The man from the bank

This is a piece I wrote a year or so ago the day after New Zilland won a place in World Cup Football

Defying our usual stupor we began this week with a song in our hearts and a spring in our step. Normally this state would be reserved for a stylish rugby win or a generous tax reduction – both occurring alongside appearances of Halley’s comet in frequency. (Actually we get used to stylish rugby wins in between world cups for they are not so infrequent.)

But this past week’s upliftment was delivered by way of the beautiful game – soccer. Now New Zilland and soccer is a bit like Jews and sailing. The last famous sailor in Judaism was Noah and I suspect that boat wasn’t quick around the buoys. Jackie Mason says about Jews and boats is that the only thing they want to know is “how many it sleeps”. It never goes out the harbour…but sleeps 16.

In New Zilland we play rugby and we frighten the living bejeezus out of everyone we play. But soccer is another story. We tend to get beaten at the last hurdle by teams from unknown islands where the crowds still wear bones through their noses like a seething mass of Generation Z. 

But win our way into the world cup we did. It wasn’t  a particularly glamorous affair and it is not as if Bahrain was some remarkably talented soccer playing nation.

The hero of the day to the baying of a great multitude was a goalkeeper who is now the darling of our media because he saved a penalty and because he looks like and is really a bank clerk with a baby.

In the interminable aftermath of TV coverage about every living moment before during and after the game my favourite scene was the clerk returning to work at the local bank on Monday morning.

It is the stuff of dreams.

So now we have to steel ourselves for the embarrassment of sending a team to Africa to play against Brazil and Russia. Steel ourselves to try and avoid terrible defeats the like of which we were subjected to when we once ventured to deep dark Africa to fight against the boers.

The thing that makes New Zilland so endearing, is the fact that we are at heart, amateursl. 

Our Prime Minister was brought up in run down state housing and a run-down state school seems to approach his role as amateur might. He is as likely to confess to not having an answer and not making the right choice as quickly as most politicians would find a way to claim godly powers.

Our criminals are gifted amateurs as witnessed by a pair of thieves who were caught recently loading their car with blocks of cheese. They were chased for some distance before being apprehended and during that journey were seen to be throwing the large chunks out of the windows.

The police sergeant announced to the public that the cheese would be recognizable from its grittiness. Amateurs all.

It is in the idea of amateurism that I find most solace as a parent, a husband and a person. For I think that it just may be that in life we are all better off as amateurs. For then we have no reason to pretend that we have infallible capacity or capability.

As a young child I was brought up to believe somehow that my father’s infallibility was godly. And as a consequence argument and debate was futile.  One day at a rugby match, my mum, father and I were unhappily seated next  two very inebriated behemoths of species Afrikaner. In their inebriated state they seemed to be only two notches up the evolutionary scale from Australopithecus. With extraodinary extended stomachs and limited sensibility they pawed in friendly fashion at my mum.

My expectation was that my father somehow would simply summon a thunderbolt to summarily turn them to ashes but this did not eventuate. WE simply got up and slunk our way home before the game had ended. It was devastating. But in a way it shone a light for me. For in that moment I discovered that the world was not really under some form of divine control and certainly not within the all-powerful hands of my father.

Had I only known this then I might have forgiven him. But it did allow me to make sure that my children were given the great gift of a bullshit radar from an early age. A radar that would allow them to question, even interminably and irritatingly, every so-called fact or assertion I or others might make. The gift I gave them was the capacity to recognise my fallibility.

For from that moment on, every achievement is a splendid one that comes without expectation. It’s like going back to work as a clerk in a bank, the day after you won your way into the world cup.