Round 9, 2006

 

 

They’ve Turned.

 

If only they had. This should have been the headline after Geelong’s latest belly-up performance against the Tiges on Saturday. It was fitting that any remaining pieces of credibility for the Scaredy Cats in ’06 were extinguished against Richmond, as Geelong’s season so far has mirrored a typical Richmond season:

1. “March champions”, as Jack Dyer used to say, with some (now) very embarrassed punters jumping on the Geelong-for-premiers bandwagon;

2. Early good form in the first few rounds, giving long-suffering supporters delusions of imminent premiership glory;

3. Several humiliating losses rendering the side easy-beats by Round 10;

4. Feral supporters turn on club;

5. Fickle club board knifes coach;

For Geelong, stages 1 to 3 have come to fruition. Now that they have lost to the Tiges, they deserve nothing more than to proceed down the slippery slope to outcomes 4 and 5. Unfortunately for the club of Geelong, the city of Geelong and the people of Geelong, the normal rules of cause-and-effect do not apply.

 

Unlike other teams, where notions of accountability are properly entrenched, the club of Geelong can rest easy knowing that it is safe from any discontent felt by its supporters. But this should not be the case. Geelong has gone from premiership favourites after Round 2 to the undisputedly worst team in the competition in only 7 weeks. During that time it has won one game, against the Over-Rated Football Club (which arguably says more about the Saints than it does about the Cats). Given such a record of under-achievement, this warrants not only supporters turning, but nothing short of civil insurrection.

 

Quite frankly, the fact that Geelong supporters have not resorted to vigilante justice is a sad commentary on both them and their team. The situation is so desperate, the depths of the Cats humiliation so extreme, that anarchy should have prevailed by now.

 

Cars should be being upturned. Players houses should be being besieged. Angry mobs like on “whacking day” in The Simpsons should be taking over Sleepy Hollow. Moorabool St should be burning. East Timor and the Solomon Islands would look like side-shows if Cat fans really cared about their team. But instead, expect just another round of polite applause and “C’mon Boys” when they next take the field at Unskilled Stadium this week.

 

But if Geelong supporters just don’t get it, then the lesser football media is equally culpable as well. The Telstra Bigpond advertisement (aka the AFL web site) had its favourite cliché machine Paul Gough come up with this report on the Cats-Tiges game:

“Richmond has pulled off its first win at Skilled Stadium since 1990 to send Geelong's 2006 AFL season to the brink of crisis.”

Brink of a crisis? Yes, in the same way Christopher Reeve was on the “brink” of a crisis the week after he fell off the horse. Geelong crossed the “brink” of crisis in Round 3, and by any objective performance measure, has been deep in crisis ever since.

 

All the signs are that the Cats coach doesn’t get it either. After another insipid fade-out against the Tiges, Bomber Thompson spat the dummy to the assembled media hacks after the game:

Geelong coach Mark Thompson abruptly cut short his weekly media conference at Skilled Stadium on Wednesday after repeated questions from reporters about changes to the side.

Thompson walked off after being asked whether he had 'given up' on some of the players.

"No. See you later," he said before departing.

Bomber is a well-mannered man, which perhaps explains why he wouldn’t given a candid assessment of some of his players. But sometimes brutal honesty is the best policy (remember Blighty calling David Pitman “pathetic” only for the jibe to motivate the big ruckman to turn it around and help his side to a flag?). For Bomber to not unload on his team is merely another form of the shirking and the kind inability to address a serious  issue displayed by the team’s supporters. But it gets worse:

Thompson did say he believed Geelong had made significant inroads towards resurrecting its season.

"I thought we made some improvement the way we played last week, what we planned to do and the way we played. We've just got to use that as a start point just to improve it a bit more."

This is worse than shirking. This is Grant Thomas levels of delusion. After a self-inflicted fade-out of the size Geelong has served up this year, a collection of knives big enough to fill a Demtel warehouse should be out for Bomber Thompson. Footballinvective.com has been arguing all year that Geelong’s captain Stephen Queen is not up to the job in so far as leadership ability is concerned. The same serious questions must now be asked of the coach. And the answers aren’t pretty. You heard it here first. The Fat Lady has sung for the coach of Geelong.

 

Footballinvective.com has turned. If no one else will, then we will.

