the Curse of the Minor Premiership

Eternal Optimists,

So, the Swans go top.
Much to the chagrin of the Mexican papers who grudingly put it on the back page in small print, while it barely raised a ripple in the Sydney fishwraps.
Go figure.
Everyone's confused in a mad, mad world.
Sydney win the Melbourne Strayan Rules minor premiership, while Melbourne win the Sydney rugby league minor premiership.
Go figure.
Back in the day when Super Coach Sheens was in charge of the Mighty Tiges in the rugby league, everyone remembers he kept a Coach's Ledger in the Club Secretary's office with one column headed "We'll take our wins", and the other "We'll learn from our losses".
He didn't really care how many you won, it was all about the ones you didn't.
So it pays to have a quick lookie at Sydney's five losses this season.
1. Rd4. Adelaide. 10 points. Robbed by partisan local umpires. A blip on the early season radar.
2. Rd8. Richmond. 1 point. A 40 second brain-fade allowed Richmond to kick a goal after the final siren. The little fish that got away - big time.
3. Rd12. Greater Western Sydney. 42 points. Beaten fair and square by the better side on the day. Complacency to blame. Swans only thrashing of the year. Only AFL game, most unfortunately, graced with my presence all season.
4. Rd15. Western Bulldogs. 4 points. The curse of the bye. Underdone. Super Coach Horse charged with telecommunications vandalism, after destroying the dial-up telephone in the coach's box in a fit of rage. First loss at home.
5. Rd17. Hawthorn. 5 points. A low-scoring ding-dong battle all day. Once again done in by a moment of madness just as in Rd8. Second loss at home.
On that record, they could have gone through the season unbeaten, if they'd really put their minds to it.
SC Horse is right onto it - Swans never lost consecutive games all year - and he would have been driven crazy by the last two beatings as he's a firm believer in the vital importance of winning at home.
Sydney has possibly, only possibly - how can you compare era's? - a better side than the ones that took the flag in 2005 and 2012.
Bloody good footballers, all of 'em.
You can't go top with any passengers on board.
And SC Horse was content to play around with the starting 18 all season until he thought he got it right.
Take Sam Reid, after a bad injury last year, played almost all of this year in the reserves - couldn't get a game under the big top when he'd get a game in any other team - just ask Keiran Jack's brother, Brandon - can't get a game either.
Swans have a genuine marquee player up front, a mid-field to die for, and a defence outfit full of hard nuts expert in building concrete walls.
Talls to burn, three out of four rookies all found a regular place in the side ['Saw' Mills won the Ron Evans Medal for the best rookie of the year in the AFL], and second year players like Heeney - well he plays with a white sea anenome perched atop his head - so he must be pretty good to be able to do that, and the Hannebery Kiddie, now incredibly in his eighth year with 150+ senior games under his belt, is only nearing the peak of his powers.
Mark my words, one day that bloke will win the Chas Browlow Trophy.
JP Kennedy appears to have been given a free rein by SC Horse "just play where you like, son, do what you think is appropriate" and he gets a thousand possessions per game, week in, week out.
The ultimate "loose man everywhere".
And talk about playing about with the ruck all season until Naismith - the tallest man to ever play for the Swans at 6 foot 9 - popped his head up late in the caper, after Sinclair did himself a mischief after Tipsy also did the same, and made it a new game in the hit outs.
Seeing him up against Mummy in the First Qualifying Final will be worth the price of the $35 walk-up pay-on-the day tickets to Cathy Freeman Stadium alone.
It's a home final for the Swans, and yet neither side has played at Cathy's Place all season.
Go figure.
Apart from assembling a top notch footy side, SC Horse [who is worry personified] is sensible enough to know that finals football is a different bottle of mussels altogether, compared to the regular season, and the only course of action open to him is to try to get the saloon passage through to the Grand Final, and you have to be very brutal to do that.
Finals football is as close to ugly all-out conflict as you can get, short of a fully-armed gun-fight.
And on a stray, but related, topic - the end-of-season bye was pure marketing genius.
If you are going into the pointy end of a war, to its chaotic, climactic conclusion, you'd want to go in battle-hard, because if you don't, you won't survive.
Simple.
Instead, football players and other ordinary men, and a lot of women too, were having the first and only Father's Day BBQ of the year on the only weekend when there was no AFL being played, at all, anywhere, all season.
Massive fail.
Go figure.
As my correspondent in the Colonies remarked "legions of men all over the country re-discover their backyards".
One for the text books in the course "How Not To Do It" in Marketing 101.
Of course the PR boffins will try to whip up some kind of cross-town rivalry shit for the derby final, which will fail...as did the miserable "Battle of the Bridge" promotion.
Sydney is not a "cross-town" city; it's more like six distinct cities, all quite different from each other, but in very close proximity, containing not much less than a million people each.
The rugby league has a team for each one, and then some, and tribal loyalty runs very deep here at a local suburban level.
But cross-town rivalry?
Anyone in the strange Eastern Suburbs, where a vast portion of the Swans fandom resides, would never dream of going to Greater Western Sydney [whatever that is - it's actually a hastily cobbled together moniker for another football team that means nothing to anyone - the place doesn't actually exist] and they wouldn't know how to get there even if the knew what and where it was.
Everything hinges on the No.1 showman, for mine, when it comes down to business time.
Buddy knows all too well now about redemption.
There is also fear to be expunged and instill in others, and revenge, where necessary, to be taken, cold.
That's why you would never want to meet Lance Franklin in a dark alley, and that's why the Swans never forgot losing by a bloody point to Richmond, and kicked a million goals on them in the very last round just to prove a point.
Didn't have to.
Just did.
Still, it was so close at the top, it was a shame SC Horse never really had the option to play ducks and drakes and do a bit of sandbagging to finish second, which under the Hare-Clarke-McIntrye-Duckworth-Lewis finals system used by the AFL, is the ideal place to be, because you never play the minor premiers until the Grand Final.
Over the years the Stats Guru has come to the firm conclusion that the minor premiership, on average, is a curse.
Just ask the Swans team that went 'round in 2014; we all know, and would prefer to forget forever, what happened in that year's Grand Final.
And it goes without saying, that is the only thing that counts.
That One Day In September.
Which now - in a world hurtling ever increasingly forward at a frightening pace - has become 1 October.

