The primitive football fanatic in me is already abuzz. Yet the thinking adult in me is already bracing for the ordeal of the fake crowd noise that will be used to pretend that an empty Sydney Cricket Ground is brimming with excitement-stoked fans.

The cerebral public intellectuals who have just debated the topic "Can you enjoy sport without crowd noise?" on ABC Radio National's ideas show The Minefield agreed, only half-jesting, that feelings about the fake crowd noise constitutes "the real moral divide of our times". That's because one's stance on the matter also proclaims something of what one believes in one's heart about Sport and Life and about the nature of Truth.

As is always the way with The Minefield this edition bristled with thoughtfully-warbled points of view.

As a fan of silence in all its forms the sudden strange silence of sports stadiums does not/would not worry me at all. I half-agree with the view (canvassed during the show) that right now the silence of stadiums should be embraced as an eloquent "reality" of these surreal times, that to have a faked crowd is a cowardy, custardy shrinking from present reality, a pretence that all is normal when abnormality is the mammoth in all our rooms.

But others on the show argued variously that silent stadiums seem unbearably sterile, that crowd noise is vital to the overall experience of football as drama and theatre, that players somehow draw inspiration from crowd noise (authentic or not). They argued, too, that the fake crowd sounds are not a wilful deceit of the people (like, say, politicians' lies) because the people know very well (and are comfortable with the fact) that the crowd sounds are synthesised.

My mind, as I brace myself for the deceitful dins that accompany Raiders' matches, is still slightly ajar on the subject. Overall, though, the fakery of a fake presence of something that isn't there offends me.

Would I, to pretend to my neighbourhood that I have bobolinks and whippoorwills (charismatic North American songbirds, totally absent from Australia) in my Canberra garden, play recordings of their songs from hidden loudspeakers in my shrubs? Hell will freeze, I will vote Liberal before I do something so fraudulent.

These are excitingly statue-toppling times and surely all of us who have a red-blooded ideological side understand something of the zeal the topplers' display.

I find myself half-wishing my city had a statue of someone hateful enough (Sir John Kerr, say) to deserve my participation in giving that effigy a jolly good toppling, in imitation of what the zealots of Bristol did with their statue of a slaver.

And yet, for the thinking zealot isn't there already something ridiculous and (unless one is a seagull) useless about figurative statues that makes them difficult to get up a full head of righteous steam about?

Now that vague feeling of mine is given meaty substance by Alicia Stalling's timely, highly-readable piece "The Sculptor vs. the Poet: Marble can be toppled, yet words are eternal".

She makes the point, with umpteen references to lost or ruined statues and to immortal and still-fresh-as-the-moment-they-were-published poems, that history shows that while statues are figuratively only made of clay our civilisation's poetry is here to stay.

She begins with the Ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar (518 BC - 443 BC). Who, imagine if you can a splendid poet being a splendid sports reporter writing his stories as poems) who in his Fifth Nemean Ode begins "I'm not just a sculptor, fashioning statues that stand around, always stuck in the same place."

No, he continues, lots of (wholly deserved) tickets on himself and his craft, he does better than any sculptor, writing "sweet songs" of sporting news that can board every ship and fly in all directions at once, proclaiming that news.

In this case his sweet song was of a certain Pytheas, who had just triumphed in the pancratium (no-holds-barred boxing) at the Nemean Games.

"Some athletes," Stalling trills, "were indeed honoured with statues to commemorate their victories, but such memorials were single and stationary and subject to all the insults of time.

"Pindar's poem wings its way unscathed over the centuries, and now is disseminated not only on paper, but electronically, across the Internet, all over the world. You can access it with a click of a button."

Inevitably Stalling brings in a star witness, Shakespeare, his Sonnet 55, to testify to her case.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time ...

What The Bard is saying, Stalling explaineth, is that "Statues only seem permanent".

"Reputation, however, is preserved not in a stone or brazen image, but in language, which continually revives by being read and spoken through the mouths of the living ... A reputation may erode, leaving the monument to it bereft of its anchoring grandeur, in a state of ironic disrepair."

Your poetry-mad columnist is buoyed by Alicia Stalling's singing of the praises of poetry's stamina, and agrees with Shakespeare that instead of bothering ourselves to topple statues we should just leave it to seagull-assisted sluttish time to give those effigies their comeuppances.