A NEW FEATURE

Exciting developments. We have a new voluntary contributor!

Bravo to our Melbourne based Lucie, who is close to the action down there and has noticed an important trend. Tonight, on this last day of autumn, Lucie begins her inspired new feature:

'What Dog is That Coach?

Here is the first entry. Two pictures - one is a giant schnauzer, one is Collingwood coach Mick Malthouse. Can you tell which is which?

You will be able to keep track of this feature, in full, on the website.


keep this space

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 9

space please

gerard ... or ... buddy?

Gwen in Row T calls it ‘abbadabba’ and it’s no coincidence that it’s a word closely related to ‘abracadabra’. Black footy magic. That’s what Round 9 was all about.

On Friday morning, the eaglet was plonked on the living room floor with one of his favourite pop up dinosaur books. This one is top shelf. (There are many, of varying calibres.) Out of the blue, I was reminded that the eaglet can get a fright, that causes him to unleash the shrillest scream, just from coming face to face with the 3D t-rex which emerges from page 11. This even though he’s seen it a good few dozen times.

Repetition doesn’t seem to nullify things for some. But I don’t handle it nearly as well. This year, adult life has taken on a repetitiousness that perhaps we assume we are destined for in growing up, having bills and children, cars whose tyres flatten, tasks and storage and proper jobs. I wouldn’t call it a flatline (yet), just lacking in deviations. I don’t handle it well.

It may come partly from growing up between two cultures and countries, frequent childhood travel and the always present obligation to be on both sides of the world. It may come from living under the flight path – constant reminders of my submerged wanderlust as the jumbos carve up the airspace above our hills hoist. It may be – as is often the case – the book I am currently taking to bed. I’ve been reading Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates, that great chronicler of mid 20th century American middle class lives and, more often than not, their disappointments.

I was talking to Gai about it shortly after the dinosaur incident. On the mundanity and repetition, she said, while possibly biting the inside of her cheek, ‘You just have to be zen about it.’ She’s right of course. [I wonder if Brad Johnson is managing to feel zen, after the repetition of his Round 9 after-the-siren miss – two in two seasons!]

But, then again, it was Friday night. But not any old Friday night. It was round 9 – blackfella round. A far easier solution than zen. Flick on the ABC and seek out some proxy highs. We’ve seen the Indigenous fellas play a good few dozen times but somehow their impact can still ignite my imagination just like the great carnivore that had the eaglet in a spin.

The Indigenous contribution is difficult to address without suggestions of exoticism or reverse racism. Adam Goodes collected some criticism when he wrote, on the 150th anniversary of the game last year, that the Indigenous boys were ‘born to play’. As if by association he had suggested the white boys weren’t. He didn’t. But the blackfellas do appear to be born to play. There, I’ve said it.

Over the course of last weekend, my imagination was thoroughly peppered by the skills of the best of the 82 Indigenous players in the League: Neon Leon Davis, Andrew Lovett, Magic O’Loughlin, Andrew McLeod, Motlop, Pearce, Wells, Betts, Bateman, Rioli … the return of Docker Des Headland and the beginning of Docker Hill. The list goes on and on. There is no doubt that they offer real dash and carry, biting side steps and dummies, a bit of twinkle and spin, a bit of cheek in their daring, a kind of rhythm in their bio mechanics that seems almost syncopated at times, when they need it to be. They bedazzle.

Martin Flanagan described some of the Bombers’ moves against St Kilda in the Age on Saturday:

‘They have Alwyn Davey. Did you see the "swoop" when he took the ball at his ankles while running at helter-skelter pace through a crowd of players in last Sunday's game? Or that other move, the backward sway with the old soft-shoe shuffle, that sent not one but two St Kilda defenders shooting past like people on a train who just missed their stop? Commentator Gerard Healey said it was one of the best sidesteps you'll see in footy.’

