After knocking off 8 teams and with 8 to go i had to take last weekend off to go to Sydney and do some work on this TV show thing that i am making called Not Quite Art. The good news for me is that the show now has the final green light (i think it’s the final green light there appears to be a lot of stop/go lights in the TV world) and its now likely to be on the ABC on tuesday nights at 10pm in September. The bad news is that i am very busy now.
Sorry about that!
Has this guy poured beer on your Grandmother? (click to enlarge)
This is a call out for anyone who might be able to help me – particularly my friends from Essendon. I want your help to find this idiot who seems to have emptied his beer over an elderly lady’s head and then spent the next couple of minutes yelling abuse and gloating about it.
Anyone who has been following this blog or my saga on ABC radio will know that I have no team bias. I am new to the sport of Aussie Rules and am spending the winter trying to pick a team by “trying out” being a fan of each of the 16 teams each week.
I went with some great fans of Essendon in an earlier round and last Saturday i went along with some old Fitzroy fans to see their team play as Brisbane. I sat with the Brisbane cheersquad behind the goals at the away end. To be frank, it wasn’t the most thrilling game i’ve seen so far because Essendon totally dominated in the second half and ran away with it. Like every other group of fans i’ve been with, The Lions fans weren’t quite congratulating Essendon on their win but they took it their stride were good humoured about it and came up with a bunch of slightly unconvincing theories about how it was still a good omen for the future.
For most of the game i sat next to Ros, a woman well into her sixties who had been following the Fitzroy (now Brisbane) Lions for over 55 years. She is the sort of woman who is the backbone of any club and i’m sure the sort of person that any true fan of any team and any sport would respect and appreciate. During the game she proudly showed me the collection of old Fitzroy memorabilia that she has carried in her purse for the decade or more since the Roy Boys moved to Brisbane and told me stories about following the club as they moved grounds and ultimately cities over the years. I”m not sure she’ll like me saying that her playing days are probably behind her – she gets around with the use of a walking stick and would struggle to pass the pre-season fitness test.
This week i am pleased to announce that i am taking on one of my very local teams this week: the Fitzroy Lions. (the other one is Carlton but i haven’t got to them yet). I live right on the boundary of Fitzroy and my local pub has more than a few pieces of memorabilia from Fitzroy’s earlier days when the team was actually in the general vicinity of Fitzroy. Due to the some issues involved with a merger, I will actually be attending one of Fitzroy’s away games as their home ground has been moved to somewhere the other side of Northcote.
Having shared a house with a mad Queenslander who is a big fan of the ‘roys during two of their three recent premierships – i can safely say their is no other team whose theme song i know quite so well. I still hear former a certain former Queensland Young Writer of the Year singing it in my nightmares.
If you’re an old Fitzroy fan or even a new fan from the new home ground on the other side of Northcote – I’m looking forward to getting to the game with you.
A good week all round. I think I’ve killed the hex theory. I think I’m good for Geelong and Geelong is good for me.
Brian (second from the right) …
After spending every week at either the MCG or the Phone Dome, it was good to actually get to a ground where it feels like the so called “home” team actually lives there. It’s a dumb thing to say but Geelong feels like it belongs in and to Geelong in a way that none of the teams in the ‘G or at the Phone Dome really do. To add to the sense of being in a real community that really connects to its football team, my host Brian called me as i arrived from home, said he could see the ground out his window and that he’d meet me there in 5 minutes. I get the impression that its a well trodden path from home to Kardinia Park and that their corporate box gets well used week in week out when the team plays at home.
Nope, definitely not the MCG…
Our destination, Glorious Geelong…
There is usually nothing too weird about sitting in the back seat of a car while listening to the people in front of you have a conversation but this week it was very, very, very strange. For this week i got away from MCG and the Phone Dome for a change and headed out of mediocre Melbourne to glorious Geelong. Given that they were going anyway to commentate on the game, i managed to grab a lift to Geelong with Drew Morphett and Dan Lonergan from ABC’s sport’s Grandstand commentary team.
Dan and Drew didn’t let on but even before we met we’ve actually been through a lot together. They’ve been my companions on many a rainy winter afternoon, they’ve spent late nights under my pillow (so as not to disturb the girlfriend) calling a gold medal or anchoring a cricket broadcast from South Africa or England or Barbados, and they’re part of the soundtrack to a road trip i did in cricket season a few summers ago through outback Queensland and the Northern Territory. They and their ABC radio colleagues have brought as much triumph and tragedy into my life as anyone I’ve never met.