 

 

Bomber - Gorn

 

In a round of lowlights, the second lowest light was surely the struggle between Essendon and Port Adelaide, respectively last and second-last on the ladder – a struggle to kick straight, a struggle to handball and a struggle to motivate themselves as the players hear their own voices echo around an almost empty Phone Dome, as Don supporters demonstrate that deep-down, they really do have much in common with Melbourne fans when things are going bad. Ski season anyone? Not surprisingly, Teal coloured glasses made the trip to Melbourne to see the game, as the skiing option isn’t all that realistic for a battling Port fan who would struggle to even afford the windscreen wiper blades on the Range Rover, let along a trip to the snow in one.

 

With the mahogany ladle beckoning for the loser of Saturday night’s Port-Essendon clash, this was a vital game for both sides. With both teams showing steadfast commitment and steely determination to land the prize of the number 1 pick in this year’s national draft in recent weeks, picking the loser (and therefore the true winner) was always going to be a tough ask. Within minutes however, it became obvious master coach Kevin Sheedy had completely out-witted his protégé Chocco Williams as the Bombers jumped out to a five goal deficit in the first quarter. It was a lead they would not relinquish, Essendon extending their advantage over the next three quarters to run out convincing 10-goal losers.

 

Yet again Port’s maddeningly inconsistent form had the effect of infuriating their supporters as instead of seizing the golden opportunity placed before it, the Power passed on a glorious chance to cut straight to the front of the queue for the nation’s best young players. While gratifying in the short term, a win against the bottom-placed team at this point of the season achieves absolutely nothing. With finals a possibility in the minds of only the most ardent supporters, vaulting from 15^th to 13^th on the table serves only to diminish the club’s chances of returning to the top in the long term.

 

Thankfully in footy there’s always next week and by a strange quirk in scheduling, the Power is presented with an immediate chance of redemption in Round 10. Another team with their eyes well and truly on the November prize is the rabble known as Carlton FC, Denis Pagan’s mob of cast-offs, has-beens and never-will-bes playing host to the Power at the Phone Dome on Sunday in what shapes as one of the least appealing match-ups in AFL history.

 

Crippled by internal bickering that wouldn’t be out of place in East Timor, the bumbling Blues are currently the competition pace-setters when it comes to on and off-field incompetence. They will present a stern test of Port’s pretension to the mantle as the competition’s most ordinary side in a must-lose match in the race for bottom spot. Carlton go in to the match red-hot favourites to continue their losing streak but the Power has proved time and again this year that on any given day, they can match it with the worst going around. While any team can get thrashed by Adelaide or Collingwood, the true test of a rubbish side is how they perform against fellow cellar-dwellers. Time will tell if Port can produce the required performance when it really matters this weekend.

 

Hawthorn finally decided to drop its “star full back” Zac Dawson, after several weeks of exhortation from footballinvective.com. After having a bag of goals kicked against him by 3 different full-forwards this season, Dawson will head back to the reserves. Unfortunately, a few weeks in the seconds is unlikely to add everything he needs to improve his repertoire, ie ball sense, a bigger body, speed, general football knowledge and confidence, which has been kept afloat in the face of continual thrashings only by the completely unfounded support of his coach and team mates.

 

Jonathan Brown’s odds for the Coleman medal shortened as he kicked another bag for the Lions, whilst Fremantle players were obviously distracted by the impending birth of Angelina Jolie’s new daughter, the ridiculously named Shiloh. The Dockers’ pathetic performance can be best described by another word beginning with ‘Shi’ and no, you don’t need to buy a vowel for that one.

 

 

Hero of the Week (x2): Neil Craig and Paul Roos. The two interstaters did their bit for Victorian football by sending Carlton and Hawthorn respectively even further down the gurgler. Those with long memories stretching back to the 1980s will be forever grateful. Those South Australians with equally big memories who cursed the Blues for pinching the best SA talent in the 80s (Braddles, Sticks, Naley, Motley, et al) must surely draw the obvious conclusion that it was only the South Australians in the side who made Carlton any good back then (Diesel and Silvagni being but receivers of all their good work).

 

Cult Figure of the Week: Lewis Roberts-Thompson - Is this just the latest fashionable haircut for the Sydney spiv set, or is LRT doing his best to resemble Lurch from “The Addams Family”?:

 

 

 

Clanger of the Week: Bomber Thompson - Like an Egyptian on a hot summer’s day, Bomber is well and truly In Denial.