Who needs an olive branch when you have the family called Silvagni.
Time waits for no man…nor for institutions…like football clubs…clubs like ours…clubs stuck in time past…while the competition sped away into the future.
But sometimes time offers redemption…and sometimes a figure embodies that chance at grasp what is offered.
So it is for me with Stephen Silvagni’s…with our recruitment of the third generation of Silvagni.
And how could it not?
We who waited for this club to find its path back to greatness. Who have found despair can always deliver another punch that misery knows now bottom, only the sickening sensation of falling.
People like me who have three phases in life yet only two phases of Carlton.
And so I say welcome young Jack! Welcome back and thank you for the chance at a new start…a new phase in this great club and in my life.
Phase one, Serge. No more need be said. Serge…The name embodies my childhood…embodies all that was strange and wonderful about those faraway years when the glamour of this club made my shining innocent mind fold in and in upon itself as if I was flicking through the player cards of my youth while chewing the sticks of gum that I can still taste, faintly, as I recall those long ago times. Serge! And embedded in Serge are premierships, Big Nick and Gags, the first trips to Princes park, to the MCG, to crowds of men and standing on empty tinnies. Syd’s dropkicks and Racehorse Hall, Jezza and Crosswell. Old Ragsy and Southby, Vinnie and Wes, Barass as player and as coach, Keka and Swannie, Robbo and Gary Crane, Quirkie and Perc….a veritable role call that even now takes my breath away. The grand players of my radiant, club-filled youth when this club carried out actions that have become legendary…including the event that outdoes all other events - the 1970 comeback. Serge captures them all…he captures the beginning of multiculturalism and he is the lamp shining on that time when Carlton strode the earth, giants amongst the mortals who dared compete against them… to borrow a phrase, Serge reminds of when we were kings.
Then came his son who we named SOS. Where Serge was earth, the immoveable object, the bandied man with the tongue and eyes of steel, SOS was air, the flier, the man who soared. Yet in the air was still his father the earth for like his father SOS could not be moved. Both were men of steel. Both strode the grounds on those bow-legs and refused to yield…and where Serge reminds me of when I was a child, SOS carries me to the time of my journey into manhood. In SOS I see Kerna, Braddles and Motts (a tear here, there is always a tear here,) Williams and Kouta…again champions all. Such a great time…such a team…such a club.
And then we fell. We, like Icarus…dared the sun and paid the price…and have been lost.
Until now…Now that I am gray and older, now when my children have grown…and grown without their Serge…their SOS, their moments sharing this Club’s time in the sun…until now. Now we enter the third phase. Jack is the beacon…the call to climb back up…to remember what is great about the past but to embrace the new, to let the son and grandson tell a tale so different from the father and grandfather that it becomes the same story…Serge to SOS to SOSOS…
I can feel hope returning…The flood is over I think…the dove has returned…the gift in its beak…the branch…the branch that is the family Silvagni…It is time to climb the mountain again and reclaim what we had lost.
Go Blues!
(sorry if it's a bit messy, the red, like hope, was quite good tonight)
_________________ This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!
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