 |
| Archives | Features | Dictionary | Subscribe | Invective Forum |
|
|
Mid-Season Prognostications and Invective
After the split round bye and an extra week for footy fans to reflect on the fortunes of their side, it is timely to reflect on the state of the league and each team – where they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going. In light of the pre-season predictions of footballinvective.com, we hereby swallow our fair share of humble pie in relation to some teams, whilst at the same time basking in the warm inner glow of vindication in the case of others. Warning: The following analysis contains assertions and conclusions that some non-South Australians may find offensive.
1. West Coast Pre-Season Prediction: 4 Current Position: 1 Will Finish: 1
Just as gob-smacked audiences were asking in the final scene of Boogie Nights, the only question that remains is just “how long” the porn stars winning margin will be. We speculated pre-season that it was important for the Eagles to seek and preserve quality tall timber if success was to be achieved. But as John Howard proved last season in Tasmania, such a policy is by no means a necessary requirement for victory over more fundamentally flawed opponents. Woosha will join the likes of Lethal, Barassi and Big Nick as one of the few players to captain and then coach premiership teams. All eyes will also be on Porn United on Brownlow night, to see if the lovely sidekick of one of its players can make it back-to-back Jo Bailey Medals for the boys from the West. 2. Adelaide Pre-Season: 7 Current Position: 3 Will Finish: 2 As Sir Thomas Playford once said, “There are only two sorts of people in the world: South Australians, and those who wish they were.” No-one understands this better than Neil Craig. And Simon Goodwin has always wished he were South Australian. Although we predict that every football fan’s ultimate dream of a Showdown Grand Final will not come true this year, we nonetheless predict that the sporting world will be treated to the amazing spectacle of a Showdown Preliminary Final (or should that be Showdown XIX? or simply Mega Showdown I?). Like ’87, ’94, ’96 and ’99, the Grand Final will be played a week early this year. The modern era has been renowned for dud grand finals (only ’89, ’97 and 2002 resonate in the memory), yet there have been a veritable procession of epic preliminary finals - take your pick from ’87 (Stynes goes walkabout), ’93 (THAT comeback), ’94 (Match Of The Decade), ’96 (Plugger Power), ’97 (the Jarman Show – up yours, Libba), ’99 (the KoutaMan and the Wandering Wallis), ’01 (some Hawk fans still think it was yesterday), or ’04 (x2). 2005 will prove no different. The Gay Pride and the Silver Teal have remained faithful to the SA ethos of razzle dazzle and flair. The flipside to this SA heritage has also been the tradition of SANFL grand finals degenerating into brutal slugfests. We predict that Mega Showdown I will also follow this great SA tradition. The Ramsgate will look like a schoolgirl slap fest compared to the thuggery, destruction and absolute pure poetry as the two great teams re-live the SANFL Dreamtime legend. We only hope that the MCC continues its intransigence on preliminary finals and insists that it be played at the G, thus giving Victorians the two underserved pleasures of hosting both the greatest game of the modern era and an influx of 50,000 South Australians to boot. 3. Geelong Pre-Season:
2 Current
Position: 4 Will
Finish:
3 Bomber Thompson has built a playing list, and Brian Cook has built the off-field nous that in their own rights are each of premiership quality. However, a certain mystical essence - an ethereal presence that lurks between the ears of Geelong players still continues to hold them back. Long-gone is the early-season bravura and haughtiness so freely exhibited by the likes of FGY at the Cats-Roos game this year, as the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow relapse into the dissociative state that has afflicted them since 1963. Much has been made on this web-site of the undoubted class and brilliance of the Scarlett Pimp and Rusty Nuts. The influence of Scarlett and Ling on the Geelong team are akin to the masculine element in the coital act – rock hard, whilst all around them is soft, wet and mushy. 4. Port Adelaide Pre-Season:
1 Current
Position: 8 Will
Finish:
4 Chocko’s boys are back. Make no mistake about it. There is something seriously anomalous about the current AFL ladder, in which Richmond sits above Port Adelaide and Brisbane, and only one of the latter teams is in the Eight. The Power will do their utmost to ensure this anomaly is safely rectified. It cannot be reiterated enough just how magnificent Port were just before the mid-term break, despite the sheer feebleness of the present day Hawks. Their trip to Subiaco was like a date with Kobe Bryant, but since then, the silver teal has been living up to its own self-evident lairising flamboyance. 5. Melbourne Pre-Season:
8 Current
Position: 2 Will
Finish
5 Realistically, they are top four material, all things being equal. Unfortunately all things are not equal - least of all the size of the Demons’ ticker. They may well finish in the top 4 after Round 22, but like Osama in a synagogue, don’t expect them to remain there for long. The Demons’ strategy this year seems to include getting as many of their players as possible reported, in a desperate attempt to prove that they really aren’t soft. Garry Lyon’s attempts to talk up the number of tribunal appearances a couple of weeks ago really fooled no one. However, like a Monaro with a piss-weak V6 (grossly underpowered), the Demons, whilst lacking real grunt where it counts, will still always manage to look good in the process, and can be relied upon for some of the best attacking football, aerial high-jinks and general crowd pleasing antics for the rest of 2005. Brucey, Robbo, Aaron Davey, Jeff White, Neitz and “Jack” Nicholson take a bow. 6. Brisbane Pre-Season:
3 Current
Position: 10 Will
Finish:
6 Last week we likened the Lions to a classic late model sports car - undoubted brilliance, impeccable credentials, and a class leader….in its day. Unfortunately for Lethal, Brown, Aker and friends, like even the finest classic cars, they eventually get superseded and dragged off by the newer models. If the Lions are a 1991 BMW M5, they have been superseded by the Pornstars, an equivalent new model M6 - faster, more refined, and a whole lot sexier. 7. Sydney Pre-Season:
12 Current
Position: 5 Will
Finish:
7 Like the tse-tse fly emerging from a Gambian bog to give its victims sleeping sickness, the Sydney Swamp will inflict a similar punishment on sports fans for the rest of the year. Even Demetriou has now acknowledged that the condition is incurable, and has given up criticising them and instead returned to form by grossly flattering and mollycoddling them – just like every previous commissioner. However, given the lack of quality teams this year, the spots at the lower rungs of the eight will be wide open to be filled by the most consistent “good ordinary team” (to use a classic Jack Dyerism). Sydney will narrowly pip the Roos for this honour. 8. North Melbourne Pre-Season:
9 Current
Position: 6 Will
Finish:
8 The
mangy Junkyard Mutt will live to not exactly fight another day, since few of
their performances this year have shown much fight. Having failed their test of moral fibre and ethics by reportedly honouring Leigh Colbert’s 200th game last week. The words of the Mutt are enough to make anyone wince:
Hello? But isn’t someone forgetting a rather more noteworthy low point in Colbert’s career circa 1999? Laidley’s comments really do beg the question, namely, just how do players show their admiration for Colbert? But treacherously standing in a circle and shooting each other, a la the final scene of Reservoir Dogs, perhaps?
At least the Roos leveled the score with Peter Bell last round and exacted revenge for his merciless and acrimonious act of colberting at the end of the 2000 season. Mr. Connolly - be very afraid. 9. St Kilda Pre-Season:
5 Current
Position: 9 Will
Finish:
9 Unlike the rest of the pea-brained football nostradami, we did not fall for the hype and instead exercised some judgment and wrote off the Saints at the start of the year. But even hard-bitten misanthropic cynics like footballinvective.com were not immune from the disease of putting overly optimistic expectations on the Saints, still tipping them to finish a respectable fifth. It should be remembered that they have won only 12 of 27 games since their winning streak at the start of 2004. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that they do not have a real coach. Maybe Rod Butterss, after watching Roger Federer destroy opponent after opponent without a mentor throughout 2004, deluded himself into believing that Little Nicky, dal Santo, Ball and the G-train could do the same in 2005. The media would have us believe that Butterss is an ‘imaginative’ operator who is blessed with the ability to ‘think laterally’. I have seen frontal lobotomy patients with more lateral thought. Nup, he’s just another Brighton spiv on the make, who like Ted Parker in “The Club” sees a football presidency as his ticket to fame and legitimacy, with an unlimited licence to interfere in football decisions as well. If the Saints had stuck with Blighty, they would be premiers in 2005. Enough said. As the media sharks began to circle Moorabbin this week in search of blood (oh, how quickly they turn), Rod Butterss immediately sprang to the defence of the coach and declared his “full support” for Thomas. On this occasion, unfortunately for the Saints, the president actually meant it. And therein lies the problem. Having dispensed with football genius in the form of Blight to install the President's mate, the relationship between the two means there is nobody to hold Thomas accountable. There is presently no separation of powers at the Saints. The only remedy, therefore, is insurrection by the masses. Given the fragile temperament of so many long-suffering Saints members, and the absurd extent to which their expectations have been inflated and now dashed in 2005, this could be highly likely. As of this week, the Saints have officially been placed on turning watch. As the sharks keep circling, the captain of the good ship HMS Saints should be making Grant Thomas walk the plank. But don’t hold your breath. It looks like they’ll all be going down with the ship instead. 10. Western Bulldogs Pre-Season:
15 Current
Position: 11 Will
Finish:
10 We predicted pre-season that Rocket would have to become an alchemist in order to fashion gold from his pile of Braybrook dung. The Dogs aren’t gold yet, and not likely to ever be any time soon, but more a pseudo-fashionable, yet dependable, titanium. We also tip that in 2005 Rocket will out-perform his more exuberant ex-teammate down at Punt Road, a certain ‘Wow Plow’, who has beguiled and hoodwinked media arseheads across the country as to the quality of his coaching acumen with his own special lights and magic show. However, with Dr. Pink these days looking more like a critically wounded Klinger on M*A*S*H, and Tiger fans beginning to get a taste for their fix of mid-season turning, you just wonder how long this will all last.
