Denizens of the
Bleachers,
Things always augure well from the off when you find yrself sitting in front of the colour telly and the marquee player in yr team kicks the Goal of The Year inside the opening ten seconds of the match - and then goes on to boot a bag. Just what the doctor ordered. Lance B Franklin was fed the ball out of the ruck from the centre bounce, dodged a few tackles, steadied about 60 metres out, no leads going on, an open goal, and he thought to himself "I can kick this myself" before honking a whopping left foot drop punt that sailed through the high diddle-diddle with distance to spare. Under usual circumstances, the packed crowd at the SCG would have gone absolutely ape-shit at the sight of something so high, wide & handsome after the season the Swans have had. Instead, The Red and The White found themselves stuck between a rock and hard place in the wastelands of Docklands with not a soul there, apart from what the Germans have calculated at about the 630 people required to run a professional stadium game.
Never mind that Sydney have been on the road now for 70+ days, they can see the light at the end of the tunnel now it's business time in the pointy end of the season to mix a few metaphors. They know the more they keep winning, the more they're kept from home. That's the least of their problems with Sydney littered with beshitten LGA's and sundry hotbeds of infectious disease. If they lose, so be it, but the way things stand with one of the most even top eights in years where everyone's a chance, it wouldn't be hard to motivate them to drive deep into September. At this point, it's anyone's Flag.
Super Coach Horse has
been satisfyingly brilliant this year, decamping to the
inter-change bench more or less permanently mid-season, leaving
the real coaching to Dean Cox up in the box with the legion of
assistant coaches, while Horse barks orders and gets in players'
ears at ground level while the game is going on. Horse has even
been on the curly phone hotline to upstairs. The Good Lady Wife
is an excellent lipreader, but she's been stymied by the Super
Coach wearing his mask on his chin and only pulling it up when
he knows the camera is on him. Longmire can see a golden
opportunity here in the twilight of his coaching career -
wouldn't it be nice to cap it all off with another Premiership
falling into your lap as other teams fall for the trap? The
roster, without really serious injury all year, has come good a
couple of seasons early by most calculations. Looking back on
what the self appointed pundits said at the start of the season
they were ranking the Swans to finish in 11th-16th. No-one
predicted a 6th placed finish, least of all more than one
squandered opportunity to make the top four.
Former Crows coach Don Pyke has to be given a lot of credit for his strategic planning on each and every opposition team week-in week-out all season long. He's the one who devises plans A,B, and C...and rarely this year have they had to go beyond Plan A. Adelaide must rue the day they got rid of him, given they were lucky to finish 15th without him. The "Sydney System" has worked a treat yet again. Bring on a few excellent youngsters through the Academy every year - one out of four has really excelled; Erroll Gulden is but a babe in the woods at 18, but has "long term star player" written all over him. And Sydney's knack of rehabilitating washed up players has done wonders yet again with Tom Hickey at long last fixing one of their long-term weakness - a genuine ruckman. The mid-field is crackling along just in time for the blowtorch-to-the-belly end of the season, and you can't fault a back line who can put up a concrete rendered brick wall whenever required. With Buddy closing in on 1000 career goals, the forward line can suit themselves.
And so we come to
Saturday's elimination final against modern day arch rivals the
Greater Western Sydney Pygmies at the only place that will have
them - York Park, Launceston. Launey, eh? York Park has a nominal capacity of 19,500
but even though Tassy is entirely plague free you won't see
them hanging from the rafters. With interstate travel banned,
not many, if any, will understand Sydney, as they get all
their footy news from Melbourne, where the Swans are rarely,
if ever, mentioned; the Pygs even less so. The Stats Guru has been busy with
the abacus getting a handle on the run up-to the deciders, and
notes that the Swans have won seven of their last eight minor
round matches against teams placed 9th, 5th, 7th, 11th, 8th,
10th,18th, and 16th at the time - so they haven't faced a top four side in
yonks and there's really no way to get a handle on finals
possibilities, but in amongst those wins, Sydney towelled up GWS
by 26 pts. If nothing else, it will be one of the weirdest
finals in eons, never mind that it should by rights be at the
Sydney Cricket Ground. Home ground advantage is long dead now,
and will probably never return.
