Footy's Back...is it?

There’s a weird vibe around town at the moment. People are carrying on saying that footy’s back, The Age and the Herald-Sun are both filling out with pages and pages of arcane footyesque speculation (which team has the most ‘recycled’ players on their list, why it’s time North must deliver, why we should have a night Grand Final, Essendon players suffering from low morale - that’s morale, not morals -  etc ), the television is back showing revelatory footage of footballers handballing to each other at training and coaches getting in and out of cars, and ASADA’s investigation into Essendon moves into its 13th month – the Nuremberg trials, by comparison, ran for just over 10 months, from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. Of course at Nuremberg they were only looking into the crimes of the Third Reich, not the Hird Reich, but if the timeline of the investigation is any indication, ASADA must believe Essendon’s crimes to be even more heinous than the Nazis. I doubt even Dermie wouldn’t go that far.

But if footy’s back, I don’t see it. Sure there are matches for premiership points, sure Caroline Wilson is already banging on about sacking coaches, or at least the boss of the Coaches Association, Danny Frawley, even Andrew Bolt is criticising Adam Goodes, but until I see the boys in brown and gold vertical stripes take the field, which due to an elongated round one spread over nine days, is not until next Saturday, I remain unconvinced.

There’s a well-known philosophical thought experiment that poses the question: “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” This question seeks to test the limits of perception and reality, and I would apply the same test to the AFL: if there’s footy’s on, but no Hawthorn to watch, can it really be said to have started?

Footy, as I see it, starts next week when Hawthorn unfurls the premiership flag at Aurora and then goes out to defend its title.

Hawthorn – soooo last year

You would think, wouldn’t you, that after winning the 2013 premiership, the Hawks would be reasonably well-fancied to win the 2014 premiership? After all, we were hot flag favourites in 2012 and 2013 without having won the previous year’s premierships in 2011 and 2012 respectively. So after a 2013 in which we won 22 of 25 games, overcame our long-time nemesis Geelong, easily defeated the other fancied teams Sydney three times and Fremantle twice, came up against just one team we failed to defeat (Richmond, bizarrely enough), then surely 2014 is shaping as yet another year of high expectations and flag favouritism. But no! It seems that without any intervening matches, unless you count our three practice matches that we’ve won by an average of 100+ points, most commentators are picking Hawthorn to finish somewhere between fourth and sixth, well behind our supposed rivals.

The commentators have picked up where they left off in Grand Final week, and keep banging on about Fremantle – the team who on a bright, sunny day with no breeze managed just 1.6 to half-time in the 2013 Grand Final. I knew we had the flag won at half-time because I thought Fremantle would be too embarrassed to come back out for the second half. But their apparent unwillingness to score doesn’t seem to put off any of the experts. And don’t let their relative goal spree against Collingwood fool you – I could have snuck two or three past the Pies defence on Friday night.

Sydney seems to be the other anointed team, on the basis that they weren’t too bad last year, and now they’ve added Franklin. It’s an okay theory on paper, but it doesn’t take into account the Hawthorn curse – that players who leave are never the same again: Mark Williams, Jonathan Hay, Clinton Young, Campbell Brown just to name a few. It seems that when you take off the brown and gold, you take away some of your ability as well. No surprises there. It also doesn’t take into account that they lost their round one match to GWS.

Writing in the Herald-Sun on 15 March, Dermott Brereton picks Hawthorn to finish outside the top 4 on the basis that our midfield is ageing and we’re likely to suffer all manner of injuries. On the question of injuries, does he know something we don’t? Is it a kind of veiled threat? He writes as if he’s aware of a plague about to sweep through the club.

On the issue of age, I presume that Hawthorn players age at more or less the same rate as players from other clubs, unless they suffer from some sort of HGPS progeria syndrome – or ageing disease. Perhaps he’s just trying to revive the ‘too old, too slow’ tag as a form of reverse psychology to spur on the players. Because it’s not as if Sydney and Freo are in the flush of youth.  Some of their players are so old they were around last time beards were in fashion.

Just on Buddy’s beard, what is going on there? Is he just trying to fit in with his hirsute team mates? Is the cost of living so high in Sydney that no one can afford razors, even on $10 million over nine years? I mean really, at Hawthorn he was a handsome heart throb with dashing good looks, whereas now he looks like someone who’d be stopped for questioning if he tried to get through customs in LAX.

Hawthorn v Melbourne practice match, or why rugby is crap

If, as the experts predict, Hawthorn is not really a premiership threat for 2014, then you wonder how new Demons coach Paul Roos viewed the Hawks’ demolition of Melbourne in the most recent practice match. The final score of 21.16.142 to 4.8.32 suggests the Hawks haven’t lost a lot of their touch.

There’s no real point covering this match – Roughead kicked six and Stratton injured his hamstring, but the only other talking point was Josh Gibson kicking two goals in quick succession. They were good goals too – and wearing the number 6, they had a touch of the Gladys Moncrieff about them.

The only other notable aspect to this match was that nearly 10,000 people turned up to watch – for a practice match!  This in the same week the NRL HQ posited its usual ridiculous prediction that rugby league would overtake the AFL as Australia’s number one footy code, even thought Round one of the NRL drew an average attendance of less than 16,000 people per game. Attendances like that barely warrant putting the game on, let alone declaring imminent domination.

Besides, rugby league won’t overtake the AFL as the number one footy code for one very simple reason – it’s a shit game. It is after all a game in which you move forward by going backwards, so there’s a refutation of logic right there. It’s a game where the only skill is throwing and catching, two aptitudes most people master by about the age of six. It is always amusing to see footage from training of big burly blokes practicing throwing the ball to each other– is it really something you need to practice? Most tellingly, it’s a game where you score by falling over.