How weird it was then to be sitting in back seat of a car listening to them both talk. I’ve probably been listening to Drew from the back seat of a car since the day I was old enough to do up my own seat belt. Except that this time he was talking to me, offering up the occasionally libelous bit of off the record gossip and swearing a lot more than i’ve ever heard him do on radio.
Another one of those moments when i realise that I’m wasting my time by attempting to post detailed match responses here. I should stick to the stupid and sensational. My post of yesterday about Essendon winning the Eurovision song contest was the 75th most popular blog post in the world in the last 24 hours according to the good folks at wordpress. I’ll never cease to be amazed at the wonders of the Internet – given i posted it late last night it only existed for 8 of those 24 hours anyway. Actually, given that “Frum Porn” is still one of the most popular search terms that drive people to this site as a result of this post, i probably shouldn’t be that suprised by anything.
Serbian Eurovision winner Marija Sheedyvic
sings her stirring anti war power ballad “When the bombers fly up up up, the bombs come down down down”
Let me be the first to congratulate Essendon on their win in the Eurovision song contest. Nice work bombers. Not sure how they’re tracking for the flag this year but a win in a major competition is not to be sneezed at.
Til now, finding someone to go to the games with has been relatively straight forward. But not this week…
Seemed simple enough, someone who follows Geelong calls in, i’ll meet them at the game we’ll drink some beer, sing some songs, yell furious abuse at displaced sandgropers who happen to have made their way to Kardinia Park and celebrate the rousing victory when my team gets up over the competition leaders. Oh no no no. If only it was that easy.
From memory (and hey, i’m not Media Monitors) it went a little something like this:
LINDY: Helen’s (or whatever her name was) called in from Geelong. Helen, you’re a Geelong fan?
CALLER (Possibly Helen): Yes and we don’t want him to come on Sunday.
LINDY: So you’re not calling in to take Marcus then?
CALLER: No, he’s a jinx. Tell him to go and see another team.
If anyone read my comments and reports about The Saints in round 3 you would have noticed the running joke about how difficult the Saints were proving to communicate with. Their fans were telling me to get out while i can, their fan forum at saintsational.com was locking me in a limbo where i was registered but unable to post and the club’s marketing department wanted me to come back a week later. I thought my general tone was one of amusement – if anything, i felt that i’d felt something of the eternal frustration of being a Saints fan.
Seems some of the folks at Saintsational saw it differently decided to get a bit stuck into me yesterday.
When my blog records showed that over a hundred people had visited me from Saintsland yesterday, i thought i’d better get over there and see what they were saying.
Here are some of the better quotes:
“i dont buy into this guy … like its some kinda honour for us for him to be a saints supporter he needs to get over himself … your either a saint or you aint”
“Yeah he’s figured out a great way to get invited to the footy each week for free. Seems like the ABC have fallen for i too putting out announcements each week asking for fans to take him to their game.”
… in the VFL that is.
Real footy by the bay…
Before everything went wrong at Richmond on Sunday evening i was having a great afternoon. If you listened to the ABC last Friday would have heard that my regular bit got hijacked. A bloke called Trevor Monti, the President of the Williamstown Football Club in the VFL competition called in to try and get me to come and check out some “real footy” last weekend. His Seagulls were taking on the Bombers of Bendigo and he wanted me to check out a bit of it…
Apparently, something similar happened to John Harms (who was also not doing anything about VFL at the time) over at The Age:
A FEW weeks ago, I received a phone call from someone called Trevor Monti. I had never met him before. He was ringing me in his capacity as president of the Williamstown Football Club. He kindly invited me to the lunch before the Seagulls’ opening game of the season against Werribee. He was very friendly.
I am always attracted to a bloke who is free-spirited enough to drop the Kennedy crow call into the opening minutes of his first conversation with you, and by the time I put the phone down, I had made a mental note that he was one of the more creative users of the word in its various forms. So I accepted.
Fortunately Trevor didn’t drop any F-Bombs on the sensitive folks over at ABC radio although he did drop a few after lunch. It looks like Trevor’s on a mission to preach the Willi word and if he needs to commit more hijacks than Al Qaeda to achieve it then so be it.
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