Round 10, 2007

After several abominations of anti-football during 2007, Round 10 turned on several displays of vintage champagne football that renewed the faith of football connoisseurs in the greatest game in the world. 

For the second week in a row, Geelong produced a brand of Bollinger Grand Annee 1985 Champagne Football. The Cats turned back the clock to Blight era (and simultaneously discredited the last two years of the Thompson era) by playing fast-running, long-kicking football. As Sam Newman so eloquently put it on the Footy Show last week, Geelong has always had the ability to play such football, but they have simply chosen not to.

After 3 seasons of indecision, Bomber Thompson has finally decided that Cameron Mooney was meant to be a forward after all, and no longer a part-time ruckman/backman/bench-warmer/vigilante hitman. The Big Hairy Cat soared all over James Gwilt, who must have surely realised that the loss of his afro (below) would condemn him to football mediocrity - a far cry from the glory days when his resplendent afro-clad image adorned Molly Meldrum's front wall.

Mooney over Gwilt - no contest

Thankfully, it looks like Bomber Thompson has been reading footballinvective.com, and was not getting excited about the result:

"What keeps us going is that we've been in this situation before and we've collapsed and crashed"

Indeed they have, which is why the players must keep treating wins as if they were losses, and never, ever, open the pages of the Geelong Advertiser, unless they want to read of how they are the best thing to happen to football since Polly Farmer, Bob Davis and The Great Man combined, and cannot possibly lose another game for the rest of the century.

As for the Saints, Nick Riewoldt once again showed he is about as effective under pressure as Nicole Cornes at a press conference when he missed an easy chance to level the scores before half-time. After 4 nauseating years of being hailed as the football equivalent of baby Jesus by the likes of Mike Sheahan (who also appointed himself as one of the three wise men) footballinvective.com boldly predicts that Riewoldt is now on the cusp of becoming the St Kilda equivalent of Matty Richardson - a high potential player who never quite made it because he played in an ordinary team (or at the very least the sort of player who, like Richo, will provoke years of passionate debate amongst his club's supporters about whether he ever had what it takes anyway).

Unfortunately, in a week of champagne football Ross Lyon continues to serve up anti-football, or the sporting equivalent of a Yellowglen "Pink" or "Yellow" (are they champagne or cordials?). We never thought we'd say it, but Lyon's continued blots on the game makes footballinvective.com nostalgic for Grant Thomas, who at least provided entertainment. Speaking of which, Thomas came out this week on SEN with a bizarre assessment of Matthew Pavlich: 

"If he was hypnotised and asked to choose between the team winning and him playing well, he'd choose to play well and have the team lose." 

Footballinvective.com has been scratching its head trying to figure out where Thomas got this metaphor from. Perhaps he was hypnotised some time during 2001 just before he got the knives out for Malcolm Blight and was asked by the hypnotist: "Now Grant, what would you prefer - the Saints to win a flag, or you to be coach..?" 

Carlton upset the Dogs in another high-quality, high scoring game, in a champagne football equivalent of Henriot versus Gosset - not quite top-line labels, but enjoyable nonetheless (not that you'd expect to find much champagne in Footscray). After the game the Blues chaired Bret Thornton off the ground, but let's hope that's all they did to him, in light of Bruce McAvaney's latest commentary clanger during the game:

Commetti: "Thornton, wouldn't they love to win this game for him today."

McAvaney: "Yes, he's a very popular player in the change rooms, young Thornton."

Thornton being escorted to the rooms 

- Don't drop that soap

Up in Sydney, Essendon pinched a match by a point and - let's not beat around the bush here - for the second game in a row they won a match as a direct result of the anti-football, un-Australian hands-in-the-back rule.

Barry Hall had two perfectly normal marks taken off him when he beat Mal Michael one-out. One of them was not even for a hand on the back but a legitimate (and typically Hall) nudge with his shoulder, whilst the other was typical of how a slow backman caught out of position (yep Mal, that's you) can simply step back into a forward's arms and milk a free kick for in-the-back, thus covering up the fact that they were beaten fair and square in a one-on-one contest.

As if that wasn't enough, Amon Buchanan's snap for goal in the last minute missed winning the game by half the width of the goal-post padding, thought it has to be said that this distance was about 20 times less than the distance which Adam McPhee ran out of bounds before setting up the winning goal a few minutes earlier. If appears that the umpires invoked the Wayne Harmes rule of boundary line discretion to McPhee, who had both feet, his whole body and the ball over the boundary line, and if he'd been any further out of bounds would have been run over by a bus on Moore Park Rd. Thankfully, the scoreboard operators at the SCG immediately replayed the incident on the big screen, and were obviously not subject to the same neo-Stalinist policy of self-censorship that applies at other grounds. 

Not surprisingly, the Sydney fans were whipped into the sort of blind frenzy of rage that would do Richmond supporters proud, and provided some of the finest entertainment of the week in the process. Most Swans supporters probably haven't been that angry since Bob Carr slapped that new tax on investment properties, or since the price of a case of Hunter Valley chardonnay last went up.