Rugby Union is a better game, but it’s still rugby. Its proponents would have us believe that it is a superior sport because it has international reach. But really, any sport in which New Zealand and Wales are the leading powerhouses can hardly be said to be the global game. And if it really is the game they play in heaven, then it simply reinforces preconceptions that heaven is a boring place to be.

The CEO is dead…long live the CEO

AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou has announced that he will resign at the end of the 2014 season. Naturally enough talk has immediately turned to speculation about his successor.

There are some obvious candidates: Gillon McLachlan, Demetriou’s current 2IC, seems to be the early favourite. He is popular in media circles, a jibe that could never be levelled at Demetriou, and with his brother Hamish embedded with host broadcaster Channel 7, pretty much guarantees positive coverage of AFL stories, not unlike state run television in Russia or North Korea. If it is anything like North Korea, however, Hamish would be wise to cultivate a better relationship with Gillon than some of Kim Jung-un’s relatives enjoy with their Supreme Leader. Certainly there will be perceptions of a conflict of interest when the next broadcast rights deal is negotiated, but that is unavoidable anyway; the AFL would be in danger of crumbling into nothing if you were to dismantle every strata of conflict of interest that exists between the AFL, the media and the separate clubs. That’s in no one’s interest.

Of course you can’t use the phrase ‘conflict of interest’ without then citing the name Eddie McGuire, especially if you’re Caroline Wilson. Fairly or unfairly, Eddie is synonymous with conflict of interest, or just Collingwood, and that’s enough to turn everyone off and scupper any ambitions he may harbour of being El Supremo.

Jeff Kennett is another name that is automatically thrown into the ring when any leadership position becomes vacant. Of course it’s usually Jeff tossing the millinery creation, so no one takes much notice. If nothing else he’d make things interesting.

But I feel the AFL needs to look beyond its own to fill this position, and as luck would have it, there are some excellent candidates who have become available in recent months: candidates with worldly experience beyond the small and parochial world of football: candidates who have consorted in the corridors of influence and dabbled in the cut and thrust of global politics. Mary Wooldridge is one such person: having lost Liberal pre-selection for the seat of Doncaster or Kew, or whatever leafy conservative protectorate she resides in, Mary could bring some Spring Street cache to the role. And if Geoff Shaw doesn’t retain the seat of Frankston at the next election, well, perhaps he could bring some of his own Demetriouesque style of debate to proceedings.

Of course, if we’re talking deposed politicians, who is more qualified than ex-lawyer and indeed, ex-PM, Julia Gillard. At least she follows football. Her choice of the Western Bulldogs may seem misguided, and as good a reason as any to have deposed her from The Lodge in the first place, but she could use her position to grant the Scraggers some special treatment. Just on that, if the Sydney Swans and GWS have a higher salary cap commensurate with the higher cost of living in Sydney, based as it is on spiralling real estate prices and the cost of soy-lattes, doesn’t it follow that teams like the Western Bulldogs and Port Adelaide should have a reduced salary cap to match the plummeting real estate of Footscray and Alberton?

Being a modern, thrusting organisation with global reach, the AFL might do well to cast its focus internationally. Exiled Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych doesn’t have much to do at the moment and like Demetriou, he has the ability to create division and stir discontent. I question his ability to maintain authority if Crimea gets a team in the AFL, but otherwise he could be the man for the job. On the other hand, you have to wonder about life in Ukraine if given the choice, a large proportion of its people would rather be ruled by Russia.

‘Travoltify’ the Brownlow 

Another man who should be considered for the role is John Travolta. I think we all agree that one of the most important roles the CEO undertakes is to read the votes on Brownlow night. No job interview for the new CEO should conclude until the candidate has intoned the words, “Gold Coast. G.Ablett. Three votes” or “Collingwood. S Prestagiacomo one vote” (well, as if he’d ever warrant more than that). This is where Travolta will have a natural advantage, given his recently demonstrated facility for names.

During the Academy Awards John Travolta was introducing the singer who was set to perform the nominated song from the movie, Frozen.  His preamble was going well, but then he introduced Idina Menzel as Adele Dazeem. The best part is he incorporated the caveat ‘the one and only’ into his preamble, when in fact she is neither. It’s not often that a complete nobody performs at the Oscars, but on this occasion it happened, quite literally, because Adele Dazeem didn’t exist until John Travolta invented her.

So if he can’t get the name Idina Menzel correct, what would he do with the names of Hawthorn’s  Brownlow fancies?

Well lucky there’s an app to help us out. Slate.com has an app where you can ‘Travoltify’ your name. You type your name into the field, and the system works out how John Travolta would say it should he ever have occasion to be introducing you at the Academy Awards.

For example, Alastair Clarkson becomes Abigail Crawzford; Luke Hodge is Lee Hufes and Cyril Rioli would be known as Cathal Ramso.

Jarry Roughead transforms into the very exotic sounding Jorja Reezeed, while Sam Mitchell becomes Struan Mitcheem and Matt Spangher is Milo Sgardener.

This could certainly enliven Brownlow night, especially as Gary Ablett winning is a foregone conclusion. Of course if John Travolta became CEO, we'd have to rename the Brownlow as the Hubbard medal. For the record, Andrew Demetriou takes on the somewhat more dashing nomenclature, Ayden Daveries.

"Two votes. Hawthorn, J Reezeed."