Football Invective i l l i

Round 5, 2009

Cyclone hits Adelaide

After its morale (and arrogance) boosting win over Hawthorn last week, Port Adelaide returned home to face a fearsome force of nature, both on and off the field. Teal Coloured Glasses arrived at the Port-St Kilda game on Friday night full of hope after a day spent pondering the future at Adelaide's Multi Function Polis, but was not impressed with what he saw:

Winter arrived with a vengeance in A-Town over the weekend – a storm of incredible force producing mayhem on dear old Rads. The mighty Torrens burst its banks, Semaphore Jetty lies in ruins, and King tides caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Yet for all Mother Nature’s fury, it still paled into insignificance in comparison to the damage inflicted by St Kilda on Port Adelaide’s claims to being a legitimate top 4 threat in season '09.

Both sides entered Round 5 on the back of some impressive results: St Kilda playing the role of Men to Fremantle and West Coast’s Boys and PAFC producing some vintage flair and razzle dazzle to run all over Hawthorn at the G in round 4 – a feat made even more impressive considering the players were forced to confront the reigning premier at the home of football wearing a guernsey to rival the Ken Done inspired 1993 Socceroos ‘spew top’ as the nation’s worst ever playing kit:

Yet despite being a compelling match-up on paper, the match quickly disintegrated both as a contest and a spectacle - PAFC ignoring the wet conditions and reverting to a nonsensical game plan of kicking backwards, sideways, diagonally or anywhere other than forwards into the St Kilda zone defence, the Saints simply sitting back and waiting for the inevitable turnovers and capitalising mercilessly at the other end, Stephen Milne in particular not taking ‘no’ for an answer whenever he saw the smallest opening.

In what was no doubt another McGuinness master-stroke, the Port forward line was then ‘cleared out’ to try to provide room for Port’s key forwards, a plan which backfired as the Port forward line began to resemble a Swine Flu quarantine zone - Tredrea and Motlop mournfully wandering their enclosure with nobody else entering or leaving.

‘Genius’ Neil Craig and his band of slap-happy overachievers await this week, a fixture that is sure to give the Power its only home crowd in excess of 35 000 for the season. The Crowbots vs the Stumbling Razzle Dazzle, Let the War Begin.

For those Victorians who underestimate the force of the storm to hit the city of Adelaide (and the PAFC) last weekend, these exclusive pictures from Football Invective.com's full-time research unit reveal the extent of the carnage inflicted:

The Port River overflows in the streets of Birkenhead

- Chocko's "counter flood" tactics backfire badly on his supporter base

Car abandoned at Somerton beach

- Graham Johncock (or was it Byron Pickett?) goes for a drive

Semaphore Jetty smashed by the storm

- The jetty proves to be as flimsy as Justin Westhoff's arms

A truck loses it near the Hahndorf turn-off

- Alan Scott comes to grief on the way back to Mount Gambier

The Torrens River reaches its capacity

- An event we are unlikely to see at AAMI Stadium for any Port home games this year

The Anzac Spirit

At the MCG on Saturday, the Bombers and Pies produced a sometimes dour, sometimes spectacular trench warfare battle on Anzac Day. After holding the line all day, the surrender monkey Magpies were over-run in the last 5 minutes as the Dons, brilliantly led by Paddy Ryder, went over the top and broke the flimsy Collingwood defensive lines.

Mick Malthouse gave a classic spray after the game, with the veins in his neck about to explode as he exclaimed that:

"I reckon we let the Anzacs down. The whole game, not just (the final four minutes), the whole game, and Essendon showed true Anzac spirit, why we play here."

When it comes to Anzac spirit, Essendon players such as Ryder and David Zaharakis showed the sort of guts displayed by Simpson at Gallipolli, whilst Josh Fraser, on the other hand, resembled Simpson's famous donkey.

For the second week in a row, Grant Thomas appeared to be channelling Football Invective.com, and claimed on 'Footy Classified' that Fraser 'dogged it' in the ruck, first against David Hille, but also during the three quarters of the game that he was fortunate enough to be opposed to the part-time ruckman and hardly-constructed-like-a-Nubrik-lavatory Ryder.

