Last week we played about 10 minutes of good football. You know, the kind of football where you kick goals not behinds (though there are some behinds I’d like to kick!). Can the players streaming forward please remember Fev is good but he is not superman. He cannot regularly beat 3 or 4 opponents, at least not while dodging footballs bombed upon his head.

It was not a good week. It was a worse game. Oh for a touch of David Rys-Jones. Someone, anyone, who would have walked across to the thug Baker’s half-dozen and given him a fair dinkum ‘good aye!’! Poor old Murph would have fist size bruises across his stomach and back.

We need some tough nuts to go with the niceties of youth. It’s no good being all skill, we need some old fashioned grunt as well. Still for that short window of glory in the third I thought it was the 1980’s again and St. Kilda were the perennial spooners and we were the old bluebaggers dozing for half a game before awakening in a rampage of goals and glory.

Alas that was then this is now. We are still in the rebuilding stage. This better be some wild tower of glory we are building, no tigeresque tower of Babel please – its bad enough hearing the Richmond babbling chorus of despair, I do not want the Navy Blue cries to co-join the yellow and black inferno. Dante, obviously, barracked for Richmond.

Pats on the back to Fev for six, he can spit as many dummies as he wants so long as he bags six or more a game. A big bear hug and grin to young Waitey who chopped up the blonde weeping willow to feed the fires of our discontent. If football was really theatre then Riewoldt would, without doubt, be cast as a whining Hamlet.

But enough of last week; last week we were the old dark whites. It doesn’t count! How can you scream 'go whitebaggers'? Sounds far too similar to white maggots and apparently we are morally bound not to scream that out anymore. Maggots have feelings too…apparently. No ability to make a sound decision mind you, but feelings…oh oh oh oh feelings….

This week, though, this week we return to the traditional foundations for this game. This week we play in the famous Navy Blue jumper against a great rival on a Saturday arvo at the M.C.G. arhhh, now that’s football!

So a ghostly confession (with apologies to Malcolm McDowell and Clockwork Orange):

‘My fellow bluebaggers it’s time I gave a wee bit of a soul revealing glimpse into the Ghost. It’s true my bluebagger brethren, the Ghost does not hate Collingwood. I know many bluebaggers do. I understand your hate. I even have a brother, bluebagger barrackers, a brother who hates the black and whiters more than he hates the taxman. This brother remembers you see, he remembers a time as a child leaving Victoria Park, that place built upon the black hole left by the devil’s thumbprint. He remembers leaving that dark place smiling 'cos the bluebaggers can shine even in hell, and that day they shone grander than a Guy Fawkes Night. But that day, my bluebaggers, some old toothless, spittle-drenched blue-rinsed, black and whiters, you know the kind, they adorn the edges of all our hells, well they approached my brother waving their umbrella-truncheons, bluebaggers. They approached him because he was smiling, because his bluebagger heart was aglow and they whacked him, they whacked him hard, they whacked him high and they whacked him low. Oh bluebagger brethren, my brother hates the black and whiters, hates them with all the fire in his bluebagger soul. But it is true my navy bluers. It is true this Ghost does not.

‘Oh why?’ I hear you cry louder than the Heatley Stand chorus during a famous comeback. Oh why does the Ghost not hate them that hates us so? Oh how can the Ghost a good solid Carlton man not hate the vertical stripes like venitian blinds hung the wrong way round?’

And there my great bluebagger tribe is your answer. I love their hate. I revel in their secret admiration that they sharpen into the vilest revulsion for all things blue. I dance on the graves of their grand dreams. Graves our boys dug. Imagine bluebaggers; imagine being a black and white (yes grip tight I know the thought hurts) at halftime in 1970. Oh imagine how you’d feel dancing in the M.C.G’s beer riddled aisles celebrating the famous victory only to snatch defeat from the jaws of immortality. Beware the jabberwocky not my friends, beware the bluebaggers! Beware their goal, goal goalsies, and their mark, mark, marksies. Beware their Croswells, Wallseys and Ted Hopkinsees!

Then there was that Harmsey/Sheldon goal in 1979 dear bluebaggers. ‘Oh it was out’ I tell them gleefully, ‘it was out by miles not feet’ and then I savour their black-teeth, red nosed despair. Their ‘hands pulling their oily hair’ despair.

Oh I do not hate Collingwood my Navy Blue peoples. How can I hate that which we have crushed so magnificently they can never meet our eyes? No, my bluebagger boys and girls, I do not hate them. For truthfully, I enjoy their companionship too much. They are the cabin boys to our pirate captains; they are the straw mats to our clean soles. I love playing Collingwood because even when we lose I know, they know, the world knows, of the six grand Finals these great teams have played, the bluebaggers have won 5. No, I do not hate them at all.

In fact I have a secret wish, my Carlton cavorters. I have this wonderful, navy blue dream that keeps me going during these flickering years where darkness lurks too close and the past glories emit barely enough warmth. I dream of the day, getting nearer I think, when we run out again that last day in September to play for our seventeenth and who, fellow old dark navies, do you think I see waiting to meet the might of Carlton on that fateful day? Who else I cry with glee? Who else to rend, to kill, to slay, who else but the feeble magpie!’

Us by seventeen points this Saturday arvo!Fev for ten between the big sticksand Murph B.O.G.

Go Blues!