Troops (left) on the ground in Kyiv. Troops, or rather Isaac “Grinner” Smith on the ground at Kardinia Park.

I recently ventured to Kyiv and Lviv to interview the Ukrainian leadership and get a sense, for the British magazine for which I write political and economic analyses, of how its defence of the Russian invasion is progressing, how Ukraine copes in its new wartime reality and how – and if – it all might end.

Clearly, this was a dangerous undertaking. Kyiv is subject to daily air raid warnings, and Lvivers over near NATO’s border in Ukraine’s EU-facing west worry they will be nuked because they live in Ukraine’s least Russian, most European and – therefore as Mad Vlad in Moscow might see Lviv – most superfluous city.

But it was a fascinating assignment. I interviewed government ministers in air raid shelters, bankers secreted in hideouts, brutalised bureaucrats, plucky Ukrainians determinedly re-opening businesses in the ruins. I was there over 10 days, in and out via Poland by day-long train and bus journeys, Ukraine currently being a civilian no-fly zone, obviously.

As any foreign correspondent will tell you, war zone dangers can be mitigated by meticulous planning. Of course it’s true, as Mike Tyson famously said, that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, but it all came off as anticipated. I described the assignment to my editor in London as successful, in that I got in and out unscathed and met all I’d sought to save for an oligarch or two and the doughty President Volodymr Zelenskiy.

But, for me, a Geelong boy long abroad as a hack, it was successful in a different, more, er, local manner.

When it was first proposed, I alarmingly noticed that the Ukraine assignment would clash with Geelong’s end-of-season march to September. Wherever I’ve been, I haven’t missed a game for years, thanks to my AFLTV subscription, as reliable as Mitch Duncan.

Over the years, I’ve watched the Cats go around from a military base in Afghanistan, via a scratchy satellite signal in the Taleban badlands of Pakistan’s Baluchistan, in Ubud flophouses and five-star Bangkok hotels. The $6000 I spent on a weekend dash to Melbourne from Sri Lanka for that last glorious September Saturday in 2009 was one of the best investments I’ve made.

Sometimes I’ve gone to obsessive lengths to maintain my date with “The Greatest Team of All”.

One time, staying in a Colombo hotel with pre-historic dial-up connections that prevented streaming, I noticed that the in-house cable TV line-up had vacant slots, that there were broadcast gaps between, say, channel 113 for CNN and 117 for Rupavahini, the Sri Lankan state broadcaster.

Knowing a bit how cable gets distributed, but more knowing that the ABC then beamed its service, including the footy, into Asia as far west as the Middle East, I saw an opportunity.

I tuk-tuked it pre-game to the HQ of the hotel’s cable provider, blagged my way into its control room and convinced the panel operator – armfuls of hotel cakes helped – to reconfigure his buttons so as to deliver Geelong’s season opener into my room. I saw my mission as diplomatic and, happily, on my next visit there a few months later, the slot was still occupied by the ABC’s Asia service.

Another time in Jakarta in September 2004 to cover the bombing by Islamist terrorists of the Australian embassy, I secured a rare interview with an influential religious hothead. He wanted me to come to his mosque before Friday prayers, whereas I persuaded him that I would come after. What he didn’t know was that my “after” allowed me to watch Geelong play – and beat – Essendon in the first semi-final that year.

For the last decade or so, being based in Europe, my televisual challenge is more about time zones. The Cats’ sustained success means that I rarely need to rise at 0410 to kick the metaphoric dew off Kardinia Park because the AFL fixtures them in the Australian-zoned blockbuster night slots, which means a normal sleep and comfortable late morning viewing for me at home in Portugal.

But the war in Ukraine posed unique logistical challenges for a Cats obsessive. Clearly, I couldn’t watch them if I got killed in a Russian air strike (though if maimed I reckon I could manage), and two, I couldn’t secure pre-trip a Ukrainian SIM card even if I was alive enough to hotspot it to stream.

I’d be net-less for a Saturday on a 22-hour train journey from Warsaw to Kyiv, and that day was when Geelong played Gold Coast. I’d been smacked in the face by Tyson.

And if I don’t watch a game, I start to worry about footy gods and premiership omens. Later trains were fully booked, crammed with returnee refugees from the war’s first bombings, which said something about Ukraine’s fightback. I added myself to a waiting list and fretted as I flew to Warsaw on Friday before the game.

