Gus Gould on drugs

Diehards,

It’s always pleasing when your football team wins the first game of the new season.
At best it engenders the general wellbeing of hope springs eternal in the breast of the optimist, at worst it give the serial pessimist a vague sense that maybe this year they won’t be damned to the horrors of the bottom end of the premiership ladder come September
Failed to get out to the No. 3 home ground at Campbelltown, on the “wouldn’t go that far on my holidays” principle, and in any case found myself on a Monday night otherwise engaged doing a couple of things in Dad’s Shed, so had to climb up onto the roof and adjust the aerial to get a good FM reception, for the quite often bizarre MMM Monday night football call, after giving up on the ABC call from Canberra on AM666, on account of there mustn’t be much power going through that transmitter during tough times by Government decree.
Gus Gould – must be on drugs -- why else would he sing the Rooty Hill RSL theme song, badly, on the radio during a football call?
Otherwise inexplicable.
After being down by eight points at half time, it was noted that the Mighty Tiges scored three unanswered tries in the second half taking full advantage of a green team that had run out of puff in this early stage in the caper.
The end scorebox suggests defence needs some work, but there are going to be plenty of options in attack, you’d suspect, with the scarily huge Mr. T. on one wing, and the try scoring freak Lawrence on the other.
Did like Todd “The Refrigerator” Peyten on interview after the game on being asked about the decision to play Robbie Farah off the bench, to be injected into dummy half after half time, say it was “a bit of gamesmanship, a bit of smart thinking there” with no need to reference Super Coach Sheens, because everyone knew who he was talking about.
Farah by all accounts had a super game and was by far and away the most important of the off-season re-signings for mine.
All that first grade experience in a relatively short career [96 games], perfect physique for his role, and a large football brain, wouldn’t come particularly cheap, even when he is shockingly unsung when it comes to the NSW selectors.
But, that’s another whinge.
Not convinced by Marshall at half back, given he’s a natural outside centre, but SC Sheens must think people learn as they get older, and it’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks, given that Benji is but 24 years old, which is hard to believe, as it seems like he’s been playing forever, and has had a couple of shoulder reconstructions to boot.
But you can never knock what must have been a bargain re-signing, as he was on reduced match fees last year anyway.
The spotlight was put on Tim Moltzen as the full back [and he’s a five-eighth looking to recreate himself] replacing the Great Hoddo, and it appeared that he acquitted himself well enough.
Only needs to be steady with good hands in defence, as the go forward should look after itself.
Also noted that the Gareth Ellis kiddie was man-of-the match in some circles.
A shrewd signing; not many Poms have ever made it in Sydney first grade, but he has already pulled on a Great Britain jersey, and by all accounts has plenty of class about him.
As a footnote, The Great Johnny Skandalis has apparently had enough of the wastelands of northern England and returned to Sydney, and the old club, in some sort of coaching/mentoring/advisory role, although no one can say with any certainty what it is exactly that he does, as he picks up a small “legend’s” sinecure.
Perhaps he makes the cut lunches?

WESTS TIGERS 34. Tries: Tuiaki (2), Farah, Payten, Lawrence, Moltzen. Goals: Marshall (5).
CANBERRA RAIDERS 26. Tries: Carney (2), Purtell, Milne. Goals: Campese (5).
At Campbelltown Sports Ground.
Crowd 17,392.

disinterested bystanders

Crown Prosecutors,

It wouldn’t be a rugby league season without the whole shooting match being kicked off with a good ol’ fashioned rooting scandal, would it?

Did like the Manly position this morning, making a determination that it was sweet for Stewart to play, on the innocent until proven guilty principle, despite the fact that he is facing serious police charges; only to find the NRL this afternoon suspend the mad rooter, unilaterally, off its own bat, without a judiciary hearing, for four matches, no appeal, and then slapping a $100,000 fine on the club, payable in 30 days thank you very much, for allowing what was always designed as a massive pisssup for the sponsors to get completely out of hand.