Thomas's comments did not exactly come as a surprise, and probably mirrored the thoughts of most Pie fans in attendance, but Collingwood nonetheless went off like a Turkish landmine at the Nek in their defence of Fraser, with Pies spokesman Geoff Walsh instead shooting the messenger:

"Talking about players dogging it, Grant might be eminently qualified,"

"Personally I think Grant is in as world where there is plenty of competition.. I suppose he's got to establish himself as someone who is prepared to say something controversial."

Unlike the tin-eared Walsh, Football Invective.com welcomes and encourages more controversial comments from the lesser football media, provided of course, they based on informed knowledge (by the way, a big cheerio to Patrick Smith). We never thought we would say it, but Grant Thomas is beginning to stand out like a beacon in the sea of dung that is the lesser football media. He is someone who calls it as it is and speaks with the sort of frankness about poor player performances that all footy fans (even Geoff Walsh) would expect from coaches, but (at least according to Walsh) are somehow deemed inappropriate if they come from the media.

As the controversy over Fraser's performance raged during the week, the biggest winner out of at the whole affair must surely be Richard Tambling, who will have breathed a sigh of relief that, for this week at least, he is no longer the most maligned former number 1 draft pick in the AFL.

But whilst Mick Malthouse reckons his team let the Anzacs down, there was another group of people in Melbourne who let the Anzacs down even more. Once again, the Anzac Day match was supposedly a 'sell-out', but the crowd was 'only' 84,000, as thousands of MCC members again stayed away:

Anzac Day embodies what it means to be Australian. So it is, of course, un-Australian to not turn up to the footy on Anzac Day, especially when tens out thousands of honest battler fans who would give their right arm to attend a big game are locked out.

As more than one MCC member put it this week, they think they have a right to not only attend every game they like, but also a divine right not to attend. As one of the more snooty ones on 'Big Footy' this week remarked (a Hawthorn supporter, not surprisingly) "we avoid the general public for a reason". The argument seems to be that tens of thousands of battlers should miss out (and tens of thousands of seats remain empty) just so the snobby members can have the right to decide on a whim whether to show up on the morning of a game (even the Grand Final) and not have any of their spare seats sat in by riff-raff.

MCC members seem to think they are above the rest of us - that just because Daddy put them on a waiting list when they were born that somehow means that their shit doesn't smell and they don't have to mix it with normal folk. This sort of elitism is a slippery slope, a thin edge of the wedge and leads down the insidious path to the kind of elitist and just plain un-Australian abominations like the Medallion Club and Centre Square.

All Football Invective.com can say is thank goodness the MCC members of 2009 weren't there on the original Anzac Day in 1915. Our brave boys at Gallipolli would never have made it ashore if they had MCC members in their ranks who thought they had a right to not show up on the morning of the landing. The town of Villers-Bretonneux would have been over-run in 5 minutes had it been defended by MCC members who thought they had a right to stay away on the day of a 'blockbuster' battle. And the Charge of the Light Brigade would never have left the mounting yard had it contained MCC members who thought it was acceptable to leave thousands of saddles empty. The end result would be that we'd now all be speaking German and spending April 25 watching soccer matches between the Collingwood Kraut-eaters and the Essendon Oktoberfests in the third division of the Bundesliga.

As an aside, in the Sunday 'twilight' match between Melbourne and the Crows, the whole of Melbourne exercised the right not to turn up:

The decision of thousands of fans to stay away turned out to be sensible thinking given what was on display. It was horrific, insipid, unwatchable, abominable - and that was just the Crows' latest away guernsey. The game itself was even worse. What is it about SA teams and horrific anti-fashion statements?

North Melbourne - the new Richmond?

In two big boilovers this week the winless Tigers and the winless Heave Ho both broke through for their first win against the Roos and Swans respectively. Was it a all a big conspiracy by Danny Frawley and the AFL Coaches Association to take the heat off their fellow members Terry Wallace and Mark Harvey, or must serious questions now be asked about the ticker and ability of North and Sydney?

The Shinboner Chicken Casseroles kicked 3 goals in the first 5 minutes and then kicked another 4 for the rest of the game, as the Tigers were allowed to walk away with the match, gathering more uncontested possessions than Visy and Amcor under a price-fixing deal.

