Round 6, 2005

 

 

In big football news this week:

 

a)     Friday night’s game between cellar-dwellers Hawthorn and Carlton proved that 49,000 Victorians desperately need a social life;

b)     Shinboner Spirit attempted to make a triumphant comeback in the final quarter at Moron Park, but was more than outweighed by Shinboners S**thouse for the first 3 and a half quarters;

c)     The Junkyard Dog again proved his tactical naivety by playing 200cm first-gamer Hamish MacIntosh and 198cm David Hale, who looked as comfortable in the wet as sperm whales do on sand;

d)     The Dog also declared that Crow pre-match entertainment was responsible for his side’s slow start – just wait for Pagan to jump all over this excuse in a futile attempt to find reasons for North’s incredible 1998 Grand Final fadeout;

e)     Port Adelaide are now officially suffering from the biggest sporting hangover since John Daly stopped attending AA meetings;

f)       Eagle Porn Stars in caffeine-fuelled Sex Romp with Swanettes;

g)     Nick dal Santo takes out mortgage on Brownlow medal;

 

Placido Demetriou took time out from his busy schedule as Conscience of the Nation and instead decided to talk football this weekend, declaring the Sydney Swamp style of play to be unattractive and unlikely to win many games. Amen to that. Notwithstanding his public declarations of support for the Carmen Lawrence School of Political Enlightenment and general propensity for executive lairising, this comment demonstrates that the CEO’s knowledge of the game is fundamentally sound. Such a comment also highlights (correctly) the need for Sydney, being the flag-bearer for a heretic football state apathetic to its might, to improve the aesthetic quality of its representative AFL side.

 

In the biggest sporting fluke since everybody fell over in front of Steven Bradbury to win THAT speed skating gold medal, Freo managed to defeat the Dees at the MCG in a free-flowing game.

 

Chris Connolly has been randomly trying every game plan in the book. This week he decided on “Game Plan #23 – kick long down the guts to tall marking forwards”. Some have made the mistake of thinking that this was in fact sound strategic thinking that was vindicated by the result, but it was just sheer luck for Connolly that this game plan just happened to be next on the list for this week. Don’t expect the Car Salesman to stick to it. On the other hand, Melbourne proved what we already knew – SOFT, as soft as any self-respecting bloke’s manhood would be if they saw Magda Szubanski in her birthday suit.

 

Any conclusion that this result means Fremantle has turned the corner is likely to be proven inaccurate. What price on Jeff Farmer staying off the juice for a second match this season and kicking another 7 goals? (or Luke McPharlin ever kicking 5 goals again, for that matter?). Pavlich enhanced his reputation as “The Polariser”, of expert opinion that is. When he goes well, he’s lauded as the next big thing and likely to be the greatest forward of the era. When he has a bad day, he’s written off as the most over-rated underachiever of all time. The ‘experts’ settled on the former description (for this week only – watch them turn) after Pavlich’s gun performance at CHF, giving Brad Miller the best Turkish bath this side of Istanbul. Unfortunately for Pavlich, he was upstaged by Jonathon “Plugger Duck” Brown at the Dome a few hours later, in a performance that was part Carey, part Lockett, and part good old fashioned Lethal Leigh-style intimidation. All that was missing was a severed behind post.

 

Down at Unskilled Stadium, the locals were celebrating the opening of the new grandstand edifice, with speculation turning to what it should be called. Various options to name it after prominent Geelong identities were allegedly considered during the planning stage of the project, including:

• The Bob Davis Stand – given that the Geelong Flyer is often reminding us that he is still the most recent Geelong premiership coach, the new stand would be the last structure built at the ground for the next 42 years (and counting);
• The Leigh Colbert Stand – each backrest in each seat contains retractable knives to give unsuspecting patrons the Colbert treatment when they sit down;
• The Paul Couch/Peter Riccardi Stand – a flash looking structure, but has the design flaw that there is no view at all of the right hand side of the ground – patrons nonetheless accorded stunning views on the left;
• The Ben Graham Stand – sound design and extremely impressive façade, yet fans are invariably disappointed when they enter the gate and find there is nothing inside;
• The Malcolm Blight Stand – like the new Ponsford Stand at the G, contains several very tall escalators, which promise patrons a thrilling ride to the very highest level, only to break their hearts by throwing them off one step before reaching the top, not unlike the Giant Escalator that leads Nowhere on The Simpsons
• The Gary Sidebottom Stand – was to have been built at the ground, but due to an administrative stuff-up was instead built at the site of a bus stop in Lara;
• The Larry Donohue Stand – dominates the landscape for one year, only to implode in the second, and be forgotten by the history books thereafter;
• The Garry Hocking Stand – name to be changed to the Whiskas Stand for one game each year;
• The Damian Bourke Stand – colossal edifice, but continually being patched up for repairs following innumerable unforeseen natural accidents;
• The John Devine Stand – complete with pulpit for inspirational speech making;
• The Mark Bairstow Stand – complete with state-of-the-art 25 horse stable and Norm Smith medal motif;
• The Ron Hovey Stand – features revolutionary mens room design, in which patrons are invited to put their loose change into a slot and flush their money down the toilet.

