Lance Franklin and Gary Junior weren’t the only ones missing from Kardinia Park on Saturday afternoon. Having stood on the Ablett Terrace for the last three encounters between the Swans and Cats, this year I was parked on the living room floor in Sydney. 

I’d just returned from Brisbane, where my Cygnet and I had been familiarising ourselves with the northern post of our family’s new FIFO existence. We were helping to dress and occupy a new space, installing the fittings of a home. It’s a life we’re learning to adapt to. To complete this new home, my Cygnet and I had brought one vital thing north with us. A cat. A substitute for our beloved blue and white-socked mog in Sydney. This one, however, had to be apartment proof. So our new cat would be a photographic canvas-printed Exotic Shorthair, stuffed with doorstop sand. Standing form only.

The cat’s name, according to its label, is Smokey. Over the course of a week we got to know Smokey and realised that while she isn’t terribly giving, she is a cat who is strangely ideal. You can prop her on the kitchen bench and she doesn’t steal the butter. You can position her at the end of the bed and she won’t wake you with her acoustic interferences at 5am. You can feed her with anthropomorphising chat and carry her off by the ears. Smokey is a cat you can control.

Sometime around midday on Saturday, a message came from one of the Clowder who usually hosts me down in Geelong. He was on the train south passing the You Yangs, none of us feeling Yin Yang apart from the Sydney mog asleep on the kitchen stool, unfazed or supremely confident. He told me he was wearing a red t-shirt underneath the blue and white, in honour of my absence. I was sad not to be there. Those traditions are precious – little existence handrails. And it looked perfect at Kardinia. The bounce sprang into the crispest sky.

The Swans got off to a start as clean as the day. Everyone had a dance partner and the pressure was turned on. Lovely hands from both sides, good attack, fair see saw. As the ‘Geee-long’ chant started up five minutes in, Gary Rohan helped himself to the first six pointer. Sinclair was all over the chief of the blond sports-headband brigade in Stanley and the Swans were miserly with the distance between their bodies and the Sherrin, mopping the groundball beautifully, carrying it forward with a short and sweet efficiency and putting it on the board. Geelong had no way of getting their chain game up and underway. Our defence looked the best it’s been this year, Rampe and Reg sending back the Geelong entries like pinball paddles. When Ben Ronke kicked his first goal in League footy and Jack evened up the score to double at the break, it felt like, against the personnel odds, we might just be alright. As strange as it sounds, Sydney supporters are unfamiliar with losing at the Cattery. 

But the thing is with Cats – they’re often out of sight before they pounce.

Menegola kicked a beauty some five minutes into the second. Fox couldn’t cover Sinclair and the clearances began to fly the other way. Geelong were always going to have their go of momentum. But as the talls started kicking truly and their midfield were contributing scores without a single answering goal from us, it suddenly felt like our home away from home was being reclaimed by its rightful owners. It was an unravelling thing. The flow of the play, the drop in tackles, the desperate long bombs that allowed punishing ricochet. Blond-brigade Stewart was suddenly stalking round our forward 50 while the cats were running feral in theirs, tearing up the furniture, making toys out of things that weren’t for playing with, ripping up the couch and the washing and the curtains at will. I wanted to sandbag the lot of them. When Parsons kicked the fifth straight Geelong goal, I messaged the Clowder.

‘Starting to feel ok that I’m not on the terrace.’

And then I messaged Brisbane for solidarity.

            ‘Are you listening?’

‘No, I stopped at half time … been too scared to go back. Should I?’

It still amazes me how a game can turn on a dime. And how bad it can feel when it’s turning away from your favour. And how charmed it can feel when it’s turning back.

I don’t know if it was the melee at three quarter time – a delightful word that sounds more like a tropical fruit or cocktail than a brawl – but something took hold. I didn’t see it coming. Fox lit the flame and the Swans took flight. They started to see the benefits of the unfamiliar – using short possession footy to take back territory with patience and precision. They balanced the grab with the flow and were maniacal with effort. The mog headed for the back door in Sydney.

‘Bit tight and nervy here,’ came the message from the terrace.

‘Here too,’ the reply.

How did they figure the lack of time left in the game and the distance between the scores? How did they convert the squeeze of such unlikeliness into confident forward play? The statistical markers – the structures and ball work, un or contested possessions, effective conversions and turnover differential – they can all be tallied and cross checked. But it takes something else to do what they did. To force a 38 point turnaround in 30 minutes when you’ve already been flat out for 90.

It was there in Kennedy’s will to keep his feet mid-clearance and execute a choice with three pairs of hands upon him. It was in the pushy self belief with which Jones turned every scrap ball into an assist and a kick-out into a goal. It was in Gary Rohan’s resolute eyes as he ran and wriggled the ball around Stewart and the boundary, keeping his feet long enough to grab it again and urge it to Fox. It was the one-eyed Cyclops Sinclair and his superhuman jumps. And the Zen like calm of Lloyd to pinpoint a leading Hayward. And the know-no-better baggageless optimism of ‘the kids’ to finish the job.

‘Can’t tell you how intense this is on radio …’ came the word from Brisbane. ‘I’ve got the headphones on running around the empty office, screaming.’ 

It’s how we all felt as spectators. On both sides of the coin I am sure. How was Stevie J seeing it, as the players funnelled spirit into precision? In the end it was momentum that lifted Rohan’s flick to Heeney, on to Florent and home.

It’s the thing I love most about football, watching a group of players adapt and move something mentally and emotionally. We ride it but they play it. As Horse said post match, ‘They’ve got to do it.’ They possess the qualities that Smokey the cat doesn’t have. The ability to respond. The mental and emotional juice to make decisions and work out from under control. It’s an animation that surpasses appearances. For me, the supporter, even a day later the parameters of that win are a mirage. Every time I look back I can’t actually see where they were.  

I guess the away game is a kind of FIFO existence. Fly in, fly out. Acclimatise. Find the keys to the door or try again another time. The Sydney mog slept on the pillow beside me on Saturday night and bathed loudly twice in the dark. She woke at dawn, begged for the open window and then refused to go out. She moved to the Cygnet’s bedroom door and howled til I fed her to save him. You can only control a cat for so long. 

For the first time in a while, we’ll play the Cats twice this year and for the first time since we said goodbye to the old second home at Homebush, the repeat will be in Sydney. Some of the Clowder are already confirmed for the SCG. It’ll be a new tradition. I’ll be wearing my navy and white under red.