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Sportsing....
Oct. 8th, 2016 02:12 amSome of you, I know, feel that sport is an irrelevant distraction. Please, oh please let me explain to you how wrong you are. And I write this with my entire neighbourhood still drunk with red, white and blue reflected glory. Yes, my village is yuppified to the eyeballs. We have wine bars, fancy restaurants, and lawyers and bankers in every street. Beneath the quinoa salads, the heart of the urban proletariat beats still. We have embraced every ethnic group under the sun. We have not scrupled to offer the same to yuppies. And they have responded nobly. Footscray remains the same. To live in my town, at this time, is to imbibe nectar in every breath.
Tell me what sports your community likes, and I will tell you about your society. Individual sports, as always, are a distraction. They tell a tale surprisingly resistant to any coherent sociological narrative. At bottom it reduces to little more than tub-thumping chauvinism. Yes, yes, One Of Us has sportsed their way to a gold medal, or has won at Augusta or Wimbledon; and thus we are all ennobled and feel it’s perfectly OK to drape ourselves in our national insignia and…. in most cases act like an utter and complete twonk. Unless it’s Peter Norman… but there is a tale for another day.
Team sports are a different kettle of ballgame entirely. And here is where the story gets interesting. Cricket? Let us deal with this one quickly, for the tale is surprisingly easy to relate. Like most sports it was invented in England, and its earliest recorded incarnation was on Hambledon Common. The men of Hambledon took on all comers and generally won. On learning that their star batsman John Small loved to play the violin, the Duke of Somewhere or Other sent a coach with a violin as a gift. That sturdy yeoman sent the coach back with two bats and two balls, himself paying the coachmen’s fare. Just to make the point that this is England and we don’t tug forelocks. Especially not on the cricket pitch. Everyone makes their own way here. The bogus class distinctions of later on did not apply to the 18th century yeomanry.
Later, the colossus of Grace dominated cricket. WG was, let it be admitted, an overgrown schoolboy to the very end of life. He regarded his bat as a rod of correction for bad bowling, and indulged in a great many acts of sharp practice. Yet England’s professionals supported him and tolerated his Little Ways. Because they knew that he would move heaven and earth for them when it came to Benefit Time. (A Benefit was a cricketer’s superannuation in a day that otherwise knew it not, outside the feudal domain of Lord Hawke and the Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Then, as now, England’s North marches to a different drum.) Grace knew and respected them, as they did him. His many acts of generosity made safe a repute which otherwise might not have survived.
Would that the mighty Don Bradman had been so kind. My local postmistress is ethnically Chinese, and she urged upon me a copy of Malcolm Knox’s Bradman’s War. ‘Is a Very Good Book!’ she assured me. Our Oriental migrants collectively have a sharp sense of Bullshit-Detection, and she was right. Knox has, we would hope, laid to rest the myth of the noble sage Sir Donald. He was in too many respects a truly awful man. Many cricket lovers have always known this, and greatly preferred to pay homage at the shrine of Bradman’s Catholics (O’Reilly, Fingleton, McCabe and Fleetwood-Smith). The simple truth is that Don Bradman was (a) the greatest batsman the world has ever seen and (b) a vengeful, self-seeking sectarian on the make. Nothing can be added to this; nor should it. This is an Australia we have left behind. Let it rest where it is.
CLR James once wrote that the history of West Indies cricket is the history of the West Indies. Oh yes. Without cricket we have an accidental archipelago. With it? Oh, my. The world’s greatest all-rounder, Sir Garfield Sobers. A kind, gentle man of prodigious talents worn down in the service of his imaginary country. Afterward? If you have never seen Fire In Babylon, you really should. The film tells it all: of how a cricket team shook off the colonial yoke and terrorized the entire globe, from a population base considerably less than that of Australia. Greg Chappell once unleashed fiery thunderbolts on Clive Lloyd’s team. The whirligig of time brought in its revenges. I daresay Allan Border still has the bruises. Never once did he complain, which is why he is revered in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Cricket is a game for men and women of steadfast courage, and no quarter is offered or given. (If you have never faced a battery of homicidal fast bowlers, then I cannot explain this to you.)
