Tyche was the daughter of Zeus. She would spin a ball in her fingers to explain luck. The ball might bounce one way and you could win the game. Bounce the other way and you were gone. And all that planning and all that effort comes to nothing.
On Saturday night, Goodes played a game that most players would die for. He motored past the best of the bombers. He kicked the ball in front, picked it up and booted the goal without raising a sweat. And then as the siren sounded and the game was in the balance, he walked in to win the game. He spun the ball in his fingers. The ball dropped onto his foot. From 50, it sailed straight. Had it been a javelin it would have split the sticks. But it wasn’t. It was a ball and it veered off at the end and went through for a point. And that was the game.
That’s the Footy gods for you. You can have a Brownlow or two. You can be best on ground. But in that crucial moment, Tyche gets to bounce her ball.
I’m just wondering whether Tyche’s ball handling varied in the wet compared to the dry, the red Sherrin or the yellow or was she a Lyrebird type of girl? Did she consider the resin on the palms to favor some and frustrate others (Steve Milne 2010)? Was she equally capable on either side of the body? Was she as entertaining to the others in the pantheon as Mark Jacko Jackson was to Kelvin Moore?
On the issue of Adam Goodes aren’t we emotional creatures prone to the trickery of the recency effect – 120minutes of football and we have the image of the final kick and the associated failure burned into our memories. All other stats have been rendered as simple tally marks in spreadsheets. Meanwhile in our provincial cities of Geelong and Adelaide individual performances were scratched out by the scores etched in rows and columns where there was no heart palpitation in the stands and spiders could simply spin their webs unhindered on the St john’s ambulance defibrillators.