Eels be right on the knight!

IT's a partly overcast Friday night at Parramatta Stadium and misty rain falls intermittently as the Eels and the Knights prepare for battle.
The late-autumn chill seeps into my bones and looking skyward I realise that neither the moon nor myself are quite full enough
for the occasion.
Some 13,000 die-hard fans have turned out - including a convoy of buses from the ex-steel city - as rugby league tries to regain the ground lost in the Super League fiasco. If my presence at Parra Stadium tonight plays just a small part in helping to achieve that then, well, it can't be helped! Largely indifferent to the sport, I did root wildly for the establishment when The Dirty Digger thought he had enough money, with the help of some brown-nosing Murdoch sports "journalists" who shall forever remain shameless over their one-eyed PR coverage of the dispute, to bulldoze decades of poorly-administered tradition.
That really gave me the shits, as it always does to hear that line: "You're from Brisbane, right, so you must back the Broncos?"
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong! I hope those whingeing, overpaid pricks stay on the bottom of the ladder and never win another game this season. Or any other season that matter. An awful lot of Brisbanites feel the same way. The Broncos always thought they could whinge about the NSWRL, Arthurson, Quayle, the draw, the weather or the fact that their bootlaces had come undone and all of Brisbane would nod in sympathy. I'm reminded of that famous sports adage: shut up, shut up, shut up you whingeing pricks, and play the game.
Buck the Broncos, I say!
No, some friends have invited me along to the Parramatta Stadium and I'm happy enough to be here. I've decided to back the Eels; any sports team that has a slimy, muddy, largely inedible river creature as its mascot (right) deserves all the help it can get. Especially when they're up against a team filled to their visors with undetectable perhancing-enformance drugs.
But I do know enough about league - and spectator sports in general - to always select the end of the park where all the action's going to take place. For that reason, we astutely take our seats in the covered grandstand near the goal line that I now know to be the one we were sitting closest to.
After a group of entertainers warms us up with a superbly unchoreographed medley of tunes that may have been from Rocky Horror Picture Show, the referee - Gerry Mander's older brother, Tim - blows his whistle and round 9 of the NRL begins.
It becomes immediately clear that Friday night's a great night for football.
Right from the start, the game unfolds exactly as planned. Like all good refs, Tim blows up early to place his stamp of authority on the match, pinging some Eel-head for taking more than a milli-second to get off the tackled player. Such penalties are always given to a defending side deep in their own half so the resultant relieving kick doesn't affect the scoreline. The ref stays out of trouble that way. Later on, the game will proceed exactly as planned, with the ref's whistle strangely silent as fatigued tacklers lie all over their opponents like egg-bound chooks on a nest.
The other facet of a top referee's art is also on show right from kick-off. Tim's hand points menacingly down the defending line, as if to say: watch it fellas, I'm really going to police the 10 metre rule tonight, no sweat! He never looks down the line of course; got too much to do straight ahead checking for a correct play-the-ball, knock-ons, forward passes, Knights players shooting up behind the play, etc etc. So his hand is left to monitor the 10 metre rule. But it isn't doing too good a job, it seems, for the crowd goes Parra and calls out something that sounds like "Twooooo! Twooooo!" over and over again.
I've got no idea what "Twooooo! Twooooo!" means, nor do I have any desire to find out. It's a one-sided chant that only erupts when the slippery Eels are on the attack.
And on the attack they are. Tries galore at our end of the park and an 18-0 scoreline long before half-time have the Eels fans in a swoon. To be fair, the Knights are showing a lot of steel to limit the Eels to that margin, what with only seven eligible players on the field. The Knights are going to be a force to be reckoned with once all their top players come back from various lengthy drug suspensions.
As if to prove that very point, they do better in the second half, keeping the play down our end for the bulk of the 40 minutes and I thank them for that.
But the final hooter sounds with the mighty Eels in the lead and we hastily leave the stadium to take well-earned refreshments at the nearby Leagues Club. Having had the wisdom to sit near the goal line that I now know to be the one we were sitting closest to, we make it to the club entrance with the first wave of over-joyed Eelmanity. Those of us who urgently need to partake of hard liquor are warmed a little on this cool autumn night by the knowledge that we'll probably only have to wait 40 minutes to be served.