Outside the clinic
Pretending to like rugby for thirty years.
Ben watches rugby. He follows the results. He has opinions about the Reds' lineout. He also watches every Firebirds game he can get to, owns two netball jerseys, and thinks the standard of play at the elite women's competition is, frankly, more interesting than most of what goes on at Suncorp Stadium. He has not said this at a barbecue.
The confession
It started at a Firebirds game his daughter dragged him to in 2018. He went to be a good dad. He left genuinely converted. He told no one for about eighteen months.
Rugby was the code Ben grew up with. His father played it, his school played it, the city plays it. He understands it, follows it, can hold a conversation about it at length. None of this is false. What is also true is that somewhere around forty he found himself watching Super Netball and thinking: this is extraordinarily good sport, and I have been sleeping on it for decades.
The pace of it. The spatial intelligence required. The way the game moves through zones at speed, the shooting accuracy under pressure, the defensive footwork. Ben, who has spent a career noticing how people manage pressure, finds watching elite netball genuinely fascinating in a way he does not find watching rugby — which he will deny if asked directly in a social setting.
\"The thing about rugby,\" he says carefully, \"is that there's a lot of it and it takes quite a long time. Netball is sixty minutes, it barely pauses, and the margin for error is very small. As a spectator experience, I find it more — \" he pauses — \"efficient. That's my professional assessment.\"
His daughter, who plays at club level and got him into this in the first place, finds his belated enthusiasm appropriate and slightly overdue. His son, who plays rugby, is handling the revelation with what Ben describes as \"commendable maturity.\" His partner has known for years and has said nothing because she is the wiser of the two of them.
The two jerseys are kept in the wardrobe, not on display. Progress is incremental.
The social dimension
Why he kept it quiet for so long.
Ben is a Brisbane psychologist who spends his working life encouraging men to say the honest thing, own what they actually feel, and stop performing emotions they don't have. He kept his netball preference secret for eighteen months. He is aware of the irony.
The barbecue problem
Queensland has strong opinions about rugby. It is the default sporting language of a large proportion of the men Ben spends time with — colleagues, fathers at school pickup, clients before and after sessions. Saying "I find the Firebirds more watchable than the Reds" in this context is not a neutral statement. It requires a level of conversational commitment Ben was not always prepared to make on a Saturday afternoon.
The performance of preference
He is also aware — professionally, acutely — that pretending to prefer one thing when you actually prefer another is exactly the kind of low-level inauthenticity that compounds over time. He has sat with men who've spent decades performing preferences they don't have. He knows where that goes. The netball thing was a small version of a larger pattern, and he recognised it. Eventually.
The actual honest position
He doesn't dislike rugby. He watches it, he enjoys a good game, he went to the 2023 World Cup quarter-final and had a genuinely wonderful time. He just thinks elite netball is a better spectator sport, and that the gap in media coverage and cultural cachet between the two is a reliable indicator of something he could talk about for some time. He tries not to bring it up unprompted. He is not always successful.
A measured, balanced assessment
Rugby is fine. Netball is better. Here is the evidence.
Ben wants to be clear that he has nothing against rugby. He has watched it for thirty-five years. He has friends who play it. He owns a Reds jersey. What follows is not an attack. It is simply a series of objective observations that happen to support a predetermined conclusion.