Now? The centre of power has moved from Marylebone to New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Does the world of cricket cope? Of course. Despite the manifest corruption which springs anew every few years, we have all accepted our new overlords. With misgivings? Surely. Nothing is ever exactly what we want. T20 is a loud, boorish circus… perhaps. And yet. The West Indies Test side is a pallid shadow of what it once was. Yet in T20 they still rule the world. And the Caribbean Premier League shows everything you could wish for as a sports spectacular. Perhaps this is what it was meant to be, with local rivalries supervening the more global concerns of their predecessors. And T20 is still cricket. Why, spin bowling (long feared as passing into extinction with the dodo and thylacine) rules the roost in the shortest form. A version of the game where a good leg-spinner is a prized weapon of destruction is still cricket. (Special pleading here from a suburban league purveyor of leg-spin….)
Let us now speak of soccer. The World Game, so-called. And, surprise, surprise, a form of the game where corruption is entrenched at the highest levels. They call it football Out There, for some reason, as if football could ever comprise a team of merely eleven folks kicking a round ball around a tiny field. The English Premier League is an immensely wealthy cartel in which you cannot hope for success unless your team is owned by what used to be called Colourful Racing Identities. (Insert translation according to your favourite epithets.) Plutocracy rules. If you do not have billions behind you, you have no chance at all. This is unrestrained capitalism in all its gory triumph. It is a similar tale throughout the rest of the world; though by no means as pointedly as in this Anglophone arms race.
And yet. Last year the EPL was inexplicably won by Leicester City. Perhaps the noble spirit of the recently re-interred Richard Plantagenet, King and Martyr, had something to do with it. Nonetheless, do not hold your breath waiting for a re-imagining of this. No Russian billionaires, no glory. This is the brutal reality of this dreadful game, wherein cheating is rife, players are bought and sold for absurd fortunes, and women are merely ornaments. Except of course in the women’s game. Amateurism – properly so-called - flourishes there precisely because there is so much less money involved.
Is this fair? Um. Oh dear. Now this is the ultimate in sporting doxology. Women’s cricket is far below the standard of the men’s game. (I am returning to cricket, since this is the sport I know best.) No sooner had women been rescued from those absurd frilly shorts they used to wear that standards rocketed. We can thank the Indian women’s team for this. No way in hell are we appearing in public dressed like that! Then someone thought it might be a good plan to offer them a little money so they could get time off to train properly. Surprise, surprise: standards lifted again. Women’s cricket is suddenly worth watching. Women’s soccer? I don’t honestly know where they are at. What I do know is that Bend It Like Beckham is one of the best sports movies ever made. And it bears the imprimatur of truth because it is set in the shadow of Heathrow, where so many of England’s Sikhs inexplicably settled, and very many of the film’s crew and staff have indisputably Indian names. (This was Keira Knightley’s big break. It may be her best acting performance thus far.) Walk around Hounslow any time, even today, and you will imagine the world of BILB without trouble. So I am suggesting that women’s cricket and soccer might well offer the promise of sport, properly imagined, which has all but disappeared from the men’s games in an avalanche of banknotes.
Now (finally) let us look at proper football. Originally Marngrook, which makes it a truly Australian game. It used to be played with stuffed possum skins, though leather Sherrins have taken their place. Many of you appear to think that football is nothing but an excuse for Men Behaving Badly. Well, no. Just no. It is a mirror of the better side of this Big Brown Land, and always has been. Blokes parlaying their sports prowess into sexual assault was a late-comer to our sociology. Back in the day, you would not have survived. No, she’s someone’s daughter, sister or wife. (And if that sounds excessively tribal, then to an extent it was. But you must not overinterpret this. If you groped or raped a woman, there would be consequences irrespective of whether she had powerful allies. Usually round the back of the pub, or on your way home from work.) But the age of sexual liberation arrived; and for a time gropage, up to and including outright rape, became A Thing, as did displaying incomplete toilet training in public, right up until the turn of the millennium.
Now? Dear gods no. Most AFL clubs have a No Dickhead Rule, for good and sufficient reasons. My team certainly does. Young men are very emulous, and the consequences of having Bad Examples among you can be awful. Those who step out of line will live to regret it. And this is a fine thing. Why should it not be? Why should over-entitled young men think they can do as they please because they are good at sportsing? In our game, the short answer is that they don’t. Unlike Certain Other sports, where bad behaviour seems to be accepted as a consequence of testosterone.
