Last week when Steven Milne's rape charge surfaced again in the media, The Monthly tweeted a previously published part of Anna Krien's book Night Games. It was a sort of intellectual rejoinder regarding the truth about our heroes' psychology. Don't forget what's really going on out there. It made me consider groupthink again. Being pushed to the end of your capabilities can reveal surprising, sometimes disappointing things. And some of those things were the lessons of our football lives. Getting pushed caused some of us to push back, occasionally with the kinds of action that Krien unravels rather well in her book. Indeed, our early years were often ruled by a code, as Krien suggests, similar to those of college fraternities, where "superiority is tested through sex, pranks, initiations and physical feats". But among these, sex does not feature for me in the way Krien wants it to. But it is hard to forget other things. On one occasion our group participated in the humiliation of a new boy, who was singled out because he was struggling, and vulnerable. This was quintessential bullying, unforgettable because it was so simple and, in some ways, summarised the rookie experience, indeed the experience of many boys everywhere. We were in a function room of some fashion, and there were great pavlova desserts before us on a table. Someone said to the new boy, "Fifty bucks if you can get that piece of kiwi fruit off the cake with your teeth, without upsetting the icing." Sounded fine, and the boy quickly went down before someone else could claim the prize.

He gnawed at the kiwi for an instant wearing a gentle, embarrassed smile, and then two players stepped up behind him and drove his face through the cake so hard that it broke the table. Naturally, the players laughed, but I couldn't because I could see the boy's face as he went past me to the bathroom. I later found him dabbing blood from his brow in a cubicle, trying to look casual. He never played in our team again and what he'd wanted, I know, was to go down swinging, perhaps a loser but not a fool, and that was the great shame of it. Simply recognising this is the easy part. Deciphering what it meant to play professional football, what it meant for that boy, is more difficult. The problem with intellectualising the physical, generally, is that you're forever grasping at concepts that are often emotions, responses outside of thought. No word, for instance, will convey the feeling of being punched in the nose, or explain the yearning to punch back. Krien observes these fraternity habits with a brilliant eye, but too often she shows us things that support what I think she suspects already – that most footballers are rather easy to deduce. It takes Krien 266 pages, for example, to at least offer us the gesture, "Of course, not all footballers are the same." Until this point, the reader is guided by a set of rhetorical pronouns, "they and them", which work to collectively diminish footballers, and place the author beyond, and above their follies.

Aside from Krien's excellent unpacking of a bizarre, and in some examples, sickening tendency for "gang bangs", the outcomes of "groupthink", as she calls it, are many, and varied. "More than [simply] be managed, players can be changed," she tells us. "If the football world stops being a sanctuary for tired old sentiments such as 'boys will be boys' and instead becomes a sanctuary for boys who not only want to play good football but also become good men." I was in Kokoda once with some Hawks - already this scene is tired, a masculine Australian cliche. We were there exercising the myth of the Diggers, trying to match pain and sweat to a set of words we borrowed from their monuments. All of this sounded dull at one point, too obvious to work a trick on me. But there we were, in teams of four at the foot of a mountain, watching New Guinea tribesman cut down trees that soon we would carry to the summit in a race. We had no measure for this, no idea how hard it might be, but we were being challenged, pushed by men who had been pushed before us in the same way. We set out and quickly came undone. The trees were too heavy. Through the foliage, voices were coming. Players were screaming things, obscenities and frustrations. It was the breaking down of our previous standards and ideas.

Later, hours later, the last of the teams reached the summit. Beaten and shaking, we sang the club song together beneath an Australian flag. It was a pathetic, and predictable scene. But at the time we were in tears, and it still grips my throat to think of it.