United at the novel’s opening, the two players' small-town lives criss-cross in unexpected ways across the arc of the home-and-away season. Yet this is no ‘hero’s journey’ profile of the players’ fortunes, as is so often sketched in the sports media. Sved inverts this convention, making the boys the objects of the culture’s (male) gaze, allowing the reader to see the ways in which their lifestyles and identities are shaped for them by these bystanders and collaborators, until they become distorting moulds. In Sved’s hands, the game’s language and customs are revealed as its true boundaries, determining the roles and freedoms of the men and women in its field of play.

Sved’s prose is taut and deceptively fluid; she has a careful ear for the code’s vernacular. Readers will most likely find themselves finishing the book at speed and in the piecemeal fashion of a short story collection (some of the chapters have previously been published discretely in Meanjin and Best Australian Short Stories). But Sved’s work is best consumed as a whole, the ruptures in its narrative continuity opening up spaces for the reader to appreciate the pathos of these characters’ lives off the page, their quiet dramas behind the play.