My team? I came to the Bulldogs late, since I wasn’t born here. But in 1989 we were told we were no longer considered worthy of having an AFL football team. And the entire Inner West rebelled. And I, though brought up to support Geelong, jumped ship. In the tribal discourse of football it is Not Good Form to change clubs. But This Is My Home! is however an indisputably valid excuse. I went once to Kardinia Park in Geelong, where we had never prospered, and narrowly missed out on this occasion. At half-time, sitting in the Outer with my mate Victor, a ratty old Bulldog scarf descended out of thin air and fell into my lap. I quickly looked up; but we were surrounded by indifferent Geelong supporters. If that isn’t a Sign, I have never seen one. I still have the scarf, as a treasured heirloom.
Very well. This is divinely ordained. I cannot argue with this. Go Dogs! So what is it about this team? I noted the following things. We are undersized, slow, and not very talented. And perennially on the verge of bankruptcy. Great. Luckily, we have a draft and a salary cap, both splendid ideas borrowed from American football. Socialism in sport really does work, though it is both instructive and bizarre that the USA, of all countries, came up with these ideas. So we have a chance to survive; though not much of one. We are forever one bad year away from another existential crisis. This just gets better all the time, does it not? A few years after, I went to a pub in Fitzroy and saw many trophies of the defunct Fitzroy Football Club. A drunken youth performed the statutory laments and demanded to know who my team was. (Only in Melbourne….) Footscray, I replied. ‘You’ll be next!’ quoth he. I glared at him. ‘We’re not dead yet!’ I informed him, and beat a prudent retreat from his melancholic depression.
The Dogs prospered, though always against the odds. I saw Steve Kretiuk, a six-foot Pole from St Albans, regularly play full-back against monsters a head taller than him and work improbable miracles. I saw a grim succession of undersized heroes play full-forward and centre half-forward against impossible odds. Always bricks without straw. The big guys we hired were rarely up to it. I watched a succession of gallant underdogs overachieve on naked courage and desperation. And always, on preliminary final day, we were found out.
I am very tired of reading utter nonsense about our preliminary final jinxes. The brutal fact is that in week three, finals change utterly. This is where you can no longer paper over the cracks. And always we were caught short for one simple reason. Flesh and blood can do only so much. If you have not played a brutal physical sport, I doubt you can understand this. If you are under six feet tall, and your opponent is much bigger than you, then in the end he will win. And always the despised west - the land of factories, slums, migrants and the urban proletariat - went home grumbling: happy that the lads had done their very best against the odds; but railing against the fate which decreed that the men of money would always triumph in the end.
Until now. Decades of compulsory socialism have wrought their miracle. And oddly enough: not having a rich history of success worked for us. When you’re completely screwed, you resign to the inevitable, bottom out, and choose your draft picks wisely. And in the last few years, I could not believe my eyes. The Bont is six foot four! Jack Macrae is six three! My God in heaven we’re finally building a team big enough to win! (Though many of our current heroes are unfashionably small. No-one else thought Caleb Daniel was worth a shot. But we did. Who cares if he’s a midget? He can play.) That their hearts will be big enough is a given. If you won’t throw yourself at the ball as if the world will end if you don’t; then go away because we don’t want you. At last we can challenge seriously. At last.
And improbable victory was achieved. And of a sudden everyone loves us. Because Australia really is a country where the underdog is celebrated. At a time when Australians are all being told that it is time to lower our expectations and get used to being second-class citizens unworthy of the largesse already sequestered for The Deserving Rich, this really is a story. The bromance between our coach and injured captain has been extensively canvassed elsewhere. I have nothing to add save that it is all true. Luke Beveridge is a magnificent coach, and Bob Murphy an ineffably saintly hero. His support for Adam Goodes is well-known. More to the point, when was the last time you ever heard of a Bulldog Behaving Badly? It doesn’t happen. Even pouring beer over a mate and starting a blue is enough to get you suspended. Because we don’t do this any more. But if there is repentance, there is also forgiveness. Because this is the land and people we want to be.
We judge our heroes by high standards. Please remember that our celebrated import Mr A didn’t actually do anything bad. He merely made some remarks bordering on homophobia and refused to back down. And then he went the whinge. And we all said get rid of this guy. Because he was homophobic? Not really. His sin was worse than that. Everyone realized that in his own mind, it was all about him. And this is not what we do here. So out you go, son. And off he went, and we hope it keeps fine for him. But see Rule One.