They are a delight to watch cause you know you’re going to get a bit of the t-rex factor. It’s unpredictable even though you’ve seen it before. Short and sweet – like many an Indigenous forward pocket – they’ve got something special. There, I said it. And I thank them for my weekend piece of it.

Undoubtedly, the highest of the highs of the round for me was the pride on display. How many of those Indigenous players actually said that they wanted to perform extra feats for this round? And they walked the talk. How many of them were encouraged to express their pride and an awareness of their supreme skills? How refreshing for this rightful cockiness to be unswaddled from a sense that we all have to be equal in order to be equal, no highs and no lows. That ain’t what made old t-rex so impressive.

There haven’t been any dinosaur books this week. Omar spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings in the back garden doing his ‘morning Motlops’. He has spent Monday and Tuesday afternoons, a little white boy in the suburbs, being Wirrapanda and Goodes and Lovett and Magic – it always comes back to Mickey. He knows the way to his mother’s heart. I must remind him of Gavin Wanganeen.

And just to prove that I am not guilty of exoticism, that I have not completely succumbed to the stereotypical white girl fantasy of the black male, I am extending my understanding of the tolerance and diversity message and revealing my real crush of the round.

I am ready to admit, this week, my ‘fondness’ for Gerard Whateley.

He is the opposite of your Nathan Lovett-Murray, the opposite of your Lance Buddy Franklin, the opposite of your Aaron Davey. He is the anchor of ABC Grandstand’s football commentary team. He is the small, pale man with a beak of a nose, who wears purple and pink striped shirts, brown shoes with grey pants, coifs his hair into a spiked arrangement to conceal the beginning of baldness and speaks with the nasal twang of a private schoolgirl. He may not have emanated the same feats as Travis Varcoe on Friday night, but he was the man who called a pass between Bulldogs Cross and Hahn – ‘the accidental perfect pass’. I am easily charmed by a man who is good with words. Even thrilled.

Happy tipping!

doing his motlops ...

JUST IN CASE

you missed it ... The eaglet has been in the garden all morning, practising. He reckons he got one through from the Colourbond fence.

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 8

photo: Mike Bowers, © The Slattery Media Group

Can I actually stop myself from reading another one of Barry Hall’s articles in Friday’s Sydney Morning Confessional? It's like a car crash I can't turn away from. He’s referring to himself in the third person now.

Last Friday, there was Barry (or his ghost writer) defending his stats from the game against Geelong. He had five touches, four marks and one behind for the match. It was a defence he might have mounted in a manner as succinct as his stats. But he strung it out for 913 (disposable) words.

‘I understand how some writers rely heavily on the stats to help them determine who has played well and who hasn't and as a player you just live with that.’

Last Saturday night, at Stade Australie against old foes the Eagles, he had just one extra touch, took one more mark but kicked five goals. While I do wish Baz would leave his self-analysis at the club psychologist’s door, the big fella has a point. His fortnight does indeed support the old saying – it’s quality not quantity.

‘We said to him, “We're not worried about marks, kicks, handballs or goals, you're a better player when you tackle and chase”,’ said Roos. ‘I think he only had six kicks, but his tackling, chasing and pressure … all of a sudden the six kicks translate into five goals.’ Poor Baz – he just got lost in translation down at Kardinia Park.

More than any numbers, what struck me about Big Baz on Saturday night was that he seemed to belong again. How else do you explain the cuddles from Captain Kirk all night? That’s the trouble with statistics. The kicks and handballs don’t show you how you belong.

I have never been terribly preoccupied with belonging. It doesn’t bother me to be on the periphery. The view is generally better.

Last Saturday night, thirteen minutes into the final quarter, when all the action was in the centre, the periphery is precisely where I found myself. Nature had called and I had followed her siren cry, extracting myself from Row 18, jumping the too-deep concrete steps in twos until I was ‘backstage’ behind the concourse. No-one much around. The clopping of my wood-soled clogs drew attention from the teenage kid reconciling his Krispy Kreme stand. It’s quite a walk to the ‘ladies’ at Homebush. What was I missing, all alone?