Meantime...over at the rugby league...the Mighty Tiges went to the bitter end, Round 24, to wait - up against insurmountable odds - until there were finally fully cooked for the year.
That's after an allegedly "gallant" comeback late in the season, after Robbie "The Best Leb in the Game' Farah was dropped to reserve grade, never to come back.
The great man was shoved out the back door without so much as a sausage to pay for promising youngsters inside the salary cap.
Club loyalty, it seems, is not worth a brass razoo.
In the end the Club Secretary has to be pragmatic and admit it's really all about the money.
Balmain again finished a disappointing ninth [they only had to win the last game to go 8th], going out with an awful 10-52 thrashing at the hands of Canberra at the Spiritual Home.
Dudded by a single Premiership point.
No-one listens to me, but Coach "Squeak" Taylor must go.
Must be sacked.
Bucks stops here, Jason.
Ninth [again] is simply not acceptable.
As if apparantly destroying Robbie Farah's career - just like Benji Marshall's career was destroyed, yet he plays on as a shadow of his former self someplace else because he needs the money - was not enough.
There should be more blame game going on at board level, for mine.
But there is hope for long suffering Tiges fans...if they can keep their young halves in Brooks and Moses out of the greedy clutches of shonky Silvertails, afford to pay the best full back in world, The Tedesco Kiddie, to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed, and remain overstuffed with very fast over 20 yards oversized refrigerators on the wings, all they need are some quality genuine article forwards.
But, have they got the cash to buy a new pack, with Chris "The Try-Scoring Freak" Lawrence and that quintessential journeyman [everyone forgives him for being a Kiwi], Dene Halatau - the very last survivor of the glory days, having played for Balmain in the '05 Grand Final, the last one that they won - both being made Life Members of The Club upon their graceful retirements?
Who knows.
And then there's the conundrum of a new coach.
They looked a million dollars on paper this season, but the investment just didn't pay dividends.
Oh well.
Shit happens.
"There's always next year".