“Somehow, the little nerves and muscles around his coccyx knitted themselves back together and he was up and running like a whippet off the leash. And that was just the first two minutes.” Columnist ROBERT MACKLIN’s been watching the soccer. 

THE headline was emblazoned across two columns last week in “The Sydney Morning Herald”: “WOMEN’S GAME MORE EXCITING TO WATCH THAN MEN’S”

I couldn’t believe it.

The “game” in question is, of course, soccer, or as the purists prefer, “football”. Had it not been so boldly headlined in the oldest living newspaper in the nation, I would have laughed it to scorn. But they have the statistics to prove it.

“It’s almost like the men are playing a game of chess and the women are playing something a bit more interesting than chess,” said Matthew Penn, a statistics expert from the University of Oxford. 

I readily admit that my soccer viewing is limited. I’ve been an Aussie Rules fanatic ever since schooldays, but I have seen a men’s soccer match. And talk about excitement! Forget chess, it was absolutely off the chart!

I was tuning in a TV set during covid when it stopped on SBS and there it stayed. I’m pretty sure the teams were from Milan and the Real Madrid (as opposed to the virtual one, I guess). Anyway, the game was just starting. 

The ref blew his whistle and the Spaniards began kicking the ball to their teammates. So far pretty standard stuff. But here’s the thing – every time a Milanese teamster attempted to wrest the ball from a Spaniard, Newton’s laws of motion were suddenly suspended! 

I kid you not. Right there in front of millions, a Milan chap in his pretty red, white and black uniform flung himself in the general direction of a Spaniard with the ball and a gust of invisible kinetic energy arrived from nowhere. 

Down went Real Mr Madrid in a screaming heap. “He’s a goner,” I thought. “His back’s broken. They’ll probably call the whole thing off. What a shocker.”

By now I had the remote under control and I replayed it. I was right. Mr Milan was physically at least half a metre from Spain’s finest when his kinetic power struck the poor chap a fierce blow in the gluteus maximus. The victim staggered, fell and writhed pathetically on the turf.

The ref obviously felt the kinetic bolt from the blue himself because he blew his whistle and started fumbling in his back pocket for a message to show everyone what he thought of it. “Yellow for cowardly conduct”. I said: “I’m with you, ref.”

But then, to my astonishment, another magical moment followed. The ref ordered a free kick to Spain and instantaneously the broken warrior leapt to his feet. 

Somehow, the little nerves and muscles around his coccyx knitted themselves back together and he was up and running like a whippet off the leash. And that was just the first two minutes. 

Thereafter I simply sat there entranced as the magic moments mounted like clips from the entire DC movie franchise with everyone on the field crashing out and zipping back up like cats counting to nine. 

So, you imagine my anticipation when I heard that we had a team of women players including Sam Kerr who had so much kinetic energy she could somersault backwards. And they were playing Ireland’s colleens whose only helpers would be tiny leprechauns whose invisible kinetic energy wouldn’t blow out a birthday candle.

Alas, I missed the match – I was still waiting to be treated in the emergency department of Canberra Hospital. But a friend told me: “Sam did her calf in and didn’t play.” 

So it wasn’t really a fair comparison with the men’s game. And he couldn’t have been paying close attention either because he missed the invisible kinetic energy altogether.

robert@robertmacklin.com