Then, I noticed it. All the way there and back, across the endless poured concrete slabs – clop clop, clop clop – I could hear the tidal roar of the crowd, swelling and retreating. And it gave me as much of an indication of where the match was at as if my eyes were trained on it. It gave me as great a sense of being a spectator as sitting face to face with the 33 078 that I returned to.

This seemingly insignificant walk on the outskirts of the game was the final, lasting residue of the night for me. Kieren Jack’s match winning kick, ruckman Jolly’s 28 hit outs, Teddy Richards’ 9 marks, all of Goodes’ 26 possessions, Barry’s career high 5 tackles, Rhyce Shaw’s 11 run and bounces and the skipped heartbeat of a last gasp victory were all superseded by a walk to the toilet.

At home, I lay for some time with my nose in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power and, by about 2am, I understood the power of my strange little Saturday night stroll between doors 131 and 134 - I had truly communed with Barry.

Sometimes it’s not until you remove yourself from the central focal point that you realise where you belong, or how you belong, or that you belong, in the picture. As Canetti says:

'There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognise or at least classify it.’

That might explain why Baz himself fell prey to the statistics. Fear of the unknown, of how he may or may not perform. He was chasing those stats himself. And, in return, the journalists, the supporters – none of us know what will become of Barry Hall next mark, next week, next year - we pinned him to his individual stats to hold the unknown at bay.

‘It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. …. It is only in this moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.’

That might be what happened to Barry this week. He surrendered himself to his crowd – his team - and no longer feared the unknown of what he could or couldn’t do as an individual. Last weekend, his success may have confirmed for Barry that it really is OK to be on the periphery, just like Roosy says, that you won’t miss any of the action, that the aggregate disposals really don’t tell it all, that the tackles and the one percenters*, the much prized, team oriented stats which don’t however get published in Monday’s sports section, say just as much as the kicks and handballs and marks. He may finally have convinced himself.

Mark Twain’s ‘dim and uncertain’ (see Quote of the Week) can reveal just as much as the straight and narrow.The bad news, then, is that, if we follow the logic of Twain’s words, such a revelation for Barry seems to support the ‘ten thousand laboured words’ route rather than the lightning bolt.

So, just what does Slattery Publishing have in store for us in 2009? Barry Hall – Pull no Punches: the authorised and self-authored autobiography.

Noooooooooo!

Happy tipping!


*One percenter: Selfless acts by players such as smothers, knock-ons, shepherds, spoils and chases, which are often not recognised in official statistics but are invaluable to teams.

To nonetheless play around with the official stats click here.
And check this out.

THANK YOU

to the ladder technician for his weekly hard work.

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 7

The concurrence of Mother’s Day and some significant OUTS last week got me thinking about my place in the team.

I have never been much into Mother’s Day. I’m into mothers, but I’m not sure about allocating them one day a year for recognition of all the unscheduled, uncontracted, unpaid and non-negotiable hours of mind-numbingly difficult work. And I’m into days … although I actually prefer nights. But, this Mother’s Day combination got me thinking about the perfect gift.

Sunday cuddles, flowers, chocolates, breakfasts in bed, afternoon tea cakes … look, they’re all nice. But tell me a mother around the nation who wouldn’t prefer to receive the embossed card, in pastel hues, which reads:

‘You’re dropped.’

Not in the adolescent sense of the word, in the footy sense of the word.

I have been trying, on and off, for the best part of five years, to get myself momentarily but meaningfully dropped from my team. Playing in the centre is taxing. I’ve tried a number of different paths: sub par performances, sloppy skills, off-target delivery, inconsistency, a vehement defiance of the team ethic, long recovery times, a bad attitude to training … carrying a pot belly.

Despite some remarkably poor on and off-field incidents, I have been unable to get myself a team imposed suspension or an appointment with the tribunal. I wouldn’t mind a Tuesday night in Melbourne, in a decent frock, down at Docklands. I could head off for a nice glass of Cabernet Merlot after accepting my two week ban.

