Round 17, 2009

 

 

After a winter hibernation spent catching some zees, Football Invective.com finally awoke from its slumber (after adding a few more zees during the last 3 quarters of Collingwood-Carlton lost Friday). 

 

This week, Football Invective.com returns to the saddle of its high horse of moral indignation. And the trusty elevated steed will be doing plenty of galloping through the sporting world in this edition. When in full stride, mounted on its resplendent thoroughbred, Football Invective.com is the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, laying waste to the hacks, crooks and spivs who would do evil to our magnificent game, and, in more generous reflective moments, showering bouquets on the selfless, gallant heroes of the code who bring glory to the greatest game in the world. Speaking of which:

 

Jimmy's pointed finish

 

 

The Cats-Hawks game was one of the finest displays that Football Invective.com has seen since the '94 Prelim Final, with an equally fitting finale. So many highlights, so little Invective to do them justice:

• Buddy Franklin, like Elvis in his glorious comeback years from 1969, reliving the golden days of '08, but all those extra donuts and hamburgers ultimately held him back;

• Luke Hodge's earful of Invective at Cameron Mooney as Mooney was lining up for goal from that pocket - even Football Invective.com could hear it from 20 rows back;

• Andrew Mackie's job on Buddy after Scarlett and Taylor limped off - David v Goliath without the slingshot;

• Joel Selwood - 42 disposals, 17 tackles and sure to retire like Mohammad Ali - all the hits to the head will surely leave him permanently brain-damaged;

• Cameron Mooney and Tom Hawkins in the ruck - more than capably filling in for Mark Blake, who is re-acquainting himself with the VFL before being stuck on the end of a hook being dangled into Corio Bay as trade bait.

• Jimmy Bartel - a hero of Geelong for kicking two behinds. (Cameron Mooney must be green with envy right now)

But the unsung hero of the game, with 4 goals of his own, and surely unlucky to be beaten by Cameron Ling for the 'AFL's Sexiest Player' award was Max Rooke. A cult favourite of Football Invective.com from well before he ceased being Jared, Max Rooke embodies much that is great about the modern game, plus all that was even greater about the game in days of yore.

 

Max Rooke harks back to the wild, carefree days of the 1970s, when flowing hair and flowing tash was de riguer, and fearsome acts of onfield brutality were committed weekly by Big Carl, Robbie Muir, Neil Balme and co. Some readers may be familiar with the web site www.chucknorrisfacts.com. However, most readers will be unaware that the site, and Chuck Norris himself, were actually inspired by Max Rooke. Accordingly, Football Invective.com hereby presents its Letterman-style Top 10 Max Rooke facts:

 

• Max Rooke was once stabbed by a knife-wielding bogan at a pub in Gheringhap Street. The knife bled to death;

• The Twelve Apostles on the coast down past Geelong used to be the Thirteen Apostles - until Max Rooke took one of them home to put in his garden;

• When Max Rooke was in Europe to get his hamstring fixed he also visited Pamploma to participate in the Running of the Bulls. He walked. And everyone in the town had steak for dinner that night;

• Max Rooke can consume an entire slab of Geelong Bitter in one sitting - without opening any of the cans;

• The four Selwood brothers are all Max Rooke's love children. He conceived the eldest one when he was five years old;

• The car chases in 'Mad Max' were all filmed on roads in the Geelong area - they are actually documentary footage of Max Rooke driving down to the local shops to get some milk and bread;

• Cameron Ling did not get the liquor licence for his new nightclub by sending in an application form. He just sent a picture of Max Rooke with clenched fists to the Director of Liquor Licensing;

• Max Rooke won Race 3 on Geelong Cup day last year. He did not need a horse;

• The Head of the River was moved from the Barwon River because Max Rooke kept winning it every year - doing backstroke.

• Max Rooke once went to a bucks party at the Alley Cat strip club in Geelong. He ate the entire cake before he realised there was a stripper inside.