11. Collingwood Pre-Season:
11 Current
Position: 14 Will
Finish:
11 The much awaited return of Bucks, and the welcome demise of Rhyce Shaw should see the Pies resurrect their season (just as the fall of France resurrected the Allied forces in World War 2). 12. Essendon Pre-Season:
10 Current
Position: 13 Will
Finish:
12 Last week, Essendon showed they are not completely gone, and St Kilda, conversely showed that they undoubtedly are, as Trabant football scored a rare win over a more highly rated side. This result suggests that someone at Windy Hill hastily strapped a turbocharger onto that asthmatic 2-stroke Trabi motor, in a hare-brained bid to give the Dons some added impetus. Surely it won’t be too long before the unholy contraption explodes on the side of the Autobahn somewhere between Rostock and Hannover. 13. Fremantle Pre-Season:
13 Current
Position: 12 Will
Finish:
13 To the casual football observer, the Dockers would appear to have gone backwards. However, the Dockers, once such an unexceptional, plain Jane outfit, are at last generating interest from the rest of the football world. Deep Purple have begun to develop a soul, but developing the necessary attributes that comprise any real football team with a real club culture and history, such as:
At
last, Fremantle are injecting some colour and innuendo into football through
their club’s new predilection for trying not to tolerate its own
dysfunctionality. That’s what makes football such a great game – and,
incidentally, why we love the Tiges so much. 14.
Richmond Pre-Season:
14 Current
Position: 7 Will
Finish:
14 They’ll
Turn. Next week. They’ll turn. 15. Carlton Pre-Season:
6 Current
Position: 16 Will
Finish:
15 We were wrong. Terribly wrong. But it’s one of those occasions where one is happy to be proven wrong. A bit like Peter Costello when he discovers another unexpectedly large budget surplus in the mid-year fiscal update – there are no losers. 16. Hawthorn Pre-Season:
16 Current
Position: 15 Will
Finish:
16 Sixteen years after one of the greatest teams of all time famously “paid the price” and won the greatest Grand Final that this generation is likely to witness, the decline and fall of Hawthorn will finally be completed this year, as the mahogany ladle makes its way to Glenferrie, albeit twelve months too late. Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse after the Port , the Family Club’s favourite spoilt son, Luke Hodge, brought further embarrassment on the club this week by getting himself dropped for an Andrew Symonds-style drinking binge. We hate to say we told you so, but we have been talking him down all year, as is our duty in light of some of the more absurd attempts by the Hawk fraternity to talk him up (see Clanger of the Week, Round 7). The man who Hawthorn would have us believe is their equivalent of Chris Judd now turns out instead to be Glenferrie’s equivalent of Barney from the The Simpsons. Meanwhile, the National Hamster Council has sent a strongly worded email to footballinvective.com and Sam Newman this week, and are rumoured to be considering suing both parties for all the unnecessary hurt that they have both caused to the rodent community in comparing them to the hapless Hawks. In a bitter press release on the association’s web site, its spokesman Dale Peterson said hamsters throughout Australia were “up in arms” at this latest affront, and were willing to “fight tooth and nail” to defend their reputation.
Hamsters – not happy
|
|
| Copyright Statement | Privacy Statement | Disclaimer |