Round 14, 2006

 

 

Geelong beat Carlton at the Phone Dome on Saturday, meaning that the Blues' last chance to pinch a win against an ordinary side in season '06 is now its upcoming match with Essendon. Gary Ablett junior’s trip to Telstra Dome on Saturday resembled Geelong’s season in 2006 – a hassle-free start, running out of gas early on, only to be left looking rather embarrassed on the side of the road as the rest of the world passed it by. His actual game, however, showed the heights of skill and class to which Geelong has the POTENTIAL to reach (the ugliest word in football) if only they could put their minds to it and throw off the indecisive, wishy-washy style of play that has afflicted them since Round 3. Still, a win is a win and their 65-point drubbing of Carlton, made possible by their amazing accuracy in front of the sticks (23 goals and just 4 points - dropping Kent Kingsley is really paying dividends), has boosted both the team’s morale and may yet result in oh-so-optimistic (and oh-so-naive) Cat fans clutching at this latest small straw to convince themselves that the team can still make the 8. For those from Sleepy Hollow who are slightly more realistic, we hear that the surf at Bells will be very good this September. 

 

In a masterful piece of scheduling, St Kilda and Collingwood played to a crowd hanging from the rafters at the Phone Dome, whilst at the same time, noted crowd-pullers the Bulldogs and the Kangaroos played to a three-quarters empty MCG. The St Kilda-Collingwood lock-out at the Dome is further evidence that the AFL’s promise to move big games to the MCG was really football’s version of L-A-W tax cuts. The 48,000 who managed to get in could have easily been 84,000 at the G, and the extra gate receipts would have saved the AFL further embarrassment by covering the cost of Comrade Demetriou’s latest pay rise. Regardless of the venue, it would have been another long walk home for Collingwood fans, whose position in the top-4 and even the top-8 is looking very tenuous. Tarrant was goalless once again, while for the Cats, meaning he'd better hurry up to sign himself to a new deal for shampoo ads, given that his future job security at the Lexus Centre is not what is used to be.

 

In other matches, the Gay Pride continued to look unstoppable, comfortably downing last year’s premiers the Swans up in Sydney and now boasting a percentage that resembles what Don Bradman's batting average against Bangladesh would have been, if he'd ever got the chance. 

 

Melbourne moved into third space after a hard-fought win up at the Gabba, are playing consistent football and are in-form and able to handle all challengers. Which can mean only one thing: The annual slump must be just around the corner. 

 

Essendon lost…again, and with 13 losses in a row (equalling the average age of their supporters) they only need one more defeat, against St Kilda at the MCG, to become the biggest losers in the history of the football club. Come on boys, do it for Sheeds – he loves breaking those records.

 

The big news off the field was the Kangaroos announcing their move to the Gold Coast of several games a year. After trying the Sydney market for a couple of years before giving up, then trying the Canberra market for a couple of years before giving up, they somehow think that the same strategy on the Gold Coast is likely to turn out differently. But as was demonstrated (and as footballinvice.com pointed out) earlier this year, and was so painfully obvious when the Brisbane Bears (dis)graced the Coast, it is a football backwater. No amount of AFL boosterism, Southport Sharks pokie club cash, nor pleas for local support from a team that gets around more than Paris Hilton before she gave up sex (yeah, right) are going to change that.

 

North Melbourne's nomadic existence (MCG-Telstra Dome-Sydney-Canberra-Gold Coast) now has disturbing parallels with the later years of Fitzroy (Bruswick St-Princes Park-Junction Oval-Victoria Park-Princes Park-Western Oval). As any successful team knows, stability is the basis of success. It's time for the Roos to properly commit to staying ar Arden St, appointing Malcolm Blight, and re-developing their own home ground into a 40,000 seat fortress, as advised last year on footballinvective.com. If you build it, they will come...

 

But the AFL was once again distracted (for the last time this year) by a certain clash of traditional rivals in Berlin, a game to be remembered for the amazing brain explosion of Zenedine Zidane (not to mention the instinctive diving response of his Italian opponent Marco Materazzi).