Scarves, flags and bunting are all over my town now. We have not yet grasped that the summit of Everest has been achieved. After the Grand Final we all went home to our respective houses, drank a great deal and watched the replay, as if unable to conceive what had just happened. Yes, it really did happen. Nobody need pity us any more. All things are possible in this Big, Brown Land. But. Please let us all remember that without an orderly AFL Commission, the inner western miracle could not have happened. I am hesitant to praise monstrously overpaid bureaucrats for anything much; but there it is. In a dog-eat-dog world of unrestrained capitalism such as the EPL my beloved Dogs could not have survived. A parable, perchance, for our times?
Tell me what sports your community likes, and I will tell you about your society. Individual sports, as always, are a distraction. They tell a tale surprisingly resistant to any coherent sociological narrative. At bottom it reduces to little more than tub-thumping chauvinism. Yes, yes, One Of Us has sportsed their way to a gold medal, or has won at Augusta or Wimbledon; and thus we are all ennobled and feel it’s perfectly OK to drape ourselves in our national insignia and…. in most cases act like an utter and complete twonk. Unless it’s Peter Norman… but there is a tale for another day.
Team sports are a different kettle of ballgame entirely. And here is where the story gets interesting. Cricket? Let us deal with this one quickly, for the tale is surprisingly easy to relate. Like most sports it was invented in England, and its earliest recorded incarnation was on Hambledon Common. The men of Hambledon took on all comers and generally won. On learning that their star batsman John Small loved to play the violin, the Duke of Somewhere or Other sent a coach with a violin as a gift. That sturdy yeoman sent the coach back with two bats and two balls, himself paying the coachmen’s fare. Just to make the point that this is England and we don’t tug forelocks. Especially not on the cricket pitch. Everyone makes their own way here. The bogus class distinctions of later on did not apply to the 18th century yeomanry.
Later, the colossus of Grace dominated cricket. WG was, let it be admitted, an overgrown schoolboy to the very end of life. He regarded his bat as a rod of correction for bad bowling, and indulged in a great many acts of sharp practice. Yet England’s professionals supported him and tolerated his Little Ways. Because they knew that he would move heaven and earth for them when it came to Benefit Time. (A Benefit was a cricketer’s superannuation in a day that otherwise knew it not, outside the feudal domain of Lord Hawke and the Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Then, as now, England’s North marches to a different drum.) Grace knew and respected them, as they did him. His many acts of generosity made safe a repute which otherwise might not have survived.
Would that the mighty Don Bradman had been so kind. My local postmistress is ethnically Chinese, and she urged upon me a copy of Malcolm Knox’s Bradman’s War. ‘Is a Very Good Book!’ she assured me. Our Oriental migrants collectively have a sharp sense of Bullshit-Detection, and she was right. Knox has, we would hope, laid to rest the myth of the noble sage Sir Donald. He was in too many respects a truly awful man. Many cricket lovers have always known this, and greatly preferred to pay homage at the shrine of Bradman’s Catholics (O’Reilly, Fingleton, McCabe and Fleetwood-Smith). The simple truth is that Don Bradman was (a) the greatest batsman the world has ever seen and (b) a vengeful, self-seeking sectarian on the make. Nothing can be added to this; nor should it. This is an Australia we have left behind. Let it rest where it is.
CLR James once wrote that the history of West Indies cricket is the history of the West Indies. Oh yes. Without cricket we have an accidental archipelago. With it? Oh, my. The world’s greatest all-rounder, Sir Garfield Sobers. A kind, gentle man of prodigious talents worn down in the service of his imaginary country. Afterward? If you have never seen Fire In Babylon, you really should. The film tells it all: of how a cricket team shook off the colonial yoke and terrorized the entire globe, from a population base considerably less than that of Australia. Greg Chappell once unleashed fiery thunderbolts on Clive Lloyd’s team. The whirligig of time brought in its revenges. I daresay Allan Border still has the bruises. Never once did he complain, which is why he is revered in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Cricket is a game for men and women of steadfast courage, and no quarter is offered or given. (If you have never faced a battery of homicidal fast bowlers, then I cannot explain this to you.)
Now? The centre of power has moved from Marylebone to New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Does the world of cricket cope? Of course. Despite the manifest corruption which springs anew every few years, we have all accepted our new overlords. With misgivings? Surely. Nothing is ever exactly what we want. T20 is a loud, boorish circus… perhaps. And yet. The West Indies Test side is a pallid shadow of what it once was. Yet in T20 they still rule the world. And the Caribbean Premier League shows everything you could wish for as a sports spectacular. Perhaps this is what it was meant to be, with local rivalries supervening the more global concerns of their predecessors. And T20 is still cricket. Why, spin bowling (long feared as passing into extinction with the dodo and thylacine) rules the roost in the shortest form. A version of the game where a good leg-spinner is a prized weapon of destruction is still cricket. (Special pleading here from a suburban league purveyor of leg-spin….)
