One thing you can say about Sydneysiders is that they are congenital bandwagoners. One only has to think of Warwick Capper, Barry Unsworth, Scadal’us, and the brief prevalence of scooters to see this point. And then there is the sad case of Souths. A team that, five years ago couldn’t have filled a thimble after eleven schooners, was now predicting 40,000 to a pre-season match. The fair-weather pearls & pinot set were once again replacing the ‘Go Kings’ sticker on the 4WD for ‘Go Swannies’ for ‘Go Waratahs’ for ‘We’re Back’. Yet these are people who think Redfern Oval is a Ted Noffs clinic, “off-road” means parking on the median strip, and when asked about Clive Churchill reply “except for the fall of Singapore he was a great leader”. Ask who won last year’s premiership and most of them say “Shore”.

The Gypsies know what it’s like to be abandoned. It’s a fact that not one of them has a mother. After winning five in a row Steve Barnett was regularly taking home a groupie (albeit a blow-up one); five losses later he couldn’t score with the elder sister of Mark Waugh’s wife. The Gypsies felt justifiably miffed and daunted by the tens of thousands that turned out to cheer the return of Souths at Moore Park. The Gypsies were Ferdinand Marcos, Soeharto and Slobodan Milosevic combined. It could only be ugly.

Souths ran with the wind in the first half and quickly set about demonstrating just why they were kicked out of the comp in the first place. Periods of intense drudgery were only occasionally brightened by moments of incredible dullness as Yak, Lindsay Cohen, the Barnett boys and Hamilton distributed the sort of puff pastry that made Arthur Beetson such a popular nude portrait model on the mid-seventies art scene. However the massive crowd came alive after a head high tackle from loose forward (in every sense of the word) Kev Kahler on Souths Number 4 ‘Bleeding Gums’ Murphy. Murphy woke up in Ward 7 at Prince Alfred, his teeth accompanying him only on visiting days. Kahler and Roy (‘so sublime it’s ridiculous’) Masters then led from behind as only they can do – a series of ankle-taps, late tackles, squirrel-grips and head butts reducing the opposition to pulp. Kahler finished with three in intensive care and Masters with five in the psychiatric ward, going the Hoppa on the last for good measure and restricting Souths to 165.

In the second half the Gypsy dragons blew smoke, but little fire. You could throw a blanket over their forwards as they tried to take it up the middle, but were met with stout defence and halitosis, resulting in more fumbling than a Marist Brothers’ prom night. Only Ewen Chung was able to counter Souths’ umbrella defence and strategic sweat-band usage by going over the top in characteristic fashion, his 49 points including 7 tries, 6 goals, 9 field goals, 4 cheerleaders and Reggie the Rabbit. Tom Sharp sensed certain victory and prematurely called Bobo’s Express Chicken Service for a ribald feast of fruit-bat tapenade, sweet ales and delicacies from the four corners of the globe. But there were to be no buxom wenches, no netball girls on the team bus home, no dual gold medals, no higher court, and no strains of Under the Southern Cross wafting across the Park. When the referee, in a mind for corruption and drooling with pleasure dispatched Lindsay Cohen to the sinbin for inconsiderately delaying the end of the game, the Gypsies had pillowed again.

With just one game left Nathan Cohen is a very relieved man. After this loss, you can run thermo-molecular Pythagorean algorithms through an anti-gravitational Magellanic wormhole, postulated at 5 billion times the speed of fellatio in a Tardis, and the Gypsies would still miss the finals by 132 000 light years. But the Gypsies will fight on – lawyers have been engaged, figureheads mobilised and a march on Botany Municipal Council organised. Dirk Wellham once said, “even dreams are real while you’re asleep,” but even a run of Steven Bradbury luck couldn’t revive this decaying corpse.