A
no-brainer for the game of the week this round. A classic Blues-Hawks game
with a classic finish. Carlton trailed by 3 goals with 6 minutes to go,
before the best dramatic climax since "I am your father" in
'Empire Strikes Back' unfolded before us:
With
five and a half left on the clock, Fevola kicks his seventh from outside
50 to keep the Blues in touch;
With
4 minutes to go Fev bombs another one from outside 50 to put the Blues
within a kick;
With
less than a minute to go, apprentice lair and David Rhys-Jones lookalike
Dennis Arnfield takes a mark in the centre, shrugs a tackle, sells the
dummy, does a gratuitous blind turn, ignores two opportunities to
handball and spears a pass down Fev's throat, 15 metres from goal;
Fev
lines up from 20 metres out and with Zidane-like precision manages to
pin-point the inside of the post, as the ball bounces through for a
tragic miss.
From
the cusp of being the ultimate hero Fev leaves the ground in despair, after
the most famous Carlton miss Steve Kernahan in Round 2 1993.
At
the other end, Jarrod Roughead won the game with 8 goals, but the most
important Hawk at the crunch time was once again Stuey Dew, who set up 4 of Hawthorn's 5 goals in the last
quarter, which again revived memories of his Grand Final heroics.
In the Grand Final
Dew played the role of the giant Marshmallow Man in 'Ghostbusters' - a huge,
lumbering behemoth who appears in the worst nightmares of Geelong
supporters, stomping all over everyone and destroying everything in his
path, with nothing safe from his unsatiable appetites. This week the Hawks are
once again thanking
their lucky stars they recruited him at the end of '07, as is the new
KFC that opened on Wellington Rd Mulgrave at the same time.
Stuey
Dew runs amok on Grand Final Day 2008
Trouble
down at Arden Street
Another
week and more bad news for the Kangaroos. This week
they
took to wearing an Argentina-style 'away' strip in the hope that
it might enable them to emulate the skill and success of the Argentinian
football team. But instead their performance was more like that of the
Argentinian economy.
Argentina
defeated by Newcastle United on Friday night
As
the unsympathetic report
of the match in The Rage noted, "The baby-blue stripes on
a white background reinforced the impression of a club under-resourced on
and off the field as Collingwood recorded a clinical, comfortable
victory."
Six
rounds into the season and there can be no doubt that the Roos are under
serious pressure. This week the hits just kept on coming for the embattled
Shinboners.
In
yet another example of the lesser football media only
having a bright idea 'lightbulb above the head' moment after Football
Invective.com first suggests it, Caroline Wilson came out this week (a week
after Football Invective.com) and suggested that Dean Laidly might be on his
way to the lost dogs home;
Further
bad news for the club came from its own CEO Eugene Arocca (a man unfairly
accused by Collingwood people of colberting their club after Eddie boned him
for the top job). Arocca this this week claimed the Roos would make more money from a zero crowd against Port
Adelaide this week than they would make if anyone turns up. The AFL's Western Sydney
chief Dale Holmes immediately seized on this admission from Arocca, saying
that it completely vindicated the 'zero crowd' business model that he is
pursuing for his own team.
Arocca
is now even talking of re-locating the Roos to a proposed
new 'boutique' stadium only one Malcolm Blight torpedo punt away from
Etihad:
Roos and Bulldogs back
study into new stadium
"A NEW boutique stadium in
Melbourne could help provide a solution to the financial bleeding harming
Victorian clubs, says North Melbourne chief executive Eugene Arocca.
"The State Government has
unveiled plans for a $2 million feasibility study, including a
30,000-40,000 seat sporting stadium, on 20 hectares behind North Melbourne
railway station."
Maybe
a new stadium is a good idea, maybe it isn't, but can the lesser football
media please stop referring to smaller footy grounds as 'boutique' stadiums?
A club's home ground should instil fear and trepidation into visiting sides
and their supporters - it should be a place that will make them so scared
they won't want to enter to enter. Perth's 'House of Pain'. Brisbane's 'Gabbatoir'
and the proposed
Adelaide 'Slammer' are all grounds which successfully create this image.
A
'boutique', on the other hand is a place where people go to get pampered and
have people be nice to them. In the Melbourne football community. the
Boutique nightclub in Greville Street is (in)famous for AFL players going
there to look pretty, pull chicks and get wasted. Why on earth would any
club want its home ground to be named after such a place?
If
North Melbourne is to move to a new home ground up the road, why waste
valuable time and money redevoping the site behind North Melbourne railway
station when then can much more easily just go to the other side of the
tracks to a ground that already exists and only needs a bit of a touch up -
Arden Street itself.
Talk
of the new 'boutique stadium' is yet another example of the football world
only cottoning on to an idea after it is aired on Football Invective.com,
for this trusty web site first proposed the idea of a new stadium in the
North Melbourne area 4 years ago.
Longstanding readers of Football Invective.com will recall our plans to save
the Roos by building a new stadium on the Arden Street site. But instead of
it being a dull, sterile 'boutique' stadium, this one will be something with colour, culture and, above
all else, PASSION.
As
first proposed in 2005, The Roos spiritual
home should be completely redeveloped into a 40,000
all-seater, members-only stadium, with the absence of corporate boxes a
resounding feature. In the interests of recapturing North’s golden era
of the 1970s, when the giant gasometer (below) towered majestically over
the ground, the new stadium's external walls should be built to resemble a rusty old
gasometer, and the magnificent new area should be known only as “The Gasodome”.