But it’s not me who’s off to Melbourne tonight. Oh no. Despite having a beastly head cold and persistent cough - de Hauteclocque (virus) – it is the tall, very mobile, centre half forward who is headed for the southern city, leaving me with the little tagger to myself until Sunday. Through the years, there have been other injuries: de Hauteclocque (back); de Hauteclocque (general soreness); de Hauteclocque (fed up). But I’ve still not seen my name in the OUTS. I have even considered worse (self inflicted?) injuries for my week off, coveting as I do a trip to Germany to visit my sister. Although, there are probably better ways to get there than radical hamstring treatments or hernia operations.

My team doesn’t take the Matthew Knights or John Worsfold approach with me – give ‘em a couple of weeks in the seconds, break the cycle, build their confidence, bring ‘em back for maximum impact. No. My team takes the James Hird approach to flatness – just keep playing ‘em. Hird suggested, during the early part of last week, that out-of-form forward, Scott Lucas, could ‘turn it around’ while continuing to play: ‘You can have a bad six weeks and turn it around. Just because you're 31 years old doesn't mean you're finished.’ Lucas may be the sort of guy who doesn’t handle rotation well. But I could be the kind of girl who does.

A rotation through Bendigo could be good. It could be very re-invigorating. I could do the deep-shaft mine experience at Central Deborah nearby (although I suspect, when they saw the words deep and shaft side by side, the Herald Sun would be all over that!!). I could enjoy the city’s famous vintage talking tram tour, have a spell in an original 1860’s Chinese joss house or sip a long black in the award-winning, architecturally designed Bendigo Art Gallery café.

Eagle, Ashley Hansen, was dropped to the reserves this week too. ‘He'll get some good form under his belt and be back in the side sooner rather than later,’ said the club. I too would be motivated by a weekend with Swan Districts versus East Perth at Steel Blue Oval, Bassendean. Swans are my kind of bird, steel blue one of my favourite colours.

I’m not alone in this. Even great Hawthorn back pocketeer, four time Premiership coach and current ABC commentator, David Parkin, was looking for a way out last weekend. He put his career on the line before Friday night’s coverage, saying he would retire if the Bombers won. He too was last seen near Bendigo.

What about my team? How would they cope with my absence? I have faith that the Nolan boys could do it without me – the weekend that is, not the future (I’m not seeking a trade, just a wee stint on the sidelines). The Bombers won. The Eagles won. My individual talents are not unsurpassable. It’d be more a question of team structure.

They’d be fine around the stoppages, in the clinches, with the contested ball. They’d make some solid forward thrusts, execute some good goal assist-goal set plays. The area for concern would be the loose ball gets – I’m not sure either of the Nolan boys could find anything once it’s two feet further than their noses. This may make them vulnerable to turnovers. But at least the little one has genuine pace to chase it on the rebound. They would miss my clearances, my carrying skills, and they’d miss my ability to ice the cake towards the end.

That said, no player is indispensable, irreplaceable. Look at the calibre of the INs from last weekend: IN Ling - the fiercest tagger in the business. IN Cousins - the on-baller who goes until he vomits. Who knows what might happen to the Nolan boys, if they had to cover my territory. You know what they say … about opportunity. When they looked at Paddy Ryder’s tapes on Monday morning, do you think the Essendon coaching staff were devastated that David Hille went down for the season?

I suspect any ‘dropping’ I am going to achieve will have to be self imposed, because my team operates a bit like Terry Wallace. They regularly threaten to release me, but it’s usually promises, promises. Terry, at least, should live up to that nickname – Plough – and do something about breaking up the clods in his field of Tigers.

And while Terry and his Tigers flounder, almost-in-the-same-boat Mark Harvey, has pulled up the anchor and got his boys sailing instead. Nobody got a week off. Nobody got relegated. Nobody got given time to freshen up physically or mentally. Nobody had the cycle broken for them. Harvey revealed that the surfing movie - Bustin’ down the Door - was the inspiration behind the Dockers' win over Carlton. Do you think Blockbuster Bendigo carries that title?