| Category | Rugby | Netball | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration (actual play vs. time elapsed) | Eighty minutes of clock time. Forty-two minutes of actual ball-in-play. The rest is scrums being reset, players lying on the ground, and video referrals that take longer than a consultation with Medicare. | Sixty minutes. Continuous. If the ball goes out it comes back in within seconds. The sport has no interest in your time being wasted. | Netball |
| Scoring clarity | Tries, conversions, penalties, drop goals — each worth different amounts, subject to video review, occasionally contested for several minutes by people in a booth in Dublin. It is not always immediately clear whether something good has happened. | A goal is worth one point. It either goes in or it doesn't. A child understands this on first viewing. Ben finds this refreshing. | Netball |
| Shooting pressure | A conversion kick is taken from a stationary position, with no defender closer than ten metres, with as long as the kicker would like. The crowd goes silent. Everyone waits. It takes about forty seconds. | A goal attempt is taken under a defender's outstretched arm, after sprinting into the circle, within three seconds, with no backboard and no second chance. This is not a fair comparison and Ben is aware of it. | Netball |
| Spatial complexity | Fifteen players, relatively few movement restrictions, a large field. You can go where you like. This is fine. It is also, Ben argues, why the game sometimes resembles organised chaos with occasional bursts of excellence. | Seven players, strict positional rules, no player allowed everywhere. The game is played in zones. Every moment requires spatial intelligence. You cannot simply run at the problem. | Netball |
| Injury profile | Concussion protocols, head injury assessments, HIA substitutions, players returning from HIA substitutions, debates about whether players should be returning from HIA substitutions. An entire parallel medical conversation happening alongside the sport. | Ankle sprains. Occasionally a knee. Nobody is being assessed for neurological function on the sideline while their teammates play on without them. Ben notes this is also relevant from a public health standpoint. | Netball |
| Referee comprehensibility | Offside, ruck, maul, breakdown, not releasing, not rolling away, obstruction, advantage, the TMO, the citing commissioner, the judiciary. Ben has watched rugby for thirty-five years and still occasionally cannot tell you exactly why the penalty was awarded. | Contact. Obstruction. Footwork. Out of court. The rules are not simple, but they are legible. When a penalty is called, Ben usually knows why within two seconds. This is not a low bar. It is clearing a bar rugby has not always managed. | Netball |
| Things rugby does better | The atmosphere at a Test match is genuinely unmatched. The physical commitment of the players is extraordinary. A well-executed lineout is beautiful in a way that Ben will admit, privately, netball cannot replicate. The World Cup exists and is very good. Scrums are interesting once you understand them, which takes approximately four years. | Rugby | |
Ben acknowledges this table is not peer-reviewed. He also acknowledges that six of the seven categories were selected by him, for him, using criteria he defined. He considers this a reasonable methodology. His daughter, who has a statistics minor, disagrees. He has not shown this table to anyone who plays rugby.
I spend my working life telling men to stop performing emotions they don't have and say the honest thing. It took me eighteen months to admit I prefer netball to rugby. The gap between what we preach and what we practise is, apparently, universal.
Wardrobe inventory
The two jerseys he definitely doesn't own.
There are two Queensland Firebirds jerseys in Ben's wardrobe. This is a verifiable fact. What is less verifiable — and what Ben would prefer remain unverified — is the precise circumstances under which a second jersey was acquired when the first was, by his own account, "perfectly functional."
The first jersey was purchased in 2019, approximately fourteen months after the Firebirds game that converted him. He waited fourteen months because he wanted to be sure it wasn't a phase. It was not a phase. The second jersey arrived in 2022 after the first was deemed — by whom, he will not say — "a bit worn in for a public setting." The public setting in question was a Firebirds game. He was going to watch netball. In a netball jersey. The bar for "public" is perhaps doing some work here.
Both jerseys are stored folded, on the left side of the wardrobe, behind a fleecy he hasn't worn since 2017. They are not on display. He has thought about putting one on display. He has not done this. Progress, as he says elsewhere on this page, is incremental.
(at a netball game, which he accepts is a technicality)
A timeline of the jersey situation
Attends first Firebirds game. Thinks the game is good. Tells no one how good he thinks it is.
Purchases first jersey after a fourteen-month cooling-off period to confirm it isn't a phase. It isn't a phase. Places jersey in wardrobe. Does not mention jersey to anyone.
Wears jersey to a Firebirds game. This is technically a public setting. He has made peace with this.
Acquires second jersey on the basis that the first is "a bit worn in." Both jerseys are now in the wardrobe. No one has seen the second jersey.
Publishes a page on his psychology practice website admitting to all of this. Professional confidentiality applies to his patients, not, apparently, to himself.