Just
as a huge bronze statue of E.J. graces the front of the Whitten Oval,
and a bronze Captain Blood towers proudly over Punt Rd, the main gate to
The Gasodome should feature a 20 foot bronze likeness of North's
favourite son, Blighty, with the
pose capturing his most famous moment, launching into THAT torpedo punt
from 110 metres out after the siren at 'boutique' Princess Park. The base of the
statue should also feature an interactive audio-visual display, where passers by
can press a button and watch replays of the magic moment, including Mike
Williamson’s classic commentary (“It’s a big kick! ….It’s
a MAMMOTH kick!”)
First
the Slammer,
now the Gasodome - when it comes to innovative stadium solutions, clubs
shouldn't waste their time begging for more dough from Etihad or investing
in 'boutique' parlours, they should instead simply follow the advice of
Football Invective.com.
Re-education, AFL style
In
scenes that must have brought back memories for Chinese footy fans who lived
through Mao's cultural revolution, the AFL Politburo gave us its own taste
of football re-education after some completely harmless (and entirely
justified) commentary on umpiring standards by Jeff Kennett.
Kennett
got himself in trouble for using the oft-used, innocuous (but apparently
highly subversive) words 'bloody umpires', which unfortunately do not appear
in the Comrade Demetriou's Little Red Book of Politically Correct Football
Thoughts.
Kennett
was ordered to attend a surreally Maoist 'umpire re-eduction' camp in the
AFL Umpires Department or be fined $5,000. Being renowned as a bloke who is
about as likely to back down as Robbie Muir in a pub brawl, Kennett refused
the re-education and promptly handed over the 5 grand, which effectively
bought himself a licence to give the 'bloody umpires' a bigger spray than an
Elvis helicopter over Kinglake. The ultimate result was victory for Kennett
over the despotic AFL regime, and Comrade Demetriou reduced to meek
humiliation.
When
asked to respond to Kennett's continued spraying on radio this week, the
Comrade could only reply "On this particular issue he's paid the
fine and the matter's closed from our perspective."
But
the matter is not closed from the perspective of Football Invective.com and
all other lovers of football freedom who, like the former full-forward for
the Paris Blues, 'Sticks' Voltaire, will defend to the death the right of
anyone to get stuck into the bloody umps.
Having
been unable to silence the gutsy Kennett, the AFL Polirburo's thought police
instead turned
their attention to a much softer target:
The
AFL has given a bunch of self-confessed football loving 'IT geeks' seven
days notice to remove any references to the AFL, images or the mention of
associated football league clubs from their footy blog.
The
blog contestedfooty.com - set
up by seven footy-obsessed students from Deakin and Monash universities -
provides commentary on matches, players and footy news.
One
of the site's founders, 21-year-old student James Rose, told The Age the
group received a letter from the AFL's legal counsel demanding they stop
using AFL intellectual property, stop displaying AFL images without their
consent and provide evidence that they have ceased to do so by this
Wednesday.
According
to the overly modest 'geeks' (come on guys, don't be too hard on
yourselves), the AFL's demands included removing all references to club
names, which are supposedly trademarked to the AFL. Apparently they can't
even include pictures of people in AFL guernseys either. The AFL's Chief
Commissar for Public Enlightenment and Correct Thoughts, Patrick
Keane claimed that:
"It's
something that we regularly follow with any area... websites, such
as media outlets, selling AFL photographs attached to a commercial sponsor
without the permission of the player concerned," Mr Keane said.
"So
it's use of anything that's got an AFL logo, be it club guernsey or AFL
images."
The
fate of Contested
Footy.com raises the issue of which other independent football-related
web sites the AFL Commissars also have in their sites. Perhaps Football
Invective.com will soon be receiving a visit from the apparatchiks from the
Ministry of Truth and being offered a one-way ticket to Room 101. But the
bold freedom fighters of Football Invective.com will not be easily subdued
by the regime of darkness.
Football
Invective.com is a lot like Batman - fighting for freedom and justice on
behalf of mainstream battler footy fans, and repeatedly foiling the forces
of softness, greed and corporate spivvery in the football world.
When
the Bat Light goes up in the night sky of
Melbourne and Adelaide, the Caped Crusaders will jump into our trusty
Batmobile and send out our weekly missives to spread the truth
and fly the flag of free speech in the greatest game in the world. And,
just like Batman, we would no longer be able to serve society if our true
identity was ever revealed.
When
the jack-booted thought police of the AFL Politburo come knocking on the
door of the trusty Football Invective.com Bat Cave we will give them the
Chad Cornes-style two-fingered salute and burn them off quicker than Gary
Ablett gaining an uncontested clearance and kicking a goal from an opening
bounce.
Hero
of the Week: Jarrod Roughed - 8
of the best (6 in the first half) and accuracy under pressure gave Roughie
the edge on Fevola in a classic forward line shoot-out at the G.
Cult
Figure of the Week: Jeff Kennett - Sprayed the umps,
defied the attempts at re-education by the AFL Politburo, and managed to
stare them down and come out triumphant. Jeff Kennett is, like Football Invective.com, a person who
will defy the totalitarian impulses of the Politburo and fly the flag of
freedom. As he showed this week, sometimes one defiant individual can
triumph over even the biggest and baddest regimes.
Kennett bravely stares down the despotic AFL regime
Clanger
of the Week: Brendan Fevola - So near and yet so
far for the F-Train. One less coat of vanish on the inside of that goal post
and Fevola would be the undisputed Hero of the Week. How fine the line is between triumph and despair, and how fine is the line
is between adulation and
humiliation at the hands of Football Invective.com.
Fev
reacts to the news that he has been awarded 'Clanger of the Week'
