There’s a good chance that thanks to the Sydney Swans’ devastating loss to the Brisbane Lions at the weekend I’ll never see my family again. Or at least on a grand final weekend.
Because I think, in the eyes of my AFL-obsessed family, I may be cursed.
As Saturday’s grand final loomed I sat with my parents, my sister and her girlfriend while they discussed all the measures they’d employed to ward off bad luck for the Swans in the upcoming game, which they’d all flown in from Sydney to see. I live in Melbourne, so I was allowed to tag along for breakfast too. My family are a nice, relatively standard, educated family who only moments earlier had been indulging in such middle-class pastimes as trading Ottolenghi recipes and discussing council parking permits. Now it seemed they were basically chanting spells and waving sage – all due to their massive investment in a sports team.
A flag that had been waved at a losing game earlier in the season had been left behind to rot, a scarf worn years ago at a previous grand final win was proudly showcased, my dad’s lucky Swans socks that spread clumps of black wool through my mum’s normally pristine house were worn beneath sensible slacks. Caps, hats, jerseys and other merchandise were turned into charms and fetishes or demoted to cursed items. At any point I felt as though I’d be asked to go on a journey with three of my shortest friends to throw a Swans keyring into a volcano somewhere.
If you’re not an AFL or sports fan, you might not realise how common superstitious thinking is. Sure, it’s played off in a tongue-in-cheek manner by most fans I’ve met but behind it all is a kind of panicked “better-safe-than-sorry” mentality that means that those gross lucky socks probably will be worn to every game.
That’s why I fear that my access to my family might be dramatically reduced in the near future. As the only non-believer, the only non Sydney Swans or AFL fan among them, surely I was the talisman of ill luck that cursed this grand final. Was having breakfast with me the flap of the butterfly’s wing that cursed the Swans’ chances?
I’m used to being a kind of cursed AFL figure in my family. From a young age it was clear that my primary form of rebellion (there was a brief, half-hearted goth phase) would be through a complete lack of interest in football, sport, or activities of any kind. My entire extended family are Swans-obsessed – my late grandfather, Godfrey Castieau, was a member since 1982 and we received a kind note of condolence from the Swans’ chief executive at his funeral. I endured a few years as the black sheep (or perhaps black swan, in the Natalie Portman sense) of the family, dragged along to every home game until I was finally old enough to be left at home without burning myself on the oven.
Sometimes I’d spend the evening of the game with my grandma, who also wasn’t a fan. In between watching British crime procedurals we’d switch the channel to check to see if the Swans were winning, trading stoic glances like women gathered around the wireless for word of our boys on the western front.
But my family were always supportive and understanding about my choices, never forcing me to engage with the game. Their only requests were reasonable – “It doesn’t matter if you bring home a boy or a girl, just don’t bring home a Collingwood fan.”
In retrospect I have to wonder just how kind and understanding my family actually was. The last game I attended, back in the 1990s, was a critical semi-final of some sort and, as was my tradition, I spent the game reading a giant hard-cover fantasy tome. I looked up to see that I was featured on the big screen at the end of the field, the camera having scanned the crowd and zoomed in on me. The crowd booed. Later on the Swannies lost.
I always thought my parents had then decided that I clearly wasn’t interested and could stay home out of kindness – but, looking back, I think they recognised a bad omen when they saw it, a cursed book-boy jinxing the team, and left me behind to avoid further calamity.
And now it seems my AFL bad luck stink has only grown stronger. I can only assume that when they come to visit Melbourne for what I hope will be next year’s Swans’ grand final, they will sensibly choose to forget to invite me to breakfast.
I guess I’ll always have the off-season to see them.
• Patrick Lenton is a writer. His romcom, In Spite of Everything, comes out in May 2025