 

Not to be outdone by the lesser football media's endless speculation surrounding exactly what was said, footballinvective.com puts forward its own Letterman-style Top 10 theories:

 

Top 10 Reasons why Zidane head-butted Materazzi:

 

10. Materazzi to Zidane: “Let’s play charades. You go first and be Phil Carmen”

 

9. Zidane to Materazzi: “Listen, I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. I am NOT doing one of those crappy Graham Gooch ads for Advanced Hair.”

 

8. Materazzi to Zidane: “You French cheese-eating surrender monkey. France’s military is even more piss-weak than Italy’s military!”

 

7. Materazzi to Zidane: “You play as well as Gabriel Gate cooks”

 

6. Zidane to Materazzi:

 

5. Materazzi to Zidane (after scoring headed goal in 18^th minute) “Ha-ha. Bet you can’t do anything with your head this game.”

 

4. Materazzi to Zidane: “Nice penalty, but you defend like Roberto Carlos” Zidane: “I’d rather be called a terrorist than be insulted like THAT.”

 

3. Materazzi to Zidane: “I see Posh Spice won “most intelligent player’s wife” at Real Madrid again this year”  

Zidane: “I told you not to remind me of that.”

 

2. Materazzi to Zidane: “How about a bribe if we rig the game and you get yourself sent off.”  

Zidane: “OK. I did play for Juventus after all.”

 

1. Materazzi to Zidane: “Gee, that World Cup mascot’s pretty lame.

Zidane: “You can insult my mother, you can insult my sister, but NOBODY insults Goleo VI”

Goleo VI

 

The attention given to the World Cup in recent weeks also once again showed that the greatest events in the world are indeed sporting, and that Australia can have a significant presence at all of them.

 

Australia's experience at the World Cup said much about our place in the world. Next time some black armband-wearing moraliser moans about how evil and racist Australians are, and how our "international reputation" is oh-so bad, they should bear in mind our experiences at the biggest sporting gathering in the world. In Kaiserslauten, a small town welcomed an influx of 20,000 chanting singing and ferociously drinking Aussie fans with open arms (hard to see them doing the same if it were English fans). After the game, Japanese fans were keen to share a beer with us even though their team had just been flogged. In Munich, jingoistic Brazilians graciously invited us Aussies to join in their singing and dancing in the Hofbrauhaus beer garden. In Stuttgart, previously feral Croatian fans desperately waved their expensive watches at us hoping to swap them for an inflatable kangaroo, in the hope that they could take their own little piece of Australia back home. When it comes to experiences like this involving real people (as opposed to our home-grown "Australia is so racist" brigade)  Australians can rest assured that the rest of the world really is quite fond of us. Furthermore, the hysterical reaction to the Zidane incident by some of the shadier elements of French and Italian politics shows that we really should take no notice next time some self-important Australian do-gooder tells us we are all so terrible and less entlightened than the rest of the world.

 

The World Cup experience has once again shown that sport is the one great social unifier of the world. Forget leaders summits, forget international law, forget the United Nations – the greatest force for world peace and unity amongst mankind is clearly, unequivocally, indisputably football.

 

 

 

Hero of the week: Marco Materazzi, the dominant personality of the World Cup final. Gives away a penalty, scores a goal, gets the world's best player  sent off, scores a penalty in the shootout, got to play at the back with the greatest defender of the past twenty years. This man is Living the Dream. It’s like Materazzi got to go to Disneyland, Men’s Gallery, Universal Studios, Barwon Prison, Spearmint Rhino and the Running of the Bulls all in the one day.

 

Cult Figure of the week: Aaron Davey - his miraculous volleyed goal against Brisbane brought back memories of THAT goal by Marco Van Basten at Euro 88.

 

Clanger of the final: Zinedine Zidane – The most undignified retirement since Mark Latham. We hope it was worth it.