 

Next week the Geelong Football Club celebrates its 150th anniversay, in a specially-constructed giant marquee on the Geelong foreshore. This week, Football Invective.com was privy to a leaked official (and strangely multi-coloured) email sent to all staff at Ford's Geelong headquarters, offering employees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity:

From: Sparks, Carole (C.)
Sent: Thursday, 30 July 2009 10:41 AM
Subject: Geelong Football Club Opportunity

 

All Football Invective.com can say is that we pity the fool who lets Max Rooke near their car – he once totalled a bus in Ryrie Street whilst trying to get the ticket machine to work. Ford employees are also under strict instructions to not let Steve Johnson take the wheel under any circumstances.

 

Meanwhile, Victoria Police this week sent around a similar email to its employees asking for volunteers to drive Geelong players back home after the big night.

 

The new deal for coaching

 

In football's equivalent of the Kirribilli Agreement, Mick Malthouse (aka 'Old Silver') and Nathan Buckley (the up-and-coming head kicket) this week announced their revolutionary power-sharing agreement, with Eddie McGuire and Gary Pert also playing the roles of Bill Kelty and Sir Peter Abeles respectively. 

 

 

Not surprisingly, the lesser football media was gushing in its praise:

Buckley, Malthouse sign with Collingwood

July 28, 2009 - 11:00AM

Collingwood has signed coach Mick Malthouse and former club captain Nathan Buckley to revolutionary five-year deals.

 

Mick Malthouse's coaching contract has been extended for two seasons. He will then become become the director of coaching from 2011 for three years.

 

Buckley will be an assistant coach for the next two seasons, then take over as senior coach from 2011 for three years.

 

The announcement, made at the Lexus Centre by a beaming Eddie McGuire, ends months of conjecture about the intentions of Buckley, who was sought for the senior coaching position at North Melbourne.

In other news Collingwood news this week, two Magpie fans have followed in the footsteps of Mick and Bucks. Wayno and Shazza, lifelong Collingwood supporters from Epping North, this week announced their engagement. In a revolutionary five-year marriage deal, Wayno will play the role of husband and Shazza the role of wife for the first 2 years.

 

From the third year onwards they will switch roles - Shazza will assume the position of “Director of Husbandly Duties” and Wayno will play the role of “Assistant Wife”.

 

The Defection

 

 

But even the Bizarro World marriage between Malthouse and Buckley was overshadowed this week b the defection of Karmichael Hunt to the Gold Coast Gay Icons (not sure what else they could possibly call themselves in light of their mascot):

 

 

Whilst the Queensland and NSW media went into a frenzy, slamming Hunt for his mercenary act of colberting, most Victorians (and all South Australians) would have shrugged their shoulders and asked 'Karmichael who?' 

 

Those that actually had heard of him had probably only done so thanks to his starring role in (yet) another NRL sex scandal, where he attracted such memorable headlines as "Broncos say toilet sex was consensual", and which resulted in his name entered the vernacular as a (highly apt) piece of rhyming slang. As another (non-lesser football media) web site put it at the time:

"...the clean cut world of rugby league was scandalised when a woman claimed she’d been sexually assaulted by three Broncos players at a nightclub. It’s not often we hear of rugby league stars drinking excessively and treating women appallingly, so the nation was understandably shocked. Brisbane Broncos supporters can breathe easy once more - although the players involved in the nightclub incident brought the club into disrepute in the eyes of club officials, police will not be charging them.

"The Brisbane Broncos have fined players Karmichael Hunt, Darius Boyd and Sam Thaiday for bringing the club into disrepute.

"Police today cleared the three rugby league players over sexual assault and drug allegations."

Once young Hunt finishes his business in the toilet and finally pulls on a pair of footy boots, he might get a shock when he realises that:

• Games go for 120 minutes. The pitch is oval shaped and the ground is 175 metres long;

• Women not only attend games; they umpire them;

• The focus is on skill with the ball, not fingers in the arse.