SYDNEY: 6.4, 9.7, 13.7, 21.10 (136). Goals: Franklin 6, Papley 3, Heeney 3, Wicks 2,
McLean 2, Mills, Dawson, Gulden, Hickey, Rowbottom. GOLD COAST : 0.4, 3.8, 5.9, 6.13 (49). Goals: King 4, Corbett, Sexton. At Docklands Stadium. Crowd: 0.
There really are
fewer better places than Browne Parke, Rockhampton to bury once
and for all the Mighty Tiges hopes of making the finals after
playing sudden death for weeks now as they clung onto the
mythical "mathematical chance" of sneaking into the top eight.
Rocky, eh? With the NRL having been forced to flee to QLD under
the Corona protocols and in search of a crowd - any crowd - the
Tiges turned up at a ground described in its Wiki page as "the
home of rugby league football in Central Queensland since the
1890s". It's just a shame rugby league didn't come to
Queensland until 1908. So it's a ground with tickets on
itself, for start off. Be that as it may, on the
strength of the 50-20 debacle, they would have been eaten like
kippers for breakfast if they'd accidentally made the season
enders anyway.
So what went wrong in yet another winter of discontent as the poor Tiges blundered on, unable to make the Top Eight for the 10th consecutive season?? That's a long time between drinks for the hard-bitten supporter to not even have a whiff of the finals, let alone a Premiership. It was hardly the fault of Coach Mr Magoo. Madge just didn't have enough to work with, and the "greater than the sum of their parts" thing just never happened for him. It didn't help recruiting a new skipper in James Tamou who had a dreadful season, and is a self-admitted failure as a captain "there are things I have let slip for too long and I put that all on me". At least Tamou knows that he's first in line to take a good look at himself down in the Room Full of Mirrors on the Balmain Road, if not clean out the club's back door without so much as a sausage. A major league blunder they could never fix.
Daine Laurie is a
bright young talented full back who's set to go places. David
Noafaluma continues to bring vintage brute strength with skilful
creativity to the wing, but he turned up still pissed from the
night before at training one day recently and he put it down to
a lack of genuine motivation and everyone seemed sweet with
that; he got a slap on the wrist axing from the "leadership
group" - whatever that is - to which he is sure to have said
"you can have it". The Mighty Tiges have a very handy goal
kicking five-eighth in Adam Doueihi, who's taken over The Great
Robbie Farah's mantle as "The Best Leb in the Game", while the
pack is a perfectly serviceable unit without being brilliant,
but they're more mobile and robust than most with a ranking chief in
the Samoan mafia, the 115kg bulldozer known as Luciano
Leilua, leading the way - but that does not make 13
players to put out there on the park every goddamn week, Pando
or no Pando. You can't do too much with a serious shortage of
depth, not to mention talent, on the roster.
Die-hard Tiges supporters would have been quite happy if the Corona had just halted competitive sport altogether, and are now disappointed that'll never happen after Tokyo. Balmain ended up playing too many players trying to fix up the weak links in the chain and plug the holes in the dykes, but it never worked. The miserable crowd at Rocky was testament to the popularity of the match. Given that ScoMo is No.1 ticket holder at the Sharks, it's not that surprising.
The whole shebang is enough to drive the long suffering Tiges punter completely spare, but year after year we still come back for more punishment & insanity, even if all hope was lost in the wilds of Queensland after a decade in the doldrums. And there's still two more rounds to play in the regular season, so they didn't even get to have Mad Monday in the tropics and break out of the Corona bubble - yet. For the truly rusted-on, The Glory Days have well and truly gone away.
CRONULLA-SUTHERLAND SHARKS 50. Tries: Mulitalo (2), Metcalf (2), Kennedy (2),
Katoa (2), Wilton. Goals: Trindall (6).
WESTS TIGERS 20. Tries: Chee Kam, Maumalo, Taulau, Tuilagi. Goals: Doueihi (2).
At Browne Park, Rockhampton, Qld.
Crowd: 2,863.
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