Let us now speak of soccer. The World Game, so-called. And, surprise, surprise, a form of the game where corruption is entrenched at the highest levels. They call it football Out There, for some reason, as if football could ever comprise a team of merely eleven folks kicking a round ball around a tiny field. The English Premier League is an immensely wealthy cartel in which you cannot hope for success unless your team is owned by what used to be called Colourful Racing Identities. (Insert translation according to your favourite epithets.) Plutocracy rules. If you do not have billions behind you, you have no chance at all. This is unrestrained capitalism in all its gory triumph. It is a similar tale throughout the rest of the world; though by no means as pointedly as in this Anglophone arms race.
And yet. Last year the EPL was inexplicably won by Leicester City. Perhaps the noble spirit of the recently re-interred Richard Plantagenet, King and Martyr, had something to do with it. Nonetheless, do not hold your breath waiting for a re-imagining of this. No Russian billionaires, no glory. This is the brutal reality of this dreadful game, wherein cheating is rife, players are bought and sold for absurd fortunes, and women are merely ornaments. Except of course in the women’s game. Amateurism – properly so-called - flourishes there precisely because there is so much less money involved.
Is this fair? Um. Oh dear. Now this is the ultimate in sporting doxology. Women’s cricket is far below the standard of the men’s game. (I am returning to cricket, since this is the sport I know best.) No sooner had women been rescued from those absurd frilly shorts they used to wear that standards rocketed. We can thank the Indian women’s team for this. No way in hell are we appearing in public dressed like that! Then someone thought it might be a good plan to offer them a little money so they could get time off to train properly. Surprise, surprise: standards lifted again. Women’s cricket is suddenly worth watching. Women’s soccer? I don’t honestly know where they are at. What I do know is that Bend It Like Beckham is one of the best sports movies ever made. And it bears the imprimatur of truth because it is set in the shadow of Heathrow, where so many of England’s Sikhs inexplicably settled, and very many of the film’s crew and staff have indisputably Indian names. (This was Keira Knightley’s big break. It may be her best acting performance thus far.) Walk around Hounslow any time, even today, and you will imagine the world of BILB without trouble. So I am suggesting that women’s cricket and soccer might well offer the promise of sport, properly imagined, which has all but disappeared from the men’s games in an avalanche of banknotes.
Now (finally) let us look at proper football. Originally Marngrook, which makes it a truly Australian game. It used to be played with stuffed possum skins, though leather Sherrins have taken their place. Many of you appear to think that football is nothing but an excuse for Men Behaving Badly. Well, no. Just no. It is a mirror of the better side of this Big Brown Land, and always has been. Blokes parlaying their sports prowess into sexual assault was a late-comer to our sociology. Back in the day, you would not have survived. No, she’s someone’s daughter, sister or wife. (And if that sounds excessively tribal, then to an extent it was. But you must not overinterpret this. If you groped or raped a woman, there would be consequences irrespective of whether she had powerful allies. Usually round the back of the pub, or on your way home from work.) But the age of sexual liberation arrived; and for a time gropage, up to and including outright rape, became A Thing, as did displaying incomplete toilet training in public, right up until the turn of the millennium.
Now? Dear gods no. Most AFL clubs have a No Dickhead Rule, for good and sufficient reasons. My team certainly does. Young men are very emulous, and the consequences of having Bad Examples among you can be awful. Those who step out of line will live to regret it. And this is a fine thing. Why should it not be? Why should over-entitled young men think they can do as they please because they are good at sportsing? In our game, the short answer is that they don’t. Unlike Certain Other sports, where bad behaviour seems to be accepted as a consequence of testosterone.
My team? I came to the Bulldogs late, since I wasn’t born here. But in 1989 we were told we were no longer considered worthy of having an AFL football team. And the entire Inner West rebelled. And I, though brought up to support Geelong, jumped ship. In the tribal discourse of football it is Not Good Form to change clubs. But This Is My Home! is however an indisputably valid excuse. I went once to Kardinia Park in Geelong, where we had never prospered, and narrowly missed out on this occasion. At half-time, sitting in the Outer with my mate Victor, a ratty old Bulldog scarf descended out of thin air and fell into my lap. I quickly looked up; but we were surrounded by indifferent Geelong supporters. If that isn’t a Sign, I have never seen one. I still have the scarf, as a treasured heirloom.
