Disappointee's,
If anything good was to come of the weird-shit opening round of the AFL it was the-powers-that-be finally answering my years-long call for shorter quarters in Australian Rules.
Said it before, say it again, the game goes on for far too long.
Who on earth has got three hours these days to watch a game of footy, when the matches are seemingly on at all hours on almost every day of the week?
It was fine when all of them were played on a Saturday afternoon, but in this day and age of instant gratification?
They should stick with the 16 minute quarter instituted for no-crowd football, if and when the season resumes, and they should go further.
It's always been a mystery to me why the clock stops when the ball goes out of bounds.
What's that about, especially as the "deliberate' was being enforced to the hilt under last year's swathe of rules changes?
Shorter games would also mean new tactics and game strategies for extra interest, and it might even reduce the very high injury toll, which you'd have to think the players would be all for as no one wants be down
in Sick Bay drawing half-pay.
A win-win situation.
But if an empty stadium emphasised anything, it's something hundreds of thousands Melburnians, Old Adelaidians and Denizens of the Golden West have known since the invention of the telly - Australian Rules is a crap game on television.
You hardly see any lead up work except in occasional wide shots, you don't see the jostling for positions in the forward lines when a side is pressing for goal, and you never see the defensive players whose
sole job is to close down star players in opposition sides.
None of that appears on the Unblinking Eye.
David Rhys-Jones won the Norm Smith Medal for shutting down Dermott Brereton in the only MCG Grand Final ever to be graced with my presence in 1987, and yet Dave wouldn't have been seen on the Crystal Bucket
as Dermo couldn't get a kick.
There is simply no substitute for being at the ground, and as My Spy at the Ground remarked "If people can't go to the footy and cheer on their side, then what's the point?"
Quite right. Football doesn't work sans the Roar of the Greasepaint and the Smell of the Crowd.
There is no "A Wonderful Day Like Today" without it.
The premature end to the season after one game is a blessing for the Swans, as another of My Spies suggested the Red and the White (and the Crows for that matter} "won't trouble the scorers much" when it
comes to tallying up the Premiership Points in the denoument to see who's in the Top Eight and who's not.
That's if they even get the abacus out of the dusty cupboard in the Club Secretary's office.
It's a lucky thing for the AFL that they have deep pockets - made even deeper by their heartless intention of reportedly laying-off as much as 80% of their staff due to the current difficulties.
The lack of gate receipts is the club's problem, and HQ want nothing to do with it..."we've got our own problems, fellas".
When the clubs run out of money and stop paying their players, what happens then?
Will they cry poor? Will footballers have to line up at the CES and apply for jobs that no longer exist in order to pick up the dole?
But the shit will really hit the fan when the sponsors want their money back, and the TV broadcaster demands the rights contract be re-negotiated in a world where network television is rapidly dying anyway, and nobody's got the
faintest clue about what the future holds.
Seven would be glad to wash their hands of it, the way it stands now, as they will lose money hand over fist in an industry that's barely profitable, if that.
And what are the players to do with themselves now they're unemployed?
Training would have to be out of the question as 'social distancing' is impossible - there's far too much snot and sloppy spit flying around the practice paddock.
It'd be an infection hotbed, and put whole teams to sleep.
Gym work? You are kidding.
Suppose they'll just have to follow the North Melbourne lead and host all night house parties with plenty of grog and gak.
It's as good as time as any to get off one's tits.
And don't suppose the drug testers will be coming a knockin' on their doors in the foreseeable future, as they would have been laid off too, and it would be too dangerous anyway.
Whether or not the result actually stands is beside the point - it was a very unusual unique farcical match - and as long time followers of The Red and The White have pointed out - a win is a win is a win, and you'd always take
the four Premiership points if they're on offer under any circumstances.
ADELAIDE: 6.0, 7.1, 9.2, 11.5 (71). Goals: Walker 2, Lynch 2, Fogarty, Stengle, Atkins, Sloane, Murphy, Davis, Jones.
SYDNEY: 3.0, 8.3, 11.4, 11.8 (74). Goals: Heeney 4, Hayward 2, Kennedy, Blakey, Gray, Papley, McCartin.
At Adelaide Oval.
Crowd: 0.
Seeing an empty hill at the Spiritual Home was both eerie and depressing. It was as if the ghosts of past Balmain greats had emerged from the Pantheon and were stealthily haunting the joint in utter confusion.