Following the most controversial defection since Kim Philby walked into KGB headquarters for a chat, the details of how Hunt was seduced into his act of colberting have been revealed. The lesser football media has now detailed how Hunt was put through a gruelling selection process in which he was given the 'OK' to play at the elite level of the greatest game in the world on the basis of a half hour "skills session" and one drop punt into Nathan Buckley's chest. But the deal was sealed (so we are told) when he was invited for tea at Comrade Demetriou's Toorak house - a bit like being invited to Stalin's dacha on the Black Sea when he makes you the offer to cross to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

 

According to AFL Kremlinologists, the Hunt defection is merely the first move in a bigger plan to poach more players from the struggling National Rapist League. Comrade Demetriou, in full Soviet style, has now established the AFL equivalent of the Comintern, to spread his ideology throughout the world, fermenting discontent and provoking defections from ramshackle tin pot regimes (such as the NRL), in the hope that those teetering regimes, if subject to enough subversion, infiltration and indoctrination, will finally fall like dominoes to the tide of historical inevitability, and be ruthlessly swept away into Lenin's 'dustbin of history'.

 

However, unlike the lesser football media, Football Invective.com will not let the hype go to its head. The defection of Hunt is no big deal, apart from what it says about this second Gold Coast franchise - namely, it shows every sign of being just as bad as the first.

 

Just like the first Gold Coast incarnation (Hello Skase, Hello Rueben), it believes it can gain local support by luring a high profile big name player (think W. Capper) who ends up being the highest-paid decoy forward of all time. Speaking of which, any female goal umpires will surely need to be accompanied by an armed chaperone whenever Hunt is playing in the forward line. Can we really have any faith that this new Gold Coast franchise is going to be any less financially incompetent that the last one, given that it is now offering a $1 million per year contract to a bloke who has never played a single senior game?

 

But, of course, the hype went right to Mike Sheahan's head, with Sheahan once again playing the faithful role of 'Pravda' to the Demetriou's Kremlin. Showing more brown-nosing of the Politburo than Manning Clark in search of an Order of Lenin, Sheahan laid on the flattery in true Burns and Smithers style:

"it might be described as one small step for a club, one giant leap for a code.

 

"Karmichael Hunt's decision to abandon a high-profile rugby league career to pursue life in the AFL is a coup money couldn't buy.

 

"The Queenslander's move is a priceless marketing development for the AFL."

Sheahan even had the temerity to proffer the view that "Karmichael Hunt is the Great McCarthy of the 21st century."

 

For those who have not seen The Great McCarthy (and we highly recommend that you do) Hunt is the antithesis of the values embodied by this great Aussie icon (and this classic Australian masterpiece of the motion picture genre):

 

 

 

The Great McCarthy was an Australian hero, a humble grass roots battler from the bush. McCarthy was a modest grease monkey off the field, hewn from the raw footballing stocks of Kyneton, deep in the heart of the Aussie Rules heartland - not some, overpaid, over-quaffed, bling-wearing, womanising pretty boy on half a million per year who reckons he can take on the big boys just because he once played kick-to-kick with Nathan Buckley for half an hour. It's been easy for Hunt to be a big fish in the small and shallow pond of the NRL. He's about to be devoured by the man-eating predators that swim in the big and unforgiving ocean that is the AFL. And Max Rooke will be waiting for him.

 

 

Hero of the Week: Plugger Duck Brown - 8 goals, plus the greatest display of physical intimidation since Chuck Norris retired from 'Walker Texas Ranger' make the big boy the stand out player of Round 17. Meanwhile, the hapless Roos continue their downward slide, with each passing week making them even more strongly resemble their stand-in coach (the Big Crock himself). Given that North Melbourne could not convince N. Buckley to replace the mangy Junkyard Dog (who has now been retired to the adjacent North Melbourne lost dogs home) perhaps the Roos could cross the street to the lost dogs home and prevail upon another Buckley to step into the top job. After all that little Buckley has been through, the pain and anguish of coaching the current Roos list will be a cakewalk for the gutsy little fella.

 

 

Cult Figure of the Week: Brett Burton - The Birdman is back, with all his resplendent ornithological prowess - faster than a speeding ostrich, soaring higher than an Eagle with a nostril full of powdered stimulants, more in-your-face noticeable and downright loveable than Big Bird on Sesame Street, the Birdman dominated Showdown XXVII with his fearless aerial hijinks.

 

Clanger of the Week: Gold Coast Football Club, Comrade Demetriou, the lot of you. Don't say you weren't warned. Like the vengeful sword of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the fickle gods of football fate will be brutally sadistic when it all turns pear shaped on the Gold Coast (once again). As it surely will.