But the footy gods selected me at full-forward that weekend. Arriving at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport, an email from Ukraine state railways rolled into my phone declaring that I’d got a seat on a later train. I watched the Cats beat the Suns in my hotel the following morning and, elated, made the overnight Kyiv train from Warsaw Centralna with minutes to spare.

As technology has advanced, I’ve had two Catmen – Stephen Mills and Simon Balderstone – join me, telephonically at least, on these journeys, as I have on theirs wherever they’ve ventured.

Mills and Balderstone are fine men, both distinguished former journalists who elevated from that noble calling into academia, politics, sports administration and, in the charitable Baldo’s case, running the Australian Himalayan Foundation.

Cats tragics all, we each have deep histories across Victoria’s Western District and are members of an exclusive club, so exclusive if has only three members. We call it the CatMensShed, which must be because we are sensitive blokes looking out for each other’s welfare and not at all in irony.

Transacted over WhatsApp, the CMS is very hard to define. I’m looking just now at the Wikipedia entry for ‘Men’s Shed’ for help and I see references to ‘well-being’ – yes, I suppose we tick that box, particularly if Geelong is winning – and I see too that a men’s shed objective is to help blokes “remain active and have an overall goal.”

Yes, well, of course our overall goal is for Geelong to win the flag every year it competes. So far we’ve had three this millennium, not too shabby, but not enough. This year, the CMS’ lid is firmly secured lest we mozz our chances of a fourth, apparently our best in a decade. Or so we’ve read. Lids prised ajar quickly get jammed shut in the CMS.

As it has evolved, the CMS has been known to stray beyond its core belief in all things Geelong Football Club into pithy prognostications on politics, society, life in general. Indeed, it’s quite the broad conversational church, particularly from October-March. But footy is at its core, and its best work is done during the season proper, when live-texting games.

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CMS badinage can be willing, and rarely takes prisoners, even eating its own. Reading back our threads, they are an emotional rollercoaster. We’ve written games off as “gawn” and “I can’t watch this shit” with too many WTFs to speak of, only to momentum surge back to elation as if we’d never doubted this fine team. We learnt our lesson not to be cocky a while back when 10 goals up versus Brisbane at the Gabba and venturing off-topic, suddenly Ash McGrath fatefully had the ball.

But mostly we are adoring. It’s easier to be that when Scotty’s win/loss ratio is north of 70% and Geelong frequently finishes on top.

The CMS has its own culture, its own hatreds and heroes. If the CMS had a clubroom or even a key fob, an image of talismanic Casterton-via-Birregurra boy Max Rooke would adorn both.

It even has its unique language, a tongue spoken by just three. Melbourne isn’t the Demons or even the Dees, but “The Off-Pistes,” Adelaide, with its recent outbreak of racism, is the “KKKrows” who play at the “Kroval”. The KKKrows co-tenant is Pawdaddelay or “The Fencers”, St Kilda is “The Sinners”, Carlton “The Blue Paper Bags”, Essendon “The Peptides”, Collingwood is “Filth” (we are not alone there) and I genuinely can’t reproduce the myriad names and descriptions we offer for Eddie McGuire on a family website like Footyology without lawyers present.

But as just as that contempt is, it falls short of our unappeasable, unquenchable, DNA-implanted hatred for Hawthorn, aka the “Evil Criminal Enterprise”, usually shortened to the ECE or simply “Crims”. As Mills messaged in sagely just now, “one of the best things about the finals series in 2022 is NO HAWTHORN and another is NO CLARKSON. Criminal mastermind.”

We frequently declaim a chorus of “Fuck Richmond!” – several were delightedly emitted as the Tigers fell to Brisbane the other week – but tend not to be rude about Gold Coast, GWS and North Melbourne, largely because they kinda don’t much matter.

The CMS quite likes the Western Bulldogs, probably because Footscray is on the way to Geelong, and Sydney, too, a domestic imperative for both Mills and Balderstone, whereas my wife is English and loves actual cats as in felines but doesn’t much know what footy is apart from it being some mysterious vortex her Australian husband has disappeared into six months of weekends for 24 years.

Because we are 60-somethings going on 10, we have our own special player shorthand, monikers which say more about us than the players, to wit “Ken” for Jack Henry because Simon and Stephen both worked for Prime Ministers (Baldo for two) as advisors/speechwriters when economist Ken Henry was their colleague and was, like Jack Henry down back – and, magnificently, forward this year against Richmond – a safe pair of hands. “Fuck Richmond!”

