Round 1, 2007

 

 

Round 1 of 2007 began with the sort of controversy and incompetence that the football world became accustomed to in 2006, as the umpires forgot their tape measures and Shags Grant clearly had his mind on other things as he hit the post from 15 metres out. But this veritable feast of clangers should not be allowed to overshadow the true story of the Roos-Pies match, namely that the Junkyard Mutt, Dean Laidley, was once again taught a lesson by a former tutor of his, this time Mick Malthouse. The Mutt can bark and yelp all he likes about Shagger’s crooked kicking and an umpire who proved that Australiam primary schools really do have a numeracy crisis on their hands. The fact remains that the Mutt blew a 5-goal lead in one quarter to (yet) another team which was more than able to counter his tactical nous.

 

Junkyard Mutt: Going, going...

 

Wayne Carey this week once again called for the purging of the Mutt, and how refreshing it is to see a former player who does not talk in the usual banal platitudes of the average former-player-turned media-commentator  and actually has something interesting to say, as well as the guts to stick by a controversial view. 

 

This week Ricky Nixon described Carey and Michael Voss as "the best of the two fresh faces in football commentary". But contrast Carey’s gutsy stand with the offerings of Voss, who seems set to follow the lead of many other former players by serving up soft-hitting newspaper columns that are eminently bland, predictable and forgettable.

 

For example, Voss’s last two columns have illustrated all that is wrong with the never-express-an-opinion-in-case-I-upset-someone breed of former player media commentary. Last week, despite its shortcomings being clear for all to see, Voss had this to say about the AFL’s policy on recreational drug testing.

“Condemn it? Get stricter? No, let's challenge other sports to meet our standards.”

“…Call me naive if you like, but I thought only three players had tested positive…”

“To learn that we had seven times that number of positive tests, without knowing how many players were involved, says to me that the AFL campaign is working.”

Well Vossy, footballinvective.com is calling you naïve this time. But this week he was at it again when discussing Leigh Matthews’ surprise decision to appoint five (yep 5 – count ‘em) captains of the Lions.

“I’m not going to tell you I’m enamoured with the idea of five captains at the Lions.”

Fair enough. So you would expect him to therefore be against the idea. Well think again, as Voss then went on to say that:

“I fully understand what Leigh Matthews is trying to do: he’s building on the Grant Thomas principle of trying to get more players to be conscious of leading a group in a rebuilding phase.”

Any indication that an AFL coach is following a Grant Thomas policy should set alarm bells ringing, yet for Voss it’s just a shrug of the shoulder and no harsh words lest he upset his former colleagues. But if he is clearly “not enamoured” with the idea of five captains (and didn’t it just work a treat in all those close finals in which the Thomas Saints blew winning leads) then why doesn’t he just come out and say what he really thinks – and what we all know anyway – that it is just a BAD IDEA.

 

Voss was a great player who never cared about running through anyone he didn’t approve of. Yet now as a commentator he seems to feel he’d better not express to strong a view on anything lest someone disagree. In this case he’s applied the egg to his own face by refusing to even offer a critical word about two of the dumbest policy ideas in modern football, namely the AFL’s drug policy and Grant Thomas’s captaincy policy.

 

The squibbing marshmallow style of Voss is a huge contrast to the style of Wayne Carey who, as he did on the field, comes out swinging fearlessly and flies the flag for whatever opinion he holds. So far this year he has had the guts to ruffle the feathers of his old club and then stand his ground in the face of criticism when he called for the Mutt to be put down. But this week he went one better on the new Channel 9 show “Footy Classified” when he went head-to-head with Caroline Wilson. It was the most entertaining late night TV that footballinvective.com has seen since the demise of “Chances” as Carey (not for the last time, we hope) put Caro right back in her box:

Carey: “Caroline, you’re like a dog with a bone with your stories on Richmond and Carlton, where you get stuck into clubs that you don’t have anything to do with, but then you say I shouldn’t express a view on a club I was involved with and gave pretty good service to over many years”

 

Wilson: “But there’s a difference between expressing an opinion and expressing a really strong opinion”

 

Carey: “And Caroline Wilson never expressed a strong opinion about a club?!?!?”

Game set and match Carey. Let’s see if Caro takes out her frustrations on Richmond once again this week.

 

In a so-called “twilight match” Terry Wallace officially entered the twilight of his reign as coach of the Tiges, as they got rolled in embarrassing style by Carlton. The Tigers blew a 27-point lead in the second half, yet Plow will be hoping that their volatile fans take solace from his reassuring words that they will be a decent side in 2011. In both his rhetoric and his actions, it is clear that Plow has now abandoned any hope of success during his “5-year plan”, which was to have run from 2005-2009. However, when we consider the history of such plans, this is not surprising. Just like the old days of the USSR, Plow realises that 5 year plans are not actually about getting results but are really just a ruse to justify the centralisation of authority amongst a select few, thus allowing that select few to control an otherwise angry populace. This could be the year that a gulag is brought to Tigerland. Then again, Tiger fans probably feel they have been living in the football equivalent of a gulag since 1980.

 

Plow’s morbid defeatism when discussing his team’s prospects in 2007 was in remarkable contrast to Dennis Pagan’s talking up of Carlton. Despite his last 4 years at Princess Park resembling a cross between a Goon Show episode and a B-grade disaster movie, Pagan still managed to convince himself this week that “we’re aiming to have everybody on our list as a candidate for our next premiership, and I reckon we’re close.” Full marks to Pagan for the sort of delusional optimism not seen since Gary Ayres last applied for a senior coaching job.