In any case, Mother’s Day is over for another year. I’ve got 362 more days of the game plan to execute. If any of you have any ideas for some good motivational viewing please hit the COMMENTS button below. And shortly before the second Sunday in May 2010, I will be posting a custom-designed, downloadable template of the ‘You’re dropped’ card on the web. I will be encouraging my team to print it. And you’re welcome to do the same for your mum.

Happy Tipping!

MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL

Appreciation to Richard for the following after this week's first Monday night of football:



One of these men doesn’t like Mondays.
I’m guessing it’s the one in the Collingwood colours.
But it’s AFL chief operating officer Gillon McLachlan, who actually looks like the silicon chip inside his head’s been switched to overload.
Scary!

BULLETIN - POST ROUND 6

To be honest, after last week, I was stuck in bulletin mud.

Thoughts don’t come easy to me this year. The once easy web of connections around the wheel of footy and life, which it has never troubled me to spin … now feels sticky and keeps getting broken during the night.

As I searched throughout last week for the clue to this week’s parallel … I realised that a season is really just all the same stories in a different order and once you’ve told them one year and then the next, it’s simply hard to tell them again.

When asked his captain’s questions at season’s start, Chris Judd declared that the biggest problem facing football was ‘over saturation of the media: the more people you get (covering football) in the media, the more attention gets paid to issues on the fringe.’

Is THAT what has happened to me? Have I become a Juddian fringe dweller, scratching for meaning at a boundary line where the throw-in has already happened? (Although I hardly consider the human condition a fringe issue!)

Then, on Thursday night, like a runner blessedly arrived on the scene with advice, a quote appeared to me. It was from a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music in which American composer John Cage described music as: ‘a purposeless play, an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living’.

I have often thought that football has a distinctively musical quality, made by rhythm and tempo and melody as it is, the solo and the ensemble interlinked. Could this be it? Was there nothing more to write, no more threads of human reason to tease out, no more improvements to self for footy to impart? Apart from the essential music of itself? Perhaps it was time to accept the inconsistencies and the chaos, to ignore the patterns, the shapes, the voices of footy, to put down the pen and just go with the flight of the ball.

* * *

Over Friday lunch, I sat down to do the tips with the eaglet. Cats v Demons? Last meeting, the Cats won by 116 points. They are 3 wins, 1 loss and 1 draw, the Cats’ way. Geelong is paying $1.01 and Melbourne $13. $13!!
‘Oh my goodness, Omar. Do you know if you put $10 on the Demons to win, and they won, you’d get $130 – enough to buy that LEGO construction set you’re saving for.’

Before they were out of my mouth, I realised the above throw-away lines now required an explanation of the TAB, of gambling, of greed and chance and unlikelihood and why the bottom hardly ever overcomes the top, of impossible miracles and why people pay to have them even exist as possibilities.

But it was too late. The thought of that bright yellow shovel digger, the 43cm long, 33cm high mobile telescopic crane with elevator hook and the sectioned modular building had taken hold.
‘Can we do it? Can we do it?’ he pleaded.
‘Yes,’ I giggled, trying to make the whole thing sound like a flippant whim rather than the ethical pit it was.

Oh God, footy was supposed to be a purposeless play this week. While I was detaching myself from the meaningfulness of a week of footy, the eaglet was learning to attach a ferocious and unswerving purpose. While my grip was loosening, his was beginning to take hold.

* * *

On Saturday morning, moments before 6am, the eaglet flapped his way into the swans’ nest. He lay quietly for some breaths before inquiring:
‘Did you put the $10 on the Demons? Because I think they have one chance of winning. I think it in my mind. I don’t know if it’s in the Demons’ mind, but it’s in my mind.’

