‘The ruckmen face off over the centre circle and for a moment everything is frozen possibility: players, umpire, the ball suspended overhead, the softly clouded sky. Everything except the fans, a circus beyond the stillness. Then the ball swings down and cracks it all open.’
The new draft pick, the tired has-been, the up-and-comer, the might-have-been. The talent scout, the coach on the edge, the beleaguered umpire, the concerned medic. The number-one fan, the lifetime members, the desperate gamblers. The footballers’ mums, the WAGs, the groupies. The tags, the rivals, the sledging. The pressure.
Mick Reece and Jake Dooley, best mates since childhood, begin their first professional season playing AFL with little notion of what they’re getting into: the complexity of the beast that the game must feed.
In Game Day, Miriam Sved brings this beast into the light over the course of one season of Aussie Rules. What unfolds is a deeply insightful novel about the pathology of an AFL club, its players and its fans. Revelling in their battles, their victories and their relentless interdependence, Game Day asks whether what unites the true believers is stronger than what divides them, and if love of the game can transcend our flaws and imperfections to result in something beautiful.
‘Miriam Sved’s Game Day is an absolute corker, leaping into the ruck of AFL religion in a muscular, steely-eyed and dramatic way that will appeal to devotees and heretics alike… It’s a gripping read that doesn’t flinch from the ugliness and imperfection of the professional sport in the 21st century, yet succeeds, too, in capturing its miraculous aspect, the epic physical poetry of Aussie rules that makes it so much more than a game to so many. It’s the most supple, lively literary take on AFL I’ve read.’
Cameron Woodhead, The Age
‘Miriam Sved’s Game Day… does for the AFL what Junot Diaz’s Drown did for the Dominican ghettos of New York… The structure Sved has adopted facilitates anthropological exploration. She shows a gifted curiosity and fine balance in the way she builds her characters. At times I found myself being reminded of the American author Jennifer Egan. Both authors share the ability to surprise with character insights, something so traditional yet so mentally refreshing. The prose is limpid yet razor sharp. Before you know it, you are looking out from the inside of her characters’ perspectives. Put together, these stories in Game Day create a complex vision of AFL culture and the passions it channels. Highly recommended.’
Ed Wright, The Australian
‘As important as sport is to Australian culture, when it comes to making the transition into depicting it in popular culture we seem to be caught just short of the tryline… It seems somewhat ironic then, that what could well become [one] of the great Australian introspectives about sport might come from a quietly spoken woman who readily admits she’s not that interested in sport.’
Karen Hardy, The Sydney Morning Herald
© Miriam Sved