Adding to the entertainment, Paul Roos lashed out at all responsible for the hands-on-the-back debacle:

An often outspoken critic of the AFL and umpiring, Roos said contact would soon be outlawed and the game will resemble Gaelic football.

 

"I think that's clearly my understanding where the laws of the game are heading," he said when asked if body contact was still allowed.

 

"It will probably at some point resemble the International Rules, the Gaelic football and we're just going to have to get used to it.

 

...Tongue in cheek, he said: "I think the crowd gave a resounding cheer for it.

Roos - not happy

Full marks to Roos for expressing the passion and dismay of ordinary football fans at this latest blot on the game. If he ends up getting fined for his comments, then it was well worth the price. But he won't have to worry about paying it himself. With the pile of money that footballinvective.com is about to make from sales of our exclusive range anti-colberting merchandise (as announced in Round 9 Invective) footballinvective.com intends to set up a philanthropic foundation. This foundation will offer to pay the fines of any coaches and players who lash out at dumb umpiring in a sufficiently controversial manner. This should hopefully encourage more outspokenness, honest criticism and, dare we say, passionate invective in football.

But, of course, the killjoys and fun-suckers in the lesser football media were determined to deprive the football world of genuine passion such as that expressed by Roos, in the same way that the rules committee are determined to deprive us of genuine marking contests. Chief killjoy Patrick Smith surely spoke for all of football's fun-suckers this week with this lamentable offering:

The bitterness of Roos appears to have affected the Sydney supporters. Their shameful performance when Essendon captain Matthew Lloyd spoke after accepting the Marn Grook trophy was reflective of a crowd incapable of sportsmanship and with no respect at all for the indigenous theme the game was meant to celebrate. Sydney no longer warrants the honour of playing in this match.

Since when does playing in an "indigenous match" mean fans are meant to clap politely like a golf crowd and not get fired up if they witness rank injustice being played out in front of them? And since when was Paul Roos' genuine concern for the health of the game evidence of "bitterness"? It's too bad Smith couldn't be as easygoing as Kevin Sheedy, who also saw the positive side of (finally) seeing a Sydney crowd get fired up:

"That just happens, (it's) the spirit of the game," he said. "Ten or 15 years ago you wouldn't have heard a thing.

"They're really getting into AFL footy now."

The champagne football continued to flow at Footy Park (or given that it was in  Adelaide, perhaps chardonnay football would be more appropriate), as Hawthorn produced a second quarter of Corton-Charlemagne quality chardonnay to blow away Port Power's 27 point lead and win comfortably. Tim Boyle kicked 5 goals from contested marks and made Darryl Wakelin look as ineffectual in marking duels as Mal Michael (unfortunately for Wakelin, no umpires came to his rescue). Both Boyle and Buddy Franklin dominated the Hawk forward line - Lance pinpointed Boyle on the burst, as Boyle nearly had his head knocked off, and then tried to squeeze the pass out to Buddy before being cleaned up by Chance Bateman. Big Jack and Big Daryl couldn't have put it better.

The closest game of the round was also the most ordinary, as Richmond and Brisbane disregarded the champagne and put on the football equivalent of a cask of $5.99 goon. Apart from the close finish, the footy on display was almost as annoying as those bloody NAB ads with the little kids that Channel  7 insists on screening every ad break ("gimme that thing..."). Not surprisingly, only two weeks after he condemned Hawthorn and St Kilda for anti-football and argued that "I would refuse to go if I knew the game was going to be played in (that) manner" Terry Wallace reached straight for the anti-football coaching manual in an attempt to shut down the Lions. Given his propensity for sheer unmitigated gall such as this, footballinvective.com will never tire of ribbing Terry Wallace, and for this week's piece of gratuitous Plow bashing, it's hard to go past this comment on "Big Footy" by a Hawthorn fan reminiscing about the 1983 Grand Final:

"Terry Wallace staying down until they gave Leigh Matthews the ball for a kick at goal. The moment Lethal kicked it, Wallace ran back to the middle like an Olympic sprinter. He was a con man even then."

Hero of the Week: Paul Roos - The gutsy Swans coach said what had to be said about the hands-on-the-back rule. Perhaps it is all just a plot by the AFL Politburo to turn the game into gaelic football in order to appease the soft Paddies who don't want to play International Rules anymore because it was too rough for them.

Cult Figure of the Week: Tim Boyle. A vintage display of one-out forward play, which reminded the football world of how contested marking should be, before the rules committee tried to turn key forwards into soft Irish netball players.

Clanger of the Week (x2): Mal Michael - If the in-the-back rule was still fair dinkum, Michael would currently be enduring the shame of costing his team the previous two games - last week he was caught out of position by Matty Richardson, only for Richo to have the mark disallowed, then this week he was comprehensively beaten not once, but twice by Big Bad Barry. If it's possible to catch Tony Mokbel after a $1 million reward was offered, then perhaps someone should offer Mal $1 million to catch a footy in a one-on-one duel. 

Mike Sheahan - Only Mike could come up with the comment, as he did on "On the Couch" that "we've really seen how important Mal Michael's been this year - taking the pressure off Dustin Fletcher." And Michael can be grateful for the hands-on-the-back rule taking the pressure off him...