Later that morning, he was dropped at his grandparents’ house. You may know them as Gai & David. Patrick and I headed off for a morning together. We chatted over almost-midday yum cha, I in a state of liberation, as I allowed the bliss of ‘purposeless play’ to wash through me just as smoothly as my chrysanthemum tea. No need to think this weekend. We returned to collect the eaglet sometime just before 2pm.

The match – Hawks v Carlton – began just as the youngest grandson added to a family tree of stains on the living room carpet – having just kicked off a freshly brewed cup of coffee – four adults on the floor for the opening bounce, blotting and foaming – the couple married almost 52 years, mentally separated by their tips – they’d gone with ‘the wife’ and the blues - and she was worried. Minutes in, we’re mopping … and the Blues are already mopping up the mess Roughhead appears capable of. We are attuned to Saturday afternoon footy. We are awake to the life we are living.

On the way home, the eaglet sleeps and the ‘hand of footy’ places a ten dollar bet on the Demons. They’re paying $14 by Saturday.


Home again, and on the couch for the final quarter. Tim lane is riffing on the brilliance of Brad Sewell – ‘He’s a Hercules!’
‘You mean a Hercules Morse as big as a horse,’ corrects the eaglet.
The parents amongst us (and the enthusiasts of small, black Skye terriers or New Zealand children’s literature) will know the reference to Hairy Maclary.

By 5.30pm, the eaglet has become Gary Ablett, under lights in the back yard. He’s playing Demon Dad - Brad ‘Broccoli’ Green – and he’s on top, of course. But will it last? What will win the eaglet’s heart: the desire to ‘beat dad’ or the desire to manifest, by home proxy, the $130 dream of a LEGO construction site? And what is at the intersection of the crossroads? Football.

I can’t avoid it, the confluence of football and life. Try as I might, they are concurring in my home, in my backyard, in my narrative, my child, our next generation. The repetition of the stories, the signposts, the suggestions of footy from season to season, it is not, as I feared, a precursor to ‘the end’ – it is just the accompaniment to the reality of on-going. Our personal stories are full of repetition, our behaviours multiply and then abate. Events position us.

We live, like the Roos, without the presence to stay entirely with what is unfolding; we live by spending just the right amount of talent to get by, like the Hawks; we live with unforgettable, embedded lost opportunities like Fev; we live life in chunks of ‘wake-up call’ like the derby Dockers; we live, often, with little structure or continuity, just hopeful bursts, like the Bombers; we live within the fortressed security of our homes, like the Lions. Sometimes, we survive on the last gasp of a desperate effort, like the Swans; we live, like the Cats, with the certainty of supremacy or we live, like the Saints, with the uncertainty of supremacy; or we live, like the Dogs, without a plan ‘b’.

From Friday to Sunday, we look into the mirror of the oval ball – and without seeking purpose or order or improvement, we are awake. From year to year, the image in the mirror is much the same. The differences are subtle. They take time. But they are there. This season, too, is maturing.

* * *

While the swans are at the match on Sunday, the eaglet has been relegated and is with his grandparents again. Word has it he spent most of the day at GAME DAY LIVE on AFL.com, monitoring the progress of Geelong v Melbourne. It’s a loss, which, thanks to his grandmother’s chicken soup and the spa jets of their bath, he can accept.

In the car on the way home, he notices the lights over the harbour and the city. ‘Just like Christmas,’ he says. Blissful silence follows. Until …
‘When do we get our $10 back?’
‘We don’t’, we reply, secretly glad the gambling experiment has failed.
‘So we don’t get it back?’
‘No, darling, that’s gambling.’

‘In the first quarter, we probably should have been another three goals up – but that’s just the way footy is. You’ve got to take your chances,' said Roos.

‘To be so close to the reigning premier, to match them in every area, but to come down to the last kick … it’s obviously disappointing but .. what can you do … that’s footy,’ said Fev.

That’s life.
Happy tipping!

THE LADDER - ROUND 6

Here's a closer look at the ladder for the visually challenged. Click on the image to see it even larger!