There are independent witnesses to the mayhem.

Who would have thought the players would have refrained from getting absolutely shiit-faced when confronted with the full array of free mixed drinks and then some, while being told to go for it?

With various groupies, daughters of captain’s of industry, and sundry hangers on milling about, its only one step of logic with the assistance of the evidence of disinterested bystanders, for the cops to conclude its bleedin’ obvious to everyone involved that Stewart poled an unwilling youngster in some grubby northern beaches unit block stairwell last Friday night.

“Get yourself a lawyer, son, you’re gonna need a real good one”.

By the way, this Tigers team named here has first grade experience to burn, if nothing else.

Rocky Trimarchi was standing at a bus stop on the Balmain Road doing nothing in particular when he was picked up by the talent scout on the way through to the leagues club on the strength of his name alone.

Huge future trading on that one.

Wests Tigers V Canberra Raiders
Monday 16 March 2009 19:00 [AEDT] - Campbelltown Sports Stadium
Referees Tony Archer & Gerard Sutton
Sideline Officials: Russell Turner & Steve Carrall
Video Referee: Chris Ward

TIGERS: 1. Tim Moltzen 2. Taniela Tuiaki 3. Dean Collis 4. Chris Lawrence 5. Beau Ryan 6. John Morris 7. Benji Marshall 8. Bryce Gibbs 9. Robbie Farah 10. Keith Galloway 11. Gareth Ellis 12. Chris Heighington 13. Dene Halatau
Interchange: 14. Rhys Hanbury 15. Rocky Trimarchi 16. Todd Payten 17. Daine Laurie; Reserves: 18. Corey Payne
RAIDERS: 1. David Milne 2. Phil Graham 3. Adrian Purtell 4. Joel Monaghan 5. Justin Carney 6. Terry Campese 7. Marc Herbert 8. David Shillington 9. Glen Buttriss 10. Josh Miller 11. Glen Turner 12. Bronson Harrison 13. Alan Tongue (c)
Interchange: 14. Stuart Flanagan 15. Trevor Thurling 16. Joe Picker 17. Nigel Plum; Reserves: 18. Brett Kelly

boerewors and sosaties

Tourists,

Pleasing to see the Australians file off the plane at Jo’burg and head straight for the nets, leaving The Captain to fondle The Ridiculous Mace for the camera’s and bleat the usual platitudes for the press.
The Vice Captain would have immediately retired to his sick bed to nurse his sore Social Finger and employ a highly-skilled slightly-built four-and-a-half foot female therapist to walk up and down on his worrying recurrence of Shagger’s Back.
Best cure known to man.
At least the administrators have had the decency and sense to tell the WAG’s to stay at home, at least for the duration of the first test, as there’s a bit of serious business on here.
Pup has always been a player who has been plagued by niggles, but battled on through the pain with a smile on his face, but it’s a real concern that now at the age of 27, those niggles are getting to a stage where they prevent him from playing from time to time.
Nothing worse than a fragile Captain, who is forced to take regular leave of command.
It must have the medico’s scratching their heads.
Trust the Seth Efreakens to pull the first swifty of the caper by naming a 4th XI for the only tour match, on the grounds that the blokes who would have regularly made the 2nd XI are busy with domestic Twenty20 cricket over the weekend and “can’t be spared”.
While the game was never going to amount to much more than centre wicket practice, the mind games are already being played.
The PJ Hughes kiddie, for example, could come out and stroll to a century against a sub-standard attack in his first representative appearance for Straya, and then think he is the best thing since bottled scotch.
The Kat has promised to take young Phil under his wing and guide him through the tour, extolling the virtues of dedication, application, and controlled violence, [“now, son, if you ever feel the need to throttle the Vice Captain, for heaven’s sake, just make sure you do it gently”], but it will be no easy task with a young fella who knows he’s shiit hot and will have difficulty keeping his big head small enough to fit through the dressing room door, let alone a bloke who has never experienced one of cricket’s swift and spectacular falls from grace.
Just ask Dave Warner, who’s yet to do anything for Straya, and suddenly finds himself back in club cricket, after probably unwittingly condemning himself with the willing complicity of the selectors to stereotype, and seriously jeopardizing his chances of ever playing first class cricket into the bargain
[Joisus! NSW even resorted to opening with Greg “Snail” Mail in the recent Shield match against Victoria, when he couldn’t score a run in recent district cricket, and has proven himself over the years to be a spectacularly consistent failure at the first class level].
At least Hughes might get some appreciation first up of why Seth Efreaken crowds are known world-wide for their warm heartedness, kindly spirit, and magnanimous appreciation of the game.
The local punters will no doubt remind the Strayans that the only Kaffir [and we are not talking about limes here] they have ever picked in living memory is not only dropped, but suspended indefinitely, on account of mental instability, and an over fondness for the drink.
It will be interesting to see how MJ Clarke gets on as a leader of men, given the undoubted tensions in the team, and his now unabashed and public hankering to pinch Punter’s job.
The Veldt is a dangerous place, where seemingly sane men can go completely mad overnight; cracked by the mental torture of quick turn around test cricket, and/or sent troppo with a whiff of the braii up their nostrils, and a skinful of Castle Lager under their belts.
The proof of course, will be in the pudding, or in this case in the boerewors and the soasties.

