Speculators,
What ever happened to the good ol' days?
Like when the cricket went right through to the end of March [well, thanking the Good Lord Joisus, first class cricket still does] and the football season always started on the Anzac Day long weekend?
Now you don't even have time to fart between seasons.
Barely a day or two into Autumn and the NRL season starts this weekend, while the AFL have waited for a very early Easter.
Little wonder rugby league players in particular complain of being overworked: an impossibly long season - the Grand Final is the first Sunday in October (!) - an inappropriate bye system that suits no-one, and five mid-week representative games scheduled for bang smack in the middle of the season. [A problem the AFL doesn't have, with the demise of the BIG V a long time ago now].
As a result, by mid-season, half the players are wounded and in the Sick Bay for extended stays.
Sensible arrangements of yore done away with with the stroke of a pen for no good reason [except to make more money for the rich].
Was horrified that even though there were only three games scheduled there this year, and Swans announced they were abandoning Stadium Australia [aka ANZ Stadium aka the Olympic Stadium aka Cathy Freeman Stadium] for good, and will be playing all their home games at the SCG.
Why leave an obviously winning ground?
The Stats Guru pointed out they are way in front in the win/loss ratio at the ground [32/22], especially in finals, where the Swans have won eight and lost two.
At least he says there's some welcome good news - Barry Hall's all time record for most goals kicked at the ground [87] will now live on in infamy, forever.
It's because the club has "listened to the fans", apparently.
The fans, who of course are very strange Eastern Suburbs types who can afford with ease the most expensive seats, have told the club "anyone who lives west of Paddington can go fuck themselves, and isn't there some club called the Pygmies out there somewhere in Sydney's armpit, for them, anyway?
It's difficult to park your Lamborghini or Maserati in the Olympic precinct, when, if you have the right cash, you can park more or less right outside the front gate at the SCG.
What riles me most is that no consideration whatsoever was given to the disabled punter, like me, who would just love to pop along to a few games a season.
Cathy Freeman Stadium is as perfect as the day it was built - what other ground in the world can you walk or hobble around the entire circumference of, both inside and out, without encountering a single step?
The place is bristling with lifts, and any seat in the ground is a short flight of stairs up or down from there, bars along every second or third aisle, and with the supermarket-style check out, the beer queues are never long even in a packed ground...and the booze is actually cold...you need to slip the gloves on to hold the cup on a mid-winter's day sometimes.
Joisus! When the children were young, you could even easily steal pies and stuff your overcoat pockets with them and no-one was any the wiser, until they, sadly, did the sums one day, and closed that loophole.
One of the few places where everything was thought of from the off to stand the test of time - it still looks brand new after 16 years - with every kind of consideration putting the customer at front and centre.
In stark contrast, the SCG is a higgeldy-piggeldy shit-hole of a place for the crippled.
Trip hazards eveywhere you look, mighty treks to your seat, and you'd be lucky to find a bar for some of that refreshing Lukewarm Stadium Beer, let alone one that isn't overcrowded.
In the Brewongle Stand, there is but one lift - the service lift.
Clearly remember the year after Supercoach Roos retired from coaching the Swans, being in the service lift one day on my stick, with a bloke in a wheelchair, and a charming young sub-continental chap carring a tray of canapes, when Roosey walks in.
Paul obviously had no idea where he was sitting and was struggling with the lift buttons.
Poking at them and speaking to no-one in particular...he said "level 7, mmm. Club SCG, eh? Mmmm. What exactly is Club SCG? Is that, like, The Members?"
To which the Indian gentleman head-bobbled and said "oh, no sir! The Members is over there, sir. Club SCG is much better than The Members".
This, from a bloke who'd coached the club for the best part of a decade, and had no idea where anything was in the stands.
"Spiritual Home", my arse.
You have to play at a ground for 60+ years before it becomes yr spiritual home.
The previously derelict and now turned into a suburban soccer ground, Lakeside Oval at Albert Park, is the Swan's aka South Melbourne's Spiritual Home.
They played there for more than a century.
How easily people forget.
And as my poor poor friend, the Country Member, with a season ticket, remarked, for the first time this year, the previously free public transport from Central Railway to the SCG is no longer included in the price of the ticket.
Sidelined and ripped off, once again.
At least the Swans, with Buddy back from the ward and firing, and the team chock full of talented yoof and experience, with a little faith, hope, and [goddamit] charity they might even have half a chance of winning the Premership.
You can imagine my mortification on opening the 40 page (!) magazine previewing the rugby league season that fell out of the Saturday Daily Terror to find that not one of the 18 so-called "experts" had tipped the Mighty Balmain Tigers to make the Top 8, and three of them had tipped the Tiges to take the Wooden Spoon.
They better not go that bad or they will, again, be a very hard team to follow.
But in the cold light of day, Balmain has no viable leagues club [er, actually, no leagues club at all] so no viable means of support and no money to fund player recruitment which is where the on-field power lies in this caper, a dysfunctional board, a poisonous relationship beween Coach Squeak Taylor and the Best Leb In The Game, who'd rather deck each other than look at each other, let alone speak, [you won't win that one Squeak] and they carry a huge South Sea Islander winger who's built like a brick shithouse and can run like a bat out of hell, but goes to the worst barber shop in all of Sydney; they may well be right, and they could go that bad.
But it's all "coulds", "mights", "ifs" and "buts".
The fortunes of football teams at the start of the season is mere speculation at best, most often scurrilous, and more often just plain wrong.
Joy, despair, unfettered delight and abject disappointment come later.
So, as The Philosopher would say, why do what most people do, and spend most of your life worrying about things that never happen?
