Muddy, Battered, and Waiting for the Next Kick-Off

After a rugby match, the ball always gets left behind.

It doesn’t matter how hard it was fought over, how many blokes were carried off, or how much noise was made about what it all meant. Once the whistle blows and the crowd drifts away, the ball just sits there in the middle of the paddock – no longer important, no longer owned, waiting for the next match.

I was thinking about the rugby match yesterday – about how the ball sat there at the end.

After being fought over for ninety minutes, it was suddenly of no interest at all. The match had been played.

Then a chance remark from Redhead stuck with me.

“The ball is important in this, Monty,” she said, answering an American reader who’d asked what the ball was even made of.

And that’s really the question, isn’t it?

What are we made of?

Every big argument in Australia ends the same way.

The people who made the rules walk off. The people who fought over them go home. And the rest of us are left sitting in the dirt, waiting to be picked up again when the next contest begins.

Back in the old days – when the ball was honest – a pig’s bladder wrapped in leather, tough enough for wars and droughts – it knew what it was to be kicked from one end of the empire to the other and still hold its shape.

Redhead was right. It does matter what the ball is made of.

The morning after the big paddock stoush dawned quiet – the way it always does when the night before has been a proper blue. The dust had settled into a fine red haze over the chewed-up turf, and the goalposts stood crooked, like a couple of blokes leaning on each other after too many beers.

I imagined being Roderick Whiskers McNibble, padding out post-match, tail high, ears pricked. The field was deserted. Except for the cat. And the ball.

Just sitting there.

Oval. Scuffed. Caked in mud and grass stains. A bit flattened on one side from where Big Bazza had parked himself on it in the final scrum. No one rushing to claim it. No one arguing over whose it was. The Cross Crusaders had limped off one way, the Crescent Clerics the other, and the sideline screamers had all gone home to their keyboards.

The referees were long gone too.

They’d blown the final whistle, enjoyed a hot shower, wrapped themselves in clean towels, and driven off with the satisfaction of men who reckon they’d “kept control of the game.” They always do.

The teams scattered next. Jerseys peeled off. Bruises compared. Stories exaggerated. By lunchtime, half of them were already talking about the next match – who’d be captaining it, what colours they’d wear, and how different things would be this time.

That’s how it always goes.

The players change. The teams re-form. New slogans get stitched onto old jumpers.

But the ball stays.

The ball didn’t complain. It never does.

It gets drop-kicked from one end of the country to the other. Rucked over. Stamped on. Buried in mud. Passed around like it’s public property – and still it holds its shape.

We’ve been that ball before.

We were the ball when wars broke out on the other side of the world and young blokes from places like Dubbo, Darwin, and Dusty Gulch were scooped up and kicked into history. We were the ball when drought cracked the land open, when factories shut, when jobs vanished and communities were told to “adjust.”

We were the ball when rules changed overnight. When neighbours were told to dob on neighbours. When fear was the game plan and compliance the scoreboard.

Every time, the same pattern.

The whistle blows. The refs walk off. The teams reshuffle.

Politicians do it better than anyone. They retire, defect, rebrand, or reappear in a fresh jersey with a slightly different badge stitched over the heart. They argue over who gets first possession next season, who sets the rules, who controls the clock.

And us?

We’re still lying there in the middle of the paddock. Waiting.

Because no matter which teams are playing – red or blue, old or new, loud or louder – we’re still just the ball to be booted. Useful only while the match is on. Forgotten the moment it’s over. Left in the dirt until someone decides it’s time for another contest.

But here’s the thing they always forget.

A game doesn’t exist without a ball.

We are the ball.

You and me. The ordinary Australians who don’t get a locker room, a media minder, or a post-match presser. The ones who keep the country moving while the teams argue over who gets the next kickoff.

No one owns us. Not the referees. Not the teams. Not the blokes who keep changing the rules and calling it progress.

We belong to the paddock. And the paddock belongs to us.

So next time someone tells you this lot or the next lot will be different, or that the next match will finally settle things, just picture the ball at dawn.

Muddy. Battered. Still oval.

Still waiting.

And sooner or later, someone always comes back for the ball.

The only question left is whether we stay lying where they left us - or decide who gets to pick us up next time.

Because the game’s not over.

It never is.