thinking hats

Fruit pickers,

Noted that the Chairman and the Three Wise Men put their thinking hats on today to pick a team for the Veldt.
Fuehrer Hilditch, no doubt, would have got out a blank team sheet and a pencil and scratched MJ CLARKE (NSW) at the top of the page.
First picked.
Big Merv, Boonie, and the Mystery Man would’ve looked on and nodded; then he wrote down the name RT PONTING (TAS).
Never mind allocating the (c) and (v-c) assignations, that’s up to The Board anyway.
At that moment the CA Tea Lady knocked on the door and wheeled in her trolley set with a delicious Devonshire Tea, so while the selectors were helping themselves, they asked her to cut a few names out of the papers and drop them into a Baggy Green that just happened to be lying around the room.
Out came the names one by one, and phrases like “too young”, “too old”, “too crippled”, “too boozed and mentally unstable” were bandied about, but occasionally The Chairman would mutter “he’ll do”, and voila!, there you have it, a 14 man squad to be led like so many lambs to the slaughter.
And yet, as at 10PM Wednesday, there appears to be no announcement chattering to life on the old bush telegraph in the corner of the loungeroom.
You could only think there might be a touch of tooing and froing over ports about whether to break their own too old/too young policy and pick McGain at 36 and Hughes at 20 as potential debutants.
Or perhaps they are arguing over brandy and cigars about the fact that there hasn’t been a half-way decent Australian all-rounder since Keith Miller.

It’s been a particularly busy couple of weeks for Pup.
First he injures his Social Finger in a late night mishap and has to miss a couple of one-day games because the batting hand’s buggered, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as there were a few wedding arrangements that had to be signed off with the agents, then he has to come back earlier than expected on account of how woefully the team is traveling, then has to take over the Captaincy after Punter was ruled out on account of the hitherto unusual injury of “too tired”.
Then, unbeknown to him, CA had to send out an SOS call to the jewelers to get a second Alan Border Medal minted so they didn’t have to cut the one they had in half.
It appears that Pup and Punter now have two AB gongs each in the Trophy Cabinet.
The bookmakers ruled a line through the book and stopped taking bets on Test Player of Year a long, long time ago.
All the while he’s been mulling over whether or not he should put himself on the chopping block at the Indian Premier League meat market in Goa at the reserve price of $US1,000,000.
Not that he needs the cash - the wedding photo’s will be worth that much in No Idea.
Probably a bit peeved that he is rated by the auctioneers as being worth $US350,000 less than K.Pietersen.
But, if the truth be known, it’s most likely that he wants to save himself from the embarrassment of not attracting any bids at that price, in these troubled times, given that he has always hoisted his petard as a test match player, who happens to also have a pretty handy 40 odd average in the one-day caper, but has generally been rubbish in the handful of Twenty20 games that he’s played.
Plus the IPL promoters are reported to be getting cold feet about the Australians who are likely to go on the Ashes tour, given that they won’t be available for the whole comp and will have their minds elsewhere.
Give it a wide berth, son.
It’s beneath you, and, let’s face it, there’s no future in it.