Very well. This is divinely ordained. I cannot argue with this. Go Dogs! So what is it about this team? I noted the following things. We are undersized, slow, and not very talented. And perennially on the verge of bankruptcy. Great. Luckily, we have a draft and a salary cap, both splendid ideas borrowed from American football. Socialism in sport really does work, though it is both instructive and bizarre that the USA, of all countries, came up with these ideas. So we have a chance to survive; though not much of one. We are forever one bad year away from another existential crisis. This just gets better all the time, does it not? A few years after, I went to a pub in Fitzroy and saw many trophies of the defunct Fitzroy Football Club. A drunken youth performed the statutory laments and demanded to know who my team was. (Only in Melbourne….) Footscray, I replied. ‘You’ll be next!’ quoth he. I glared at him. ‘We’re not dead yet!’ I informed him, and beat a prudent retreat from his melancholic depression.
The Dogs prospered, though always against the odds. I saw Steve Kretiuk, a six-foot Pole from St Albans, regularly play full-back against monsters a head taller than him and work improbable miracles. I saw a grim succession of undersized heroes play full-forward and centre half-forward against impossible odds. Always bricks without straw. The big guys we hired were rarely up to it. I watched a succession of gallant underdogs overachieve on naked courage and desperation. And always, on preliminary final day, we were found out.
I am very tired of reading utter nonsense about our preliminary final jinxes. The brutal fact is that in week three, finals change utterly. This is where you can no longer paper over the cracks. And always we were caught short for one simple reason. Flesh and blood can do only so much. If you have not played a brutal physical sport, I doubt you can understand this. If you are under six feet tall, and your opponent is much bigger than you, then in the end he will win. And always the despised west - the land of factories, slums, migrants and the urban proletariat - went home grumbling: happy that the lads had done their very best against the odds; but railing against the fate which decreed that the men of money would always triumph in the end.
Until now. Decades of compulsory socialism have wrought their miracle. And oddly enough: not having a rich history of success worked for us. When you’re completely screwed, you resign to the inevitable, bottom out, and choose your draft picks wisely. And in the last few years, I could not believe my eyes. The Bont is six foot four! Jack Macrae is six three! My God in heaven we’re finally building a team big enough to win! (Though many of our current heroes are unfashionably small. No-one else thought Caleb Daniel was worth a shot. But we did. Who cares if he’s a midget? He can play.) That their hearts will be big enough is a given. If you won’t throw yourself at the ball as if the world will end if you don’t; then go away because we don’t want you. At last we can challenge seriously. At last.
And improbable victory was achieved. And of a sudden everyone loves us. Because Australia really is a country where the underdog is celebrated. At a time when Australians are all being told that it is time to lower our expectations and get used to being second-class citizens unworthy of the largesse already sequestered for The Deserving Rich, this really is a story. The bromance between our coach and injured captain has been extensively canvassed elsewhere. I have nothing to add save that it is all true. Luke Beveridge is a magnificent coach, and Bob Murphy an ineffably saintly hero. His support for Adam Goodes is well-known. More to the point, when was the last time you ever heard of a Bulldog Behaving Badly? It doesn’t happen. Even pouring beer over a mate and starting a blue is enough to get you suspended. Because we don’t do this any more. But if there is repentance, there is also forgiveness. Because this is the land and people we want to be.
We judge our heroes by high standards. Please remember that our celebrated import Mr A didn’t actually do anything bad. He merely made some remarks bordering on homophobia and refused to back down. And then he went the whinge. And we all said get rid of this guy. Because he was homophobic? Not really. His sin was worse than that. Everyone realized that in his own mind, it was all about him. And this is not what we do here. So out you go, son. And off he went, and we hope it keeps fine for him. But see Rule One.
Scarves, flags and bunting are all over my town now. We have not yet grasped that the summit of Everest has been achieved. After the Grand Final we all went home to our respective houses, drank a great deal and watched the replay, as if unable to conceive what had just happened. Yes, it really did happen. Nobody need pity us any more. All things are possible in this Big, Brown Land. But. Please let us all remember that without an orderly AFL Commission, the inner western miracle could not have happened. I am hesitant to praise monstrously overpaid bureaucrats for anything much; but there it is. In a dog-eat-dog world of unrestrained capitalism such as the EPL my beloved Dogs could not have survived. A parable, perchance, for our times?