Huge sighs of relief could be heard from inside Punt Road, where the powers that be will be glad that the meek and supine Tigerban of Round 5 2009 does not resemble the violent and blood-thirsty Tigerban of Round 5 of their previous coach's final year in the job.

Tiger fans - Round 5 2004:

Tiger fans - Round 5 2009:

Following Richmond's break through win, it was the lesser football media that turned, and after weeks of agitation for change at Tigerland suddenly declared that the pressure is now off the Tiges.

One win against a choking and inept Roos hardly fixes the underlying problems at Richmond that the lesser football media have been magnifying so much in the last 4 weeks. But the lesser football media are as fickle as Adelaide's recent weather, and have the attention span of a goldfish with alzheimers. One member of the lesser football media even said on radio on Sunday that "Terry Wallace has been subjected to so much scrutiny in recent weeks, perhaps after last night's result it's time for us to turn our attention to Dean Laidley."

Does this mean that they will now turn their focus to an equally concerted attempt to bring about regime change in the Arden Street coach's box?

Football Invective.com certainly hopes so, and has long been of the view that Dean "The Junkyard Mutt" Laidley has outlived his usefulness at Arden Street and should be sent across the road to the North Melbourne lost dogs home instead. To get the ball rolling for the lesser football media, we hereby offer some humble suggestions for its next feeding frenzy.

Last week the Herald Sun asked viewers to choose their headline to announce the execution of Terry Wallace. This week, Football Invective.com encourages readers to choose their own preferred headline for the axing of Dean Laidley:

"Neutered Junkyard Mutt gets final cut"
"Junkyard Mutt gets rubber chicken treatment"
"Roos to Laidley: Loss to Tigers a bigger embarrassment to the club than Boris"

But whilst Football Invective.com calls for the Melbourne lesser football media to hold a coach accountable, don't expect any such treatment from the Perth media. Our WA cousins always have had a slightly different view of the world, but the first question to Mark Harvey at his post-match press conference was surely taking state parochialism way too far:

"Was it good to finally get a win, after all the pressure you've been under from critics from the eastern states"

Critics from the Eastern states? Welcome to footy club accountability, WA-style. A crap coach, an underachieving list and 15 years of mediocrity can all be blamed on those nasty easterners. We suppose the WA media also asked their local hero Alan Bond how he felt about all that unfair criticism from those horrible eastern states corporate regulators.

Western Sydney - the new Vietnam

The Anzac day round commemorates what was ultimately a futile battle 94 years ago, but this week another equally futile (but far less heroic) campaign was in the news, with the NRL jumping all over the military metaphors and claiming that a Western Sydney team will be the AFL's Vietnam.

The metaphor is indeed apt, as, just like Vietnam, Western Sydney is a complex theatre of war of which outsiders know little, and is now the subject of an attempted incursion by a big foreign power, which deludes itself that it will attract local support.

Just as the Americans thought they had a reliable ally in South Vietnam and a reliable local puppet in Ngo Dinh Diem who claimed to represent popular opinion, the AFL deludes itself that in Bankstown Mayor Leo Kelly they have they key to winning over the local masses and succeeding in their imperialist agenda.

But just like the South Vietnamese regime ended in collapse and humiliation, so too is the AFL's supposed local support collapsing beneath it. This week the NSW government announced that it had pulled the plug on any possible funding of a home ground for the club (not that it would have cost them much to set up the number of seats required to accommodate two men and a dog), and even the local Member for Blacktown sunk the boot in and said he doesn't want a Tin Pot team in his area.

But, just like the defiant yanks who refused to see the writing on the wall in the 1960s, the AFL and its local Western Sydney apparatchik Dale Holmes continue to claim that this territory is winnable:

"AFL NSW/ACT general manager Dale Holmes said the funding decision by the state government did not alter the plan to have the second Sydney team up and running by 2012.

"The process in establishing that team will unfold over the coming months with one of the key tasks being the establishment of a local western Sydney advisory committee," said Holmes.

"We currently have more than 35 local business, community and sporting identities who are keen to see the establishment of a new national sporting team in their region.