The New Messiah

Adorationists,

There was some animated talk mid-week among the wise men and fools scattered along the front bar at The Local about whether MJ Clarke’s effort in Sydney was his best test match hundred.
The Old Sage in the corner lifted his brandy and soda to his lips, nodded, and simply said “probably”.
Then someone piped up with “what about that hundred he scored in the West Indies – you know the one – first game back after he’d been late getting to the tour on account of his missus’ old man had shuffled off the mortal coil and he was suffering a recurrence of Shagger’s Back? Problem with it was - no one saw it – it was in the middle of the night here, and there was no one in the ground – just The Man and His Dog, a few dozen ground staff and a handful of journo’s -- and it took the best part of two days before they got around to printing an account of it in the papers. You remember.”
There were a few furrowed brows, other big scores were considered, and then most agreed that your maiden test match hundred on home soil is by definition, always going to count as your best, no matter how many more you make.
Of course, there was no disagreement that it was a superlative match winning knock.
And there is no doubting it’s the kiddie’s best domestic summer by the length of the street, and he could, at a pinch, rightfully lay claim to the title The New Messiah; he’s been called on to save that many people, that many times.
His 98 in Brisbane certainly saved Australia from ignominious defeat by the SheepShaggers, and they would have gone down much more heavily against the RhinoRooters and probably lost the series three-zip, if it wasn’t for him.
His cover driving and off cutting is getting more and more reminiscent of The Great KD Walters by the day, and some coaches have obviously been to work on his leg side play.
He seems to have, by and large, solved his LBW problem, and is a much better thinker on his feet when it comes to game situation while at the crease.
A quick fiddle on the abacus down in the games room reveals that Pup scored exactly 600 test match runs over the summer which would have almost certainly topped the aggregates, at an average of 75.00, which must have topped the averages too.
His overall average in 40+ test matches is now edging up to very close to 50.
A fine effort for a bloke who was dropped mid-way through that lot, and has batted almost his entire test career at No. 5
The proof of the pudding, of course, will come when he gets to Africa; once the aroma of the braai gets into his nostrils, and the lure of the iced mixed drinks and impossibly beautiful women hanging around in bars gets to him [as it did on his last visit to the Veldt], who knows what will happen.
At least he won’t have the problem of being tasked with breaking up fights that Roy gets himself involved in, not this time around.
That way, he might even have time, if he has room, for another tatt.

“does that mean they’ve all got headaches?”

