From Agony to Ecstasy
Sometimes football gives you a night that reminds you exactly why you love it.
Saturday was one of those nights.
Ken and I were in Launceston for the Launceston Cup with 15 South Hobart teams.
Kids everywhere.
Ken was coaching an Under 13 side and I was operating on a thank-God-for-ChatGPT schedule trying to get around enough grounds to photograph at least half of every South Hobart team sometime during the weekend.
I managed 14 out of 15.
Not bad.
By Saturday evening I was totally exhausted.
We finally got back to our hotel at about 6.50pm, ordered some room service and got ourselves ready to watch what, for us, was a very big game in Melbourne.
Northcote City against Melbourne Victory.
A place in NPL Victoria on the line.
Max, our son, coaching Northcote.
Nick, his stepbrother, playing up front.
Simple really.
Eat dinner.
Put the football on.
Try to remain calm.
Of course not.
Then the bloody fire alarm went off
We had just finished eating when the fire alarm sounded.
Out we went at about 7.15pm with everyone else.
Half an hour standing outside.
False alarm.
Normally I would have been thoroughly unimpressed.
This time football had done us a favour.
The game before Northcote's at Lakeside had gone to penalties and everything had been pushed back.
So while we were standing outside wondering when we were ever going to be allowed back in, the delay was actually saving us.
Eventually we were let back into the hotel.
Perfect.
Or so we thought.
Because we were only just making our way back towards the room, surrounded by people trying to get into the lifts and get back upstairs, when Melbourne Victory scored.
One minute.
One bloody minute.
We weren't even properly back in the room.
"Oh God."
That horrible football feeling had already started.
One minute
Northcote were behind almost before the game had properly begun.
This wasn't just another football match.
The winner was going into NPL Victoria in 2027.
Northcote had not played at that level since 2018.
This mattered.
To the players.
To the coaches.
To the board.
To the supporters.
To everyone who had carried the club through the years.
And now they were behind almost immediately.
Then came the 27th minute.
Nick Morton.
1–1.
Ken exploded.
"That's my son!"
And then, almost immediately, in that wonderfully understated fatherly assessment:
"He took his goal so well."
Yes Ken.
He did.
Nick had made a choice
There was another layer to Nick being out there that night.
He could have been preparing to play for South Hobart in the Australian Championship.
Football Australia had set the Australian Championship registration window for 9–15 September.
Because Football Victoria scheduled its promotion final after that window, any player wanting to transfer from a Victorian club to an Australian Championship club had to deregister from the Victorian club before the registration period closed.
There was no exemption allowing them to play the Victorian final and transfer afterwards.
So Nick had a choice.
Leave Northcote before its biggest game in years and make himself available to return to South Hobart for the Australian Championship.
Or stay.
Finish what he had started with Max.
Play for promotion.
He stayed.
And then scored the goal that kept Northcote alive.
I love that.
Agony
And then nothing.
And nothing.
And nothing.
For more than two hours.
Northcote and Victory could not be separated.
Every Victory attack felt dangerous.
Every Northcote attack had us leaning towards the television.
Every refereeing decision seemed enormous.
Besart Berisha, coaching Victory, was living every moment on the touchline.
There was plenty of emotion over there.
There was plenty in our hotel room too.
Ninety minutes.
Still 1–1.
Extra time.
Still 1–1.
Oh God.
Penalties.
Why does football do this to us?
Five-four
Penalty shootouts are bloody awful when you care.
You can barely watch them.
And yet you cannot possibly look away.
Eventually it came down to Victory's fifth penalty.
Did Noah Calamatta save it?
Did he get a hand to it?
Who cares.
It came off the post.
And absolute pandemonium broke out.
Northcote City had won the shootout 5–4.
Promotion.
NPL Victoria.
Max had done it.
Nick had done it.
Northcote had done it.
And two supposedly sensible people in a Launceston hotel room were jumping up and down and dancing like lunatics.
That is football.
