1. Big bang footy
YOU MIGHT think, if you were strolling with the kids past AAMI Stadium around, ooh, 6pm on Sunday, that the enormous thuds and crunches drifting over the light-towers were evidence of something violent and physical carrying on within.
Something like, say, Port Adelaide’s Matt Thomas riding Nathan Bassett into the ground. Or ruckman Dean Brogan showing Luke Jericho what it would be like to be hit by a meat van. Or Michael Pettigrew and Scott Thompson colliding like two highly accelerated protons.
And you’d be right. But thankfully, for those of us who like a bit of bang and crash with our footy, all of this is legal. So the next time your rugby-loving brother-in-law chews your ear off* about Australian football being aerial ping pong, and his best mate joins in with his theory about athletes who still have necks not being real athletes – consider this Exhibit A.
*Possibly literally, if he’s into Union
2. Bye bye, baby
WHEN the league’s 17th side, the Gold Coast Weekenders, signs up, we may all be facing an old dilemma. What do you do on the weekend when your team has a bye?
You could walk a weekend in someone else’s shoes and adopt a second side. Or stage a small protest by not entering your tips. Or follow our lead and simply spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon weeping in front of the television.
The last time there were an odd-numbered total of sides in the AFL was in 1994, the year before Fremantle joined and three years after Adelaide. So what did our forefathers do then? Ah yes, they watched Gladiators.
Problem solved.
3. Hello muddah, hello fuddah
HERE’S another entry for the list Jack Dyer used to keep marked ‘footballers today don’t know they’re born’: homesickness isn’t what it used to be, according to Chance Bateman.
In Dyer’s day, footballers were taken from the nest as hatchlings and reared in conditions indistinguishable, if memory serves, from the boarding houses in Oliver Twist. They were picked on at draft camp and forced to run up hills in temperatures rising as high as double digits. Most brutal of all, they were given amusing nicknames like Polly and Skinny, and even sometimes amusing surnames, like Fanning.
It made them into men.
Today’s young footballer, says 99-gamer Bateman, has things like club infrastructure, and support, and a player development manager with his interests at heart. Softies, the lot of them, we say. Captain Blood would have had none of it.
4. Heave ho
INTRIGUING claims from Fremantle yesterday, where departing CEO Cameron Schwab claimed that one of his proudest achievements in his six-plus years at the club was “being able to utter the F-word for the first time in our history”.
Now, among our many roles at afl.com.au – tea lady, office grump, the man who changes the light bulbs – we at the Four Points also consider ourselves a sort of moral guardian, a beacon for today’s troubled, if pampered, youth. And while we know enough of dockworkers to doubt that Schwab created club history at Freo, we still find his pride in the claim worrying. What next? North Melbourne’s Rick Aylett fondly recalling the first time he farted loudly in a board meeting? Collingwood’s Greg Swann reminiscing about sneaking a dirty magazine into the CEOs’ conference? Ex-Melbourne boss Steve Harris claiming, “The best bit was the time we all got bladdered and passed out in the begonias”?
WHAT’S COMING UP
What to look out for on afl.com.au this Tuesday
Team of the Week
The only man at afl.com.au who once worked as a furniture removalist, expert Matt Burgan, casts his eye over the weekend’s best 22.
Mark of the Year/Goal of the Year
Was Andrew Lovett’s goal better than, um, Andrew Lovett’s other goal? You be the judge.
Dean Bailey
Melbourne’s coach fronts the press this afternoon after the world’s most heartening 30-point loss.
NAB AFL Rising Star
afl.com.au’s Jen Witham has an interview with this week’s nominee, and we’ll have video highlights of the performance that won him the nod
‘So, Bomber – think you can get any better?’, and other searching questions.
The views in this story are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
