It’s a season already full of highlights for Matt Rowell, but perhaps his biggest has come in a moment before the opening bounce, rather than after.
Footage captured ahead of Saturday’s game between the Gold Coast Suns and Melbourne showed Rowell appearing to eat some of the grass on Heritage Bank Stadium.
It was a moment that had the crew on Fox Footy’s Bounce enamoured, the live audience repulsed and social media in a frenzy.
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“That’s about connecting,” Andrew Gaze said on Bounce.
“You connect with your environment and then it all comes back, it’s like this big circle.”
Bernie Vince called it “earthing”.
It’s not the first time Rowell has had the footy world talking.
For a large part of 2020, Rowell was sidelined due to a shoulder injury, which saw him take to the coaching side of the game for much of the season.
Ahead of a draw between the Suns and Essendon, Rowell could be seen taking notes while teammate and good friend Noah Anderson was warming up in front of him.
Rowell isn’t the first professional athlete to eat grass at his venue of choice.
Tennis champion Novak Djokovic has eaten the Centre Court grass at Wimbledon ever since he first claimed the trophy in 2011.
“It’s a little tradition,” he told the BBC in 2018.
“As a kid I was dreaming of winning Wimbledon, so, like every child, you dream of doing something crazy when you actually achieve it – if you achieve it – and that was one of the things.”
Whether Rowell ends up with a CV as glittering as Djokovic’s remains to be seen, but he’s certainly doing it all in 2023 so far.