 

As predicted only last week on footballinvective.com, Geelong was a damp squib against the Bulldogs, and Tom Harley fell victim to the Geelong Captain Curse and will miss the next 6 weeks with a hand injury. Though this should not be the only thing that should be worrying Harley. This week footballinvective.com received in its mailbox the Geelong Football Club’s 2007 yearbook, and on this occasion you certainly can judge a book by its cover:

 

 

Oh dear. Instead of the ruthless on-field warrior that the club surely needs (actually it probably needs about 18 of them right now) the Cats would rather dress up their new captain to pretend he’s a real estate agent. Just the thing to strike fear into opposing forwards when they come up against the softest team in the League this year.

 

At Subiaco, Port Power produced the most magnificent start to a season since Tony Modra’s 13 goals in Round 1 1994 by putting on a display of old-school SA footy at its finest. For lovers of free flowing Croweater football it was a veritable Rembrandt exhibition of this most exquisite artform. Danyle Pearce and Shaun Burgoyne ran amok in the midfield and deep into the forward line; Brendon Lade bombed a magnificent 70-metre torpedo goal and then resembled the beloved Dave "Grave Danger" Granger at his most violent as he took on half of Freo (below); Dean Bogan dominated the ruck; and even Richmond’s former team mascot, David Rodan, bobbed up to successfully re-enact the days of Adam Saliba as the stereotypical rotund forward pocket. Furthermore, all this happened in the third quarter only, as Port showed that one quarter of football is all that it takes to prove that South Australia’s best is still THE best. 

Lade: Tough Guy

 

For footballinvective.com it was like dusting off the video of the 1990 SANFL Grand Final and watching Darren Smith dominating the ruck, Scott Hodges marking everything up forward, and an ageing Chocko and a young Gavin Wanganeen tearing apart Graeme Cornes’s Glenelg with vintage Port Adelaide champagne football.

 

Rodan: Lair Flair

 

At Footy Park, the Crows had a Round 1 hiccup that is not uncommon for premiership sides, as they stumbled against the so-called “Baby Bombers Mark III” (likely to be Teenage Delinquent Bombers by season’s end if the last two years are anything to go by). The magnificently named Leroy Jetta starred for the Dons, and young Leroy now takes over from Digby Morrell as the titleholder of the footballinvective.com award for the AFL player with a name most like a porn star. However, few would be unwise enough to write off the Crows yet. Neil Craig has surely now realised that being premiership favourite in June and July doesn’t count for anything, and is employing a strategy of starting the Crows slowly (like Sydney always does) before building up to a relentless march to Grand Final glory. Having said that, Perrie, Welsh and Bock were genuinely ordinary, and footballinvective.com wonders why every supporter at Footy Park can see that Ian Perrie is clearly past it but the Crows coaching staff cant.

 

The Eagles and Swans put on their third consecutive one point ball-game and this time Daniel Kerr was the hero, with his tackle on Ryan “Princess Mary” O’Keefe in the final minute being the difference. It would be no exaggeration to say that Kerr clearly had the most speed of anyone at the ground. If Kerr was a horse, you’d swear he was high on Special K. Or if he was a basketballer, you’d think he’d been flipping a flipper every hour on the hour. But of course, that would just be malicious speculation. (click here to hear Kerr at his finest).

 

 

Hero of Week: Wayne Carey. In a colourful profile piece in this week’s Sunday Rage (which managed to find a spare page for football in its David Hicks tribute edition) Carey told us that: “journalists were not very well liked people among footballers". Hear hear. Carey in the media, just like he was in the field, resembles a giant alpha male red kangaroo contemptuously stomping over the herd of meek eunuch wallabies that fill up the paddock. It’s great to see that he maintains his contempt for average-quality football journalists. And it’s even better to see that, unlike Michael Voss, he is in no danger of becoming one himself.

 

Cult Figure of the Week: Danyle Pearce. The stand-out in a magnificent display of SA Lair Flair from the Port midfield, which gave spectators the football equivalent of a 5-day tour of Corton-Charlemagne, Montrachet and Bordeaux, such was the quality of pure champagne football on display. Special mention to his support act David Rodan as well.

 

Clanger of the Week: It’s hard to go past umpire Stuart Wenn (who can’t count to 50) and Shannon Grant (who can’t kick from 15) but this week we have. The first recipient of Clanger of the Week has been plucked from obscurity (namely the back page of the Sunday Rage) and hereby nominated as the single most unfunny attempt at football humour that footballinvective.com has seen since Jason Dunstall tried hosting a TV show. Apparently the column is meant to have been written by a football. Read it and weep (literally):

 

Then again, if you can't bear to read the whole thing (and we don't recommend you do) then the following extracts should suffice:

"we footballs, who make the game possible, are left languishing at the bottom of training bags, our opinions never aired."

 

"As a playing group we are struggling. There, I've said it. Why are we so deflated?"

You get the idea. True champagne comedy that one. Apparently the author has a show in the Comedy Festival. Looks like he'll be about as successful as Fozzie Bear in this role. Or about as successful as The Rage is at picking decent writers.

 

Once again The Rage looks like being footballinvective.com’s favourite whipping boy in the lesser football media in 2007. And once again, The Rage looks like doing all it can to make that task so much easier.

 

Let the War Begin.