Station Street Boys Run A Bit Of Piggy In The Middle On The Tram Tracks While Half The Strip Films It And Nobody Wants The Ball

STATION STREET — One bloke in a black tee, one copper standing dead still by the paddy wagon, and a crowd of about forty phones deciding who's the piggy. That's the game the boys out of Station Street were playing on the tram tracks late one night, and it has the whole trade asking the same thing: who brought the ball?

There wasn't one. That's what made it. A fella with his arms out and his phone up squared off in the middle of the road like he'd been told the slab was his and the pour was starting, while the officer stood there with the patience of a man who has watched a lot of people discover physics. Behind them the Metro sign glowed, the crowd leaned in, and everyone had a better view than the guy in the middle.

"That's a bloke who's been running on pints and confidence since smoko," said one linehand who has stood in the wrong spot on a pour and knows the feeling. "Hard to tell who's chasing who. Doesn't matter. Somebody's getting run around."

A workplace safety expert who has never been on a footpath after midnight called it "a textbook case of nobody reading the exclusion zone." Tram tracks, wet bitumen, one bloke in the open and a lot of people with their phones out, all of it happening where traffic is supposed to go.

No ball ever turned up. Eleven people filmed it. Not one of them picked up a bucket.