On the field at Unskilled, Rocket Eade flew the white flag at the opening bounce, stationing his best forward (C. Grant) in the backline for the whole game, and immediately resorting to a 17 man flood, leaving Jade Rawlings one-out with M. Scarlett as his only possible goal-scoring option. Given the respective form and abilities of these two men, this game plan could be summed up in two words: Good Luck.

 

 

In light of his indifferent form in the last 28 rounds, Jade Rawlings has now become the most resented person amongst Footscray supporters since Darren Jarman. This animosity is understandable, considering that he earns around 20 times the wage of the average Doggie fan, yet displays less than half the productivity, and given his Hawthorn breeding and grooming, is as out of place amongst the Sons of the West as Paris Hilton is among those country hicks.

 

At the MCG, St Kilda easily stitched up Collingwood. Dr Mike Sheahan, Professor of Neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic, drew on all of his medical expertise on the subject of head injuries to argue on the back page of the Herald Sun that Mark Maguire should not take the field for the Saints, only to be repudiated by informed club and medical opinion, and Maguire himself. Some argue that this slight embarrassment may force Professor Sheahan to re-assess his propensity to seek the limelight by talking about subjects of which he knows nothing, but I doubt it.

 

Eddie McGuire and Mick Malthouse unofficially conceded that the Cold Pies would be playing for the priority draft pick this season and the football department, in the absence of any coherent recruiting policy, decided that nepotism, in the great traditions of Indonesia during the Suharto years, was the best solution to improving player stocks. Take a bow Cloke boys, who looked more like three-fifths of the line-up of the latest boy band than the future foundation of a mean lean football team.

 

Consistent with this new recruitment policy, McGuire this week gave the green light for one of the most clandestine and hare-brained schemes (part ‘Brave New World’, part ‘The Club’) ever devised by football management. Eddie, mindful that it has already been 15 years since the Pies tasted premiership glory and with no end to the pain in sight, and also mindful of the Federal Government’s plans to reduce the number of Medicare-funded IVF treatments, has launched a pre-emptive strike against those who stand in the way of his quest for premiership success. He has secretively ordered Nathan Buckley to donate his sperm in the name of science, and will serially impregnate 42 willing surrogates (no doubt some of Broadmeadow’s and Abbotsford’s finest upstanding young Catholics) with Buckley-fertilised embryos. IVF consultants have reportedly already warned Eddie of the inherent obstetric dangers inherent in volunteering to mother/father one of Buckley’s children, but he has retorted in an internal club memo that he would remain on standby should the necessity arise. This will produce a ready made, complete list of Nathan Buckley drones, ready to wrest the 2022 premiership cup from the rest of the league, precisely 32 years after last doing so. Each Nathan Buckley progeny would be genetically engineered and tailored so as to have every position on the ground covered. (i.e. Carey Buckley – with extra sexual randiness gene, Lockett Buckley – to contain an extra fat gene, Liberatore Buckley – bizarre cross-species gene transfer technique with a feral Tasmanian Devil on PCP, et al.)  This would be completely consistent with the current family bias agreement instituted by the Lexus football department, and would undoubtedly give Collingwood its best chance of winning a premiership in the foreseeable future.

 

TigerWatch, Week 6: They’ve Turned. As predicted, the yellow and black have turned early in the season, but not in the expected direction. As predicted, the team’s form against a top side has whipped its fickle supporters into a frenzy of emotion. If nothing else, it has proven that Tiger fans have a unique ability to over-react, whatever the result.

 

A drive down Punt Rd at 7:00 on Sunday evening saw an amazingly large number of Tiger fans still continuing their post match celebrations, with some can-in-hand kick to kick on the Tigerland turf, usually the sort of thing reserved for Grand Final celebrations. If they can knock off the Old Enemy at the G this Saturday, expect a tickertape parade down Bridge Road the following Monday.

 

Port Power, meanwhile, must now face its own turning fans. Perhaps what would do it the most good would be for its coach to turn – Chocko was always able to bring out the best in his side when he was verging on the criminally deranged. He needs to shake of his post-premiership complacency and once again show us his dark side to get his team to snap out of its rut. Perhaps a few days spent up north roughing it with some of Salisbury’s finest will do the trick (a bit like spending time in the setting of ‘Once Were Warriors’ – “Cook the coach some eggs!"..whack!)

 

 

Hero of the Week (x2): 

1. Hayden Skipworth - the latest unexpected Crow matchwinner to be plucked from obscurity (in the finest tradition of Adam Saliba and Shane Ellen) and likely to quickly return to it as well.

2. Jonathan Brown – is this a man on the brink of world domination, a la Carey circa 1993, Lockett circa 1987?

 

Cult Figure of the Week: Impossible to overlook Richo in a classic 200^th game, who along with Wallace bum chum Dr Pink, have become football’s equivalent to ‘Terrence and Phillip’, searching for tweasure and, this time, finally finding it.

 

Clanger of the Week: The Premier of Victoria (and supposed Geelong supporter) opened the new Unskilled Grandstand. In so doing he paid tribute to the club administration, “in particular President Frank Costa and CEO Greg Cook.” Actually, his name is Brian Cook. As clangers go, this is up there with Alan Bond, who as president of Richmond famously introduced the team captain “Dale Whiteman” at the club B&F, after declaring how much he loved “the black and red”. Rumour has it that the Premier was later quoted getting stuck into “Prime Minister Bob Howard and Treasurer Paul Costello” for not resolving the leadership issue.