulating me on twenty consecutive years of club membership. ‘Twenty years?’ was my first shocked thought. ‘Twenty years!’ came the softer follow-up. 

I was not born into my club membership. I didn’t receive it as a baton nor choose it in defiance. In my childhood, ‘sherrin’ was more likely to be a varietal red on my French father’s table than an oval ball to kick around a field. I fell into footy in my early 20s, invited to a game I was promised I would find poetic. And I did. Membership grew into caring about an era of players and their culture, investing in a narrative throughout games and seasons. But it also became about belonging to a stand and a row and the stories of lives we sit among. Week to week. Month to month.

When I had a child of my own, I did everything right. I knitted my spring baby seasonally inappropriate red and white merino wool bootees. I took him to open training before he could walk and manoeuvred him along the boundary padding where he was blessed by my beloved Micky O running rehab laps. We took him to a Swans grand final! But it was the 2006 edition. And the very morning after the game, our almost two-year-old stood on the breakfast table over the Sunday Age and slipped his allegiance seamlessly to the Eagles. ‘We’re flying by!’ he sang, week after week. Month after month.

It was three years until we won him back, when he pulled on his tiny shiny jersey for the Newtown Swans Under 6s. He wore Rohan’s 16. He named his goldfish Jetta and Jed (Lamb) and Reid. We got a blue cat with white paws – a Geelong supporter, he assured me – and he raced her down the backyard with the footy tucked under his arm, holding off possession all the way to the jasmine. I called him my Cygnet. Within another three years, his interest in footy had waned. The goldfish died. But his love for the Cat and her species grew. He must have read the Dorling Kindersley Cat Encyclopaedia for a season’s worth of hours through those years.

My approach to Sunday’s game against the Cats was already skewed by the affection I have for a clowder of Geelong supporters I have come to know. One by-product of club membership is that your path is inevitably crossed with members of other teams. You come to care about them and thereby their teams’ fortunes in ways that easily blur the boundaries of single-minded loyalty. But the complication was vastly amplified by Saturday when the now almost 15-year-old Cygnet stumbled into the kitchen and asked, ‘Do we have a blue and white scarf?’ He could no longer resist the intense love he has for species Felis catus. 

Sunday in Sydney was a perfect winter afternoon. With over 30 000 in the stands, the crowd was as loud as the western sun. Gwen from Row T was wearing short sleeves. She turned in shock at the Cygnet turned Kitten, though knows she doesn’t have a leg to stand on, her own navy and white adult son lodged quietly beside her. (The other one’s a Hawk!) Every single one of our O’Reilly gang was there for the very first time this year. It felt like something unnameable. 

Ronke snatched the first goal within five minutes and the pom poms were high at the Randwick end. The Swans seemed to have control of the contested ball and were intent on efficient disposal, greedy movement through the middle and the kind of repeat entries reminiscent of a time when forward pressure was all the talk.

As the Cats took off towards goal in the second, I wondered, ‘Maybe this is the scoring end?’

Aliir Aliir intercepted.

‘Maybe not,’ added O’Reillys Patrick and James. ‘Maybe this is just a good day for the Swans!’

Zak Jones spilled it.

‘Maybe not,’ we all giggled in unison.

Before we had finished our banter, it was 3.3 apiece The Cats muscled in on the clearances and took the throat of the scoreline through Hawkins, Ratugolea, Dangerwood and Selwood the Younger. Blakey danced an exquisite double-act look-away ballet to land a score in Heeney’s reach and Ronke took a mark much higher than he was made for. But Hawkins continued to parade his 250 games of experience and the Cats steadied it to an even ledger at the break. 

The Swans’ designated Member Recognition Round meant that not only did someone jiggle cardboard for money in the half time break, but someone won a car! And the rest of us sat in our congregation, warming like lizards in the last of the sun, relishing the ritual distribution of Gwen’s footy biscuits, watching the sky track through shades of coral and fire, talking of holidays spent and children growing, riffing on what a rebuild actually means, what it takes to teach young men to play and who might come and go. All the while my Kitten purred beside me.

Geelong arranged their structures and experience, held possession and worked to targets. Our fellas, without a mast in the middle, couldn’t cost the Cats their wobbles and rummaged for lost pace with rushed kicks that came straight back. Half way through the quarter, the sun sank below the Ladies’ flags taking any red-striped headiness with it. But there is spirit and will enough in this group. And Dawson is a shining light, always in the right spot, utility by request, sweeper when needed, goal kicker on demand. As Heeney’s double couldn’t quite total us to a Nick Davis ending and Geelong careered towards their victory, I looked for equivocation in the Kitten’s eyes but found none.

I’m a believer in coming to our memberships by choice, repeat investing if that’s what it takes to find the right fit. For twenty years, week after week, month after month, I have consciously and unconsciously re-selected this club, this row and seat, this band of O’Reillys and all our conversational threads, the players of eras past and those now on the threshold. 

In the car on the way home, I helped the Kitten try on his new colours more fully. No baton, no defiance.

            ‘What other song has the ground name in it?’ I asked, prompted by O’Reilly Max’s giggle during the hooped victory tune. ‘It’s not like we say Cheer cheer at the SCG …’

            ‘What was Skilled anyway?’ he added.

‘Who knows? A credit union for workers? And who thought Alphabet Stadium (as one of the Clowder calls it) was a good idea?’ we laughed.

I am fortunate to find, twenty years on, that my red and white still fits me. The blue and white cat was howling at the front door when we got home, racing the Kitten to the kitchen to gorge on the spoils of his homecoming.

Mathilde has been a Swans member since 2000. Her love of football is part physical, part geometrical and part philosophical. She lives in Sydney with her partner and their eleven year old son and wiles away her winters in the O’Reilly stand. Mathilde writes regularly for footyalmanc.com.au.