The AFL seems to be pinning its hopes on the fact that they have now found 35 potential supporters for their team which, to be fair, is 35 more than wanted a team in Western Sydney 12 months ago. And, to be fair, some very popular movements have started with less than 35 supporters (Christianity started with 12) so maybe there's hope. But the comparisons end there, given that:

we are dealing with heathen lands which can't be converted;
Dale Holmes is certainly no Jesus; and
Comrade Demetriou certainly is not God.

Meanwhile, the lesser football media continued to cover itself in glory in its coverage of this issue. The Rage first reported that the Swans were adopting the position of Britain in relation to the Vietnam war and not getting involved:

"Swans officials preferred to stay out of the debate surrounding the ramifications of the NSW government's decision and the base for the second Sydney team."

Yet on the very next page, The Rage printed an article featuring scathing comments from Swans chairman Richard Colless:

"Swans chairman Richard Colless says he does not believe a team will be entrenched in western Sydney "in my lifetime", even as the AFL moved to reassure local clubs that plans to implant a team in the region as early as 2012 remained on track."

The lesser football media could at least read its own papers. But unlike the blind lesser football media, Football Invective.com has been saying right from the start that Western Sydney is the dumbest idea since Baldrick's last cunning plan in the Elizabethan era.

The idea that another team in Sydney will hasten the march of Aussie Rules in NSW is about as credible as the old 'domino theory' now looks. Just as the domino theory was invoked to justify years of waste and misadventure in Veitnam, history looks set to repeat itself on this Western front come 2012. As Karl Marx said, history always repeats itself twice - first as tragedy, then as farce. The Gold Coast (repeating the history of the Brisbane Bears) looks set to be the tragedy, whilst West Sydney (and its 35 supporters) will undoubtedly provide the farce.

The Vietnam comparisons don't end there. The Western Sydney team deserves the same kind of public opposition as the Vietnam war. Football Invective.com hereby volunteers to lead a moratorium march down Bourke Street so thousands of Melburnians can protest against this pointless strategic folly. Young players at risk of being drafted by the new franchise should also revive the lost art of draft dodging, by either burning their draft nomination cards in protest, or tanking during the draft camp at every fitness trial at which members of the West Sydney football department are present.

Finally, just like Vietnam, we should get protest singers writing protest songs about the whole terrible affair. Perhaps John Schumann and Redgum could write a new version of "I was only nineteen" telling the story of a promising 19-year old draftee who was shipped off to a foreign hell-hole and forced to be an unwitting conscript in an unwinnable campaign. Perhaps it could go something like this:

Mum and Dad and Denny saw the first pre-season game at Puckapunyal

We did clinics at Mount Druitt and Penrith before the first game

And no one came

The picture from the paper showed us young and strong and clean

God help me – I was only nineteen

Demetriou said she’ll be right mate, if we build it they will come

But I’ve played in every home game and still not seen anyone

And I’d rather play in Tassie where we’d actually be seen

God help me – I was only nineteen

From the bogans out in Blacktown to the spivs at Homebush Bay

Its all just bloody rugby league and soccer out this way

But Dale Holmes still reckons we’ll come good in 2018

Gold help me - I was only nineteen

Every week there’s no one at our boutique stadium

If I could see Demetriou now I’d kick him up the bum

The Hawks have fifty thousand members but we’d settle for thirteen

God help me – I was only nineteen

My mates who went to Melbourne clubs pull chicks at every bar

But it’s too hard to score up here 'cause no one knows who you are

And I’d rather be at Freo where at least the girls are keen

God help me – I was only nineteen

Hero of the Week: David Zaharakis - a classic display of Anzac fighting spirit by the young man to win the game for the Bombers. If you had to go into the trenches to take on the Turks, you'd want this boy next to you.

Cult Figure of the Week: Grant Thomas - After years of malignment from Football Invective.com, it is with mixed feelings that we award Thomas this week's gong, but his comments this week and the response they provoked from the more-precious-than-Gollum's-ring Magpie football department clearly justify the prize. But Thomas shouldn't get too far ahead of himself just yet. As any real coach would agree, you're only as good as your last game.

Clanger of the Week: Josh Fraser - Yes, he squibbed. Yes, he let the Anzacs down. but don't ask Grant Thomas to confirm this. Just ask his coach.