Max
I was so proud of Nick.
But I was enormously proud of Max too.
We talk endlessly in football about pathways for players.
We don't talk enough about pathways for coaches.
Especially coaches who weren't former professional players or big names.
There still seems to be this assumption in football that if you played at a high level you must automatically be a good coach.
Well, not necessarily.
Max hasn't had that advantage.
He has had to learn his craft.
Work.
Study.
Prepare.
Take whatever opportunities came his way.
And convince somebody to give him a chance.
Northcote City did.
And it paid off.
There are plenty of really good coaches who never get that opportunity because their playing CV doesn't open the same doors.
Max got his chance.
He took it.
And next year he will coach in NPL Victoria.
How bloody good is that.
Our Tassie boys
There is another little bit of pride in this for me too.
Tasmanians are so often told, directly or indirectly, that our football isn't quite good enough.
Our players aren't quite good enough.
Our coaches aren't quite good enough.
The opportunities are somewhere else.
Well, some Tasmanian boys went across Bass Strait and had something to say about that.
Nick scored twice in Northcote's 3–2 semi-final win over Bulleen and then again in the promotion final.
Three goals across two games.
He wasn't the only one.
Angus and Kaz had both played their football in Tasmania before crossing the Strait and both were trusted by Max.
Kieran, a South Hobart boy, had been Northcote's keeper for most of the season before injury ruled him out.
Noah, who had also spent time playing in Tasmania, stepped into goals in his place and there he was when the whole season came down to a penalty shootout.
Kasper stood up and took his penalty beautifully.
Max coached the team there.
Every one of them played a part.
That makes me incredibly proud.
Meanwhile, back in the hotel room
My phone was going mad.
Messages from people who cared.
Ash, Max's partner, and I messaging backwards and forwards.
Then later we heard all the little stories you don't see on a livestream.
The emotion.
The relief.
Max lifting Ash over the fence.
The tears.
Back to the Northcote clubhouse.
Pizzas ordered.
Flares in the clubhouse.
A club celebrating something that genuinely mattered.
And that matters to me.
Because this wasn't a final where you win a trophy and then everything goes back to exactly how it was.
This changed something.
Northcote City will play at a different level next year because they won that football match.
Players will test themselves at a higher level.
Supporters will watch their club play different opponents.
The board members and volunteers who have carried Northcote through the years get their club back into Victoria's top tier.
It mattered.
Really mattered.
At 4am
Naturally I woke ridiculously early the next morning.
So did Max.
About 4am we were messaging.
Neither of us could sleep.
Adrenaline still going.
Going over moments.
Talking about the game.
The relief.
The pride.
The sheer bloody madness of it.
And maybe that is why I love football as much as I do.
Promotion and relegation
God I love promotion and relegation.
I really do.
It gives games like Saturday night's enormous meaning.
Win and your club goes up.
Lose and you stay where you are.
Everybody knows exactly what is at stake.
Players.
Coaches.
Volunteers.
Board members.
Supporters.
No guaranteed place next year.
No protection because somebody bought a licence.
Earn it on the football field.
Northcote earned it.
That is the beauty of it.
That is why there were tears.
That is why there were flares in the clubhouse.
That is why a hotel room in Launceston suddenly had two people dancing around it like complete idiots.
It meant something.
What next?
Max is going to NPL Victoria.
That sounds pretty bloody good.
What Nick does next, who knows?
His decision to stay in Melbourne meant giving up the opportunity to play for South Hobart in this year's Australian Championship.
That's the consequence of the choice he made.
But I hope he stays in Melbourne.
I hope he keeps challenging himself and keeps proving what a wonderful footballer he is.
He spent almost his entire football life at South Hobart.
Now he has gone somewhere new, stepped into another football environment and made an impact when it mattered.
Not a bad few weeks.
And somewhere in a hotel in Launceston, his dad got to leap up and yell:
"That's my son!"
Football.
Bloody hell.
I love it.