Never seen Leichhardt Oval that empty.
Reminded me of sitting on that same hill back in '89 with a heavily pregnant Good Lady Wife and a couple of our mates in driving, torrential rain.
It had been raining for days, the grass on the hill had turned into deep mud and little rivulets were pouring off the mound and onto the concourse below.
You could hardly see the game through the pelting precipitation, and the thud and thwack of the tackles was about the only thing that could be heard above all the splashing and sploshing.
Got no recollection of who the Mighty Tiges were playing, let alone the final score, but the lasting vivid memory was there was hardly another soul in the ground apart from The Man & His Dog.
"The joint's empty! There's nobody here!" as we marvelled at ourselves being such fools wearing entirely useless plastic poncho's.
Surprised to see that elusive human-canine duo hadn't snuck into the ground undetected somehow, and the TV shots of some flag waving pissed idiots trying to look in over the barbed wire topped galvo fence were truly pathetic.
Such pathos.
There's a balcony on the back of terrace house there that overlooks the ground that would afford a fine view of the game - but I have never once seen it occupied by anyone during a match.
In 35 years.
Yet, when the ground was dead empty, that perch was full of chardonnay-gulping canapé-chomping supreme wankers, who were displaying no interest in the footy, only in waving at the TV camera's.
Look at me! Look at me! Knobs, they were, of the highest order.
Enough to make an Ol' Balmain Boy go off in the direction of sticking the fingers down the throat territory.
The Tiges had started the season off well enough winning their opening game on the back of a Benji Marshall "masterclass" against St George-Ilawarra in Wollongong - which did have a crowd of 9,137 in the rain - after
ScoVo had graciously allowed them in before banning large gatherings, mainly so the Hillsong Conference out at Homebush could continue on it's merry tongue-speaking way on the Sunday.
Now that's entertainment.
But Balmain had it coming to them in this game with a defence that was so piss-weak it was a shock to see the hopeless mess they were in out back, even to those who've lived through nigh on a decade without making
the finals.
And when the "Dog Rooter" scored a very soft second-half try for Newcastle it left a taste in the mouth that was most unpleasant. Made me want to spit out a gobful of gloop.
The Rooter of course is Mitchell Pearce, the son of the famous Balmain champion, legend, and immortal Wayne "Never Played A Bad Game" Pearce.
You'd have to hope that Wayne didn't feel the need to hang his head in shame, as everyone knows it must be very tough to have spawned such a disappointing deviant son who plays for the wrong team.
He's too good for that.
Before the season began the so-called expert pundits were asked to publish their predictions of the season's results, and no-one put Balmain finishing anywhere above 14th and many had enthusiastically backed them for
the Wooden Spoon, not very quietly confident they would finish stone motherless last and they thought the 7/1 on offer were luxury odds.
And in the likely event the season is delayed for a long time, it could even sound the club's death knell, unless some White Knight comes to the rescue, but you'd think they'd be in very short supply during the current interregnum.
Balmain has been short on cash for decades, buying and selling the wrong players and hiring coaches who were out-and-out gibbering duds and wanted their grossly bloated stipends paid out.
The merger with Western Suburbs was ill fated from the off, resulting in a totally dysfunctional board of infighters and backstabbers who couldn't organise a chook raffle, let alone work out two bob in the coffers.
The Tiges have been more than broke more than once.
Like everyone else in the country, how are they meant to survive with an income of precisely zero?
Here too the sponsors will all want their money back as the Leichhardt turnstiles once again rust to a ghostly silence.
For the faithful, it's a fine ol' time to close down the season. Only postpones the inevitable. They've tried to kill off the club before and failed, and they'll try again in a Doomsday Scenario.
Supporter solidarity and eternal vigilance are the only things standing between us and them.
It was shaping up as yet another Winter of Discontent for the die-hards anyway, so, as the Philosopher said while nursing this week's favoured tipple down in the Front Bar on my last visit to The Local before they closed the pubs
"might as well just throw your arms in the air" and may the Good Lawd Joisus help us all.
WESTS TIGERS 24. Tries: Nofoaluma, Thompson, Reynolds, Leilua. Goals: Marshall (4).
NEWCASTLE KNIGHTS 42. Tries: Tuala (2), Ponga, Barnett, Mann, Lee, Pearce, Watson. Goals: Ponga (9).
At Leichhardt Oval.
Crowd: 0.