By dint of his surname, Brad Close is fatally attracted to the CMS as “Bunny” or “Boiler”. The CMS’ mutual histories in the Western District render Gary Rohan simply as “Cobden”, where he was born, as was my mother, a town haunted by all three CMS members when kids.

A little known fact is that Max Holmes was born “Sherlock” in the CMS, which morphed into “No Shit” and is now just “NSS”. Paul Chapman was the original “Mr Reliable”, now its Mitch Duncan aka “Reliable”.

And so it goes; the hirsute brothers Cam and Zach Guthrie get a Tolkienesque makeover in the CMS; “Guth the Elder/Younger”. Brandon Parfitt was christened Parfait (perfect) by the Francophone Balderstone. We’ve posited that Patrick Dangerfield will go onto a political career after footy, so he’s “The Honourable Member for Mogg’s Creek” (admittedly D.a.n.g.e.r is much easier on the thumbs), Irish Zach is the phonetic “2E”, and we can’t really improve on the perfection of “Sel” or “Stewie” or “Hawk” or “Blitz”, and it would be sacrilegious to do so.

But Isaac Smith’s arrival at Kardinia Park posed particular issues for the CatMensShed, not just of nomenclature but of integrity. When Smith was recruited from Hawthorn in 2021, we began to question the probity of the club’s administration. It was one thing to hire the gifted Jeremy Cameron from the barely-registrable GWS, but for Smith to appear in the hallowed blue-and-white alongside Jez, well, it was upsetting for the CMS.

Smith had been a premiership-winning member of the Evil Criminal Enterprise that had inflicted much unhealable pain on Geelong; 1989 and 2008 obviously the worst of the enduring agony.

Yes, we had the better of the seasonal Kennett Curse – and, God knows how many YouTube links the CMS have shared reliving Jimmy’s magnificent post-siren point in 2009, and the forever-thrilling Mackie-to-Duncan-to-Stevie-to-Sel play that ended on Hawk’s booming, goaling boot in 2012.

And there was Danger’s dominating debut on Easter Monday at the “G” in 2016. But the CMS snort derisorily at the ECE’s pitiable propaganda that these Crims win the games that matter, while still traumatised by the 2013 prelim; 20 points up at three-quarter time, then the stray spray at goal from Travvie Varcoe at the death.

Hawks becoming Cats wasn’t just not a thing, we assumed it had been outlawed by the club’s constitution, imprinted with the police charge sheets from Leigh Matthews’ assault of Neville Bruns in 1985. Smith had to be part of a Putinesque ECE program to embed their cancerous spies in our ranks.

With deep-state suspicions about former Hawks Rod Olsson’s and Gary Ayres’ successless terms as coach, we delved into history for how many Cats had also played for the ECE. There were – correctly and appropriately – few, and even less of any standing. Moving between the ECE and Kardinia Park just wasn’t something that self-respecting footballers wanting to play for The Greatest Team of All did. But here was Smith, an ECE capo FFS, in hoops, and, moreover recruited by the sainted Stephen Wells regime.

In his first media outing in blue-and-white, Smith was smiling. That brought to CMS’ collective mind that goofy grin he offered in the 2016 qualifying final when kicking after-the-siren to win it for the ECE. Fatefully, he missed, which put us in the prelim. There was no debate. Smith had to be “Grinner”.

In his two seasons at Catland since, I can’t say that the CMS has hugely warmed to Grinner, despite him being by all accounts a very nice bloke (which makes his previous career at the ECE even more puzzling). We’ve thawed, but at best, I’d say we now respect him and, truth be told, we’re probably glad his speedy self now plays for us.

But has Grinner proved his worth? Rationally, unquestionably. But the CMS isn’t rational. We are Moorabool St Taliban. For the CMS, there’s a forever chunk of Smith that’s ECE, and calling Grinner “Grinner” helps us justify his presence on our wing and – yes, OK, dammit – in our best 22.

I guess it’s our own, far safer example of why, come what may in Putinland, Ukrainians can never be Russian.

THE GEELONG SIDE AS SELECTED BY THE CATMENS SHED

B: 2E, The King, Son of Rat
HB: Reliable, Ken, Stewie
C: Grinner, Sel, NSS
HF: Bunny Boiler, Jez/Jezza, Flyin’
F: Stinger, Hawk, Cobden
FOLL: Rhys, Blitz, The Honorable Member for Mogg’s Creek
INTER: Guth the Younger, Kolo, Guth the Elder, Atko/Axe
EMERG: Parfait, Irish Marek, Menners, No Cigar