A family matter
His daughter's considered opinion is that he has become "a lot."
She got him into this. She has some responsibility here. She does not accept this framing.
"Dad, just come to the game."
She invited him to a Firebirds game. She expected him to sit politely, pretend to follow it, and enjoy spending time with her. This was a reasonable expectation based on eighteen years of observational data.
Verdict at the time: "He seems fine."
"He knows quite a lot about this now."
He started watching games she wasn't at. He started having opinions about game plans and defensive rotations. He purchased a jersey. She was surprised but not alarmed. This is still her own fault and she is aware of it.
Verdict at the time: "Cute, actually."
"He has opinions about the commentary now."
He has strong views about which commentary team understands the game and which does not. He has articulated these views at length. He bought a second jersey. He watches replays. He sent her an article about centre court movement patterns. She plays club netball and did not know this much about centre court movement patterns.
Verdict at the time: "He is a lot."
She is proud of him for admitting it publicly. She has told him he is "overdue." She also plays in a Thursday evening competition and he has been to twelve of her games this season, which she says, in a voice that contains mostly affection, is "fine, it's fine, it's not weird."
Professional assessment
A registered psychologist explains, at unnecessary length, why netball is better.
Ben is aware that applying clinical frameworks to a personal sporting preference is not normal behaviour. He has done it anyway. He would like it noted that this represents exactly zero billable hours.
The cognitive load hypothesis
Netball requires continuous spatial reasoning, positional awareness, and rapid decision-making within strict movement rules. From a cognitive psychology standpoint, watching elite netball engages the observer's predictive processing systems in ways that rugby — with its longer possession phases and slower build-up play — simply does not. Ben finds this stimulating. He has used the phrase "cognitively dense sport" at a dinner party. He will not be doing this again.
The time-efficiency framework
Sixty minutes. No rolling substitutions. No video referrals that last eleven minutes and conclude ambiguously. No fourth quarter that somehow takes forty-five minutes of clock time. Ben's schedule is busy. His attention is a finite resource. A sixty-minute sport that does not mess around is, from a practitioner's perspective, a highly efficient use of the available bandwidth. He has made this argument to his son, who plays rugby. His son's response was "okay, Dad." He accepts this.
The pressure performance variable
Shooting accuracy under extreme time pressure, with no backboard, no second-chance offence, and a defender's hand in your face — Ben argues this is among the most psychologically demanding individual performance moments in professional sport. He has watched the same Claire O'Brien shooting sequence eleven times. This is research. He has written nothing down. He is not sure what he would do with the findings.
The sunk-cost error (inverted)
Having watched rugby for thirty-five years, the rational response to discovering you prefer another sport is to acknowledge the preference and adjust accordingly. Continuing to watch rugby primarily because you've watched it for thirty-five years is a textbook sunk-cost fallacy — the kind of thing Ben explains to clients regularly. He is now correcting the error. He still watches rugby. He's working on it. Insight and behaviour change are, as he tells his clients, different things.
The suppression-expression continuum
Keeping a genuine preference hidden for eighteen months, then selectively disclosing it to immediate family, then eventually publishing it on a professional website is, Ben acknowledges, a fairly textbook arc of emotion suppression followed by gradual integration. He has described this exact process to clients. He did not notice he was doing it himself until his daughter pointed it out in 2022 during a conversation about jersey number two. He finds this professionally embarrassing. He is including it here anyway because it's funnier than leaving it out.
Clinical conclusion
The preference for netball is genuine, proportionate, and no longer suppressed. The acquisition of a second jersey is within normal parameters. The commentary opinions are perhaps slightly elevated in intensity but not clinically significant. The decision to analyse all of this using professional frameworks is, in Ben's own assessment, "a bit much, but accurate."
This analysis has not been peer-reviewed. It has been reviewed by his daughter, who said "yep, that tracks." He has taken this as sufficient validation.
Here for the therapy, not the netball.
The Firebirds are not bookable. The psychology practice very much is.