Fellow Shatteredees,

Who’d be an Australian cricket selector at the moment, for love or money?
Not when you the team you picked has just been out played, out captained, and out coached.
To be done by nine wickets when you were odds on at the end of day two against a mob of Yarpies does tend to disappoint.
It’s a funny game
Someone was muttering under his breath something to do with the first time Straya had lost a test series at home in 16 or 17 years or something or another.
AMJ Hilditch?
What’s he ever done?
DC Boon and MG Hughes?
No one’s denying their deserved place in the pantheon of the greats – but how does that qualify them?
And then there’s the faceless man, who you would hope, acts as the obligatory fly in the ointment?
When they arrive in Sydney the “leadership group” would probably benefit from an afternoon in The Room Full of Mirrors down on the Balmain Rd [it’s free – the footballers are in Hawaii].
Pup and Punter could hop into the sauna afterwards and they might discuss their injudicious second innings shots that didn’t even bother to trouble the umpire to put his finger up, as the whole ground knew.
It looked like both of them were using one of those curved sticks favoured by Irish hurling players.
And just when the test match was there to be saved for a second time.
To dolly one to the field in test cricket is a cardinal sin, only very slightly better, but not by much, than the original sin of running yourself out.
As a good mate remarked today when he heard of the result in Melbourne “Sydney looks like a good place for one or two to debut, but I’m damned if I know who.”
Noted from the television graphic at the office after the dénouement that IM Chappell had somebody called Marcus North somewhere in his batting order.
Marcus Who?
KJ O’Keeffe is keen on opening with PJ Hughes [NSW] on a horses for courses basis, but neglects to factor in the fact that the kiddie has only been playing first class cricket for five minutes.
There’s even been talk of playing both spinners on a track, which from my first hand observations this summer, will play like a four to six lane highway over the five days,
You’d only do that if you found that SK Warne and SCG MacGill weren’t overly busy in the New Year.
Speaking of blokes who have had the decency and sense to retire just after they had achieved the peak of their powers, there must be one or two jokers over the age of 30who are currently in the team, who might just take themselves to wondering in the light of what’s happened, whether they could have played on too long.
Maybe they should’ve followed the lead of DR Martyn and JL Langer, who are both decent and sensible men; just walk away from the caper and take your chances.
Who’s to say?
The young folk might have a few thoughts about it.
When news broke that B Lee had something wrong with his foot and that according to the news it had given the selectors a headache, the Good Lady Wife remarked “does that mean they’ve all got headaches?”
Enough said.

con artists

Frustratees,

The Royal Commissioners, who turned up in Melbourne to conduct the semi-public inquiry into the Pathetic Performance at Perth, would no doubt have had their minds concentrated by the proceedings on day three at the MCG with Straya’s inability to take two tail end wickets in a day.
This, after the Captain had scored a ton to lead from the front, and the Vice Captain was asked to save the test match and came good with a well made 80 odd not out.
An innings of two sensible halves by MJ Clarke, as he plunged the pitchfork into the deck just out in front of the popping crease on day one, only to help score at a run a minute on day two.
The rapidly developing cricket brain coming into play.
Everyone knew the wrong team had been picked by the selectors from the off.
Clueless.
Perhaps the Royal Commissioners should just sweep away the Chairman and the Three Wise Men in one fell swoop, and be done with it.
From now on, it’s me and you who pick the team, OK?
Nothing like it when yr bowling attack goes completely haywire.
I’m reluctant to bring my 84 year old mother into this, but she said to me on the phone “we are completely buggered aren’t we?” after watching the thing on the television all day as it went “on, and on, and on, and on….”
There’s been talk of turning up at the ground on the Monday of the Sydney test match.
But even the most rudimentary cost analysis reveals that good seats at the test cricket cost just about as much as good grandstand tickets to the Formula One in Melbun.
WHAT THE??!!
How much does it cost to pay two cricket teams to play?
Astonishing.
At least at Albert Park the beer is guaranteed full strength [and I’d imagine that the top shelf will be available in the two “exclusive” bars that I’ve paid to have access to] and even in general admission at the race track you can get things like savoury pancakes or a bratwurst on a bun with German mustard and caramelized onions to keep you going, and five dollar beers, all at a reasonable price for a main event.
After the last Ashes bonanza, the jokers at Cricket Australia must be the biggest con artists going around.
Give me five bucks in to ICC WWC at Newcastle No.1 Ground in early March, any day of the week.
Pup must be hoping that he’s not required to make much more of a contribution to the test match, while going to sleep smiling, and dreaming about plotting the coup d'état to take the Captaincy off Cap’n’Cockhead just in time for the Ashes tour.
Stranger things have happened.