Preliminary Finals

 

 

For Victorian football fans, their worst fears have finally been realised. The Herald Sun must have hired a South Australian headline writer to mark the occasion, given its descent into mindless, yet hilarious, parochialism:

 

 

But perhaps they were only following the example set at Moron Park last Friday, as the feral croweaters served up their own unique brand of extreme jingoism, as only croweaters can. It went close to matching the all-time records for sheer South Australian sporting zealotry, currently held by the state games against the Vics in the 1980s, Round 1, 1991 and Round 22, 1993.

 

Even the Premier of SA, Mike “State Bank” Rann, came out with a suitably moronic comment, predicting that the influx of Port Power fans across the border this week will raise the average IQ of Victoria. Sure Mike, sure. But not half as much as it will raise the average IQ of South Australia while they’re gone.

 

For the first time ever, a Port Power home final managed to sell-out Moron Park. The burglary rate in Adelaide must have skyrocketed last week in order to finance this spending spree by Power fans (and then plummeted to zero during the game), whilst the South Australian police could have prevented countless future crime waves if they had tagged and bar-coded every Moron Park patron upon entry to the stadium.

 

Meanwhile, adherents of that other Adelaide-based team, the (gay) Pride of South Australia, will be trembling in fear at the prospect of a Port Power premiership. Like terrified Berliners in 1945, middle class Crows supporters will be spending the week huddling in their wine cellars in fear of the proletarian hordes taking over their city.

 

Like the huge army of Orcs that went on the warpath against the civilised world in Lord of the Rings (below), the sight of rampaging Power fans taking over Adelaide will be truly gruesome, as they run amok in an orgy of wanton destruction, whilst grunting their monosyllabic battle cries (“Stop! Stop! Stop!” “Top! Top! Top!” “Grunt! Grunt! Grunt!”). 

 

  Port fans Dazza, Wayne and Bindi getting into it

 

Not to be outdone by State Bank Rann, Leigh Matthews has also come out and made several out-of-character moronic comments himself. Now that J. Akermanis is keeping his mouth shut, it’s as if the peroxide polemicist is now writing lines for Lethal instead. Unlike Aker, we can usually be confident that when Lethal opens his mouth it has been preceded by some degree of thought, but his most recent efforts have thrown doubt on this theory. Lethal came out with several doozies this week – the AFL would be a “shitpot” competition without the interstate sides (“shitpot”? Is that that a cross between shithouse and tin-pot?), and that Geelong facing Brisbane was like a bunch of kids afraid of a haunted house (haunted by what? – Martin Pyke’s extensive collection of spirits perhaps?)

 

The Paralympics opening ceremony took place on Friday night, and the following evening Geelong paid homage to the Paralympic spirit by playing with some “special” disabilities of its own. In particular, its players chose to play with the physical disability of not being able to kick straight from more than 20 metres out in the forward line, and the mental disability of forgetting that the rules of the game actually allow teams to play-on and move the ball forward after an uncontested mark in the midfield.

 

If “Bad Kicking is Bad Football” then Ben Graham and Peter Riccardi were truly shitpot footballers last Saturday. These two blokes have no trouble roosting a sack of wheat over a silo any other day, but on this night they couldn’t have produced a decent kick in an electric chair. As one indignant talkback caller on 3AW put it: “What’s all this rubbish about Ben Graham being a good kick? He’s not a good kick - he’s just long kick. There’s a BIG difference!”

 

Some disappointed Cat fans may point to the 0 goals, 4 behinds that Graham kicked as the difference between the two sides, but one can only wonder what the result would have been had Geelong, like their opponents, also been able to pay their players an extra $2.4 million above the salary cap over the past four years. For all of Brisbane’s sob stories about the need for a “relocation allowance” Geelong has had the most conspicuous examples of players being deterred from relocating. Jade Rawlings for example, is just one of many players who refused to re-locate to Geelong (even declining the club’s final desperate offer of a limousine motorcade to take him to and from Melbourne each day), and gosh, wouldn’t a big marking forward like Rawlings have been handy for Geelong on the weekend.

 

Nonetheless, absent slush funds and wayward kicking aside, it was a game that was there to be won by the Cats. The Lions were off the boil. They were arrogant, lazy and complacent, thinking they could just cruise through. Alas, Geelong never quite had the self-belief to properly back themselves and display a bit of boldness in the last quarter. If they had, we would now be hailing them as geniuses and heroes for pulling of the biggest upset since Phonse Kyne and Collingwood thwarted Melbourne’s attempt at four in a row in 1958. Instead, they’ll have six months to ponder all the patronizing adjectives such as “gallant”, “valiant” and “promising” that the media are already dishing out at them.

 

Hopefully Bomber Thompson will handle the situation by learning from his mentor Sheeds. After the Dons got walloped in the 83 Grand Final, Sheeds pulled the plug on their evening booze-up that night, angrily grabbing the microphone and declaring that none of them deserved to having a good night out after the way they played that day, and that anyone who took any sort of satisfaction from the result did not deserve to pull on the guernsey again. So it should be with the Cats. No back-slapping and small-town adulation this time. If not, then the real lessons of 89-92-94-95 are still yet to be learned.

 

Brownlow night produced its usual mix of talent and glamour, plus the usual array of gold-diggers and wannabes. Then, of course, there was Chris Judd’s rather outstanding better half. She truly dazzled in her elegant backless (and frontless) number, which enabled her to show off her own dual Brownlow medallists to magnificent effect. A million self-appointed talent scouts in the lounge rooms of Melbourne were left in no doubt that a new star was born on Brownlow night 2004. Keep an eye on her in future - definitely one to watch.

 

Judd and partner - thanks for the mammaries

 

The Juddernaut himself also performed with distinction. After every TV shot of him during the night showed him in intimate proximity to a Crownie, with eyes getting progressively redder, wasn’t is marvelous to see him start looking a bit sheepish around Round 20, and then reach for a giant water jug (not to be confused with the two other appetising jugs seated next to him) in a desperate attempt to get himself in a fit state for his speech. He needn’t have worried, as he handled himself will semi-sober aplomb, hitting the usual banal questions from Quarters for six with some classic smart-ass repartee.

 

Now that history has been made with the first ever Grand Final between two interstate teams, we can expect Andrea Demetriou, Placido Evans and the usual suspects in the media (such as Mike “Smithers” Sheahan, who dedicates his life to flattering the Mr Burnses of the AFL) to spend the week serving up all the usual claptrap about how we are now a “truly” national competition, that the AFL has finally “come of age” and that Victorians have “embraced” the national league.

 

Well bugger it, no they haven’t.

 

If the AFL is so confident that the "truly national league" has been embraced by Victorians, then footballinvective.com suggests they test this theory by scheduling a play-off for third place between Geelong and St Kilda. It could be played at the MCG on the Saturday after the Grand Final. Both teams have had good seasons so they deserve a parade through the city the day before as well. And the winner deserves to have a cup presented to it – perhaps we could call it the shitpot in honour of Leigh Matthews. The shitpot could be engraved with the words “VFL premiers 2004”. They should sell all the tickets to real fans and lock the doors to all the corporate boxes to keep the spivs out. The MCG would be chock-a-block and Victorians would jump at the chance to see St Kilda attempt to win its second VFL flag and Geelong win its ninth (given that its seventh and eighth were in 1992 and 1994).

 

No prizes for guessing which match would generate the most interest amongst Melburnians. The Port Adelaide versus Queensland exhibition match this Saturday (by the way, several thousand AFL and MCC tickets still unsold) will pale into insignificance compared to the spectacle of the two perennial underdogs battling it out to be the best team in Victoria – still the highest honour in football.

 

 

 

Tips:

 

Brisbane by 43

Norm Smith Medallist: J. Leppitsch (for personal hygiene assistance (aka bath) rendered to W. Tredrea)

First Goal: D. Bradshaw

Attendance: 77,129 (lots of MCC no-shows and heaps of $1,000 spiv packages left unsold)