Boyd's Bitchslap, Hayne's Backchat, Campese's Comeback

Can’t keep up? Allow me to bring you up to speed, time-poor peasant.

So. Six rounds down. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. You really wouldn’t want to spend much longer than six weeks with Pa Bundren though would you, even if he was your own creation.

·         In league, the 6 week mark is really when you are forced for the first time since season’s start; when you were all flush with that dumb optimism that exists irrespective of reality, to reevaluate your top 8 aspirations. Cowboy fans and the deluded loons who annually espouse their penthouse potential I’m talking to you.

·         Unless you are a Storm, Manly or, god help you, a Rabbit supporter, chances are that your club has already demonstrated a dazzlingly varied array of inadequacies designed to challenge your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Well, endure you must. This is football, and football, like life itself, mostly consists of endurance and suffering.

·         Dave Taylor has been dropped, for reasons that nobody has bothered to make clear. Seemingly, nobody has had to bother because no one cares enough to ask. Those who would normally ask are too busy making off-colour and cruelly unsympathetic cracks about Josh Dugan. I suppose the word is that he has an attitude problem, but saying Dave Taylor has an attitude problem is as obvious and unhelpful as saying the Freemasons have an image problem.

·         Jarryd Hayne is a player operating under conditions of severe personal stress. He offsets this by engaging weekly in vigorous and one sided dialogues with referees. Sometimes he takes a few minutes time out in between bouts and plays a bit of football. The Eels are locked several years deep into their slow and untidy spiral of decline now, and the strain is showing.

·         Ricky Stuart is operating under some stress too. All coaches do, of course, but not all coaches front post-game press conferences with the brimstone of a southern Baptist preacher and not all coaches care enough to make a $10 000 investment in the future of the game which is going straight to hell as they see it.

·         Darius Boyd gave another arresting press conference. In it, he gave nothing away to the assembled media other than the one thing they already knew from years prior, which was that they were dealing with a halfwit who was still not even remotely acquainted with proper press conference etiquette. Far be it from me to dish out unauthorised psychiatric diagnoses but he does seem to have advanced several shades up the spectrum since becoming a Knight.  

·         Misery continues to seep through Ben Barba’s barely maintained façade. There’s an ocean breaking inside the poor boy’s brain. You can see the tide washing in and out of his eyes. Barba was last year’s excitement machine. Josh Dugan was once an excitement machine. The game is littered with broke-down excitement machines. It’s a veritable Somme, and very sad.

·         Terry Campese finally made his comeback. This just leaves us waiting on Jesus now. Of course, the thing about comebacks (and this is where Terry went wrong last year) is that you are expected to come back and stay back. It’s not compulsory, but it is the preferred method.  Seven minutes of flabby play does not a comeback make, although as exits go it was spectacular, in a tragic Shakespearean way. Raider fans, who are well accustomed to pain and tragedy, absorbed the psychic pain with trademark weary stoicism facilitated by extra lashings of class A narcotics.

·         Recently, the Raiders have overcome trying circumstances to win 2 games. In a row. I believe this is what hubris-bloated commentators officially refer to as “a roll”. The other week against the Roosters, when the Raiders finally, after 45 profoundly painful minutes of play, completed a full set of six, Brandy Alexander called that “a roll” too. Raiders. Severely lowering standards since the mid-90s.

·         Sonny Bill is back too. I find it hard to summon interest in someone who seems to be so solely committed to self-interest, but he has rendered the Roosters vaguely watchable, which is not a sentence I thought I would write in Braith Anasta’s absence. 

·         Paul Gal was supposed to hang his junk out for charity. He arranged his underpants into some sort of crudely fashioned G-string instead. The whole this was a touch underwhelming. As in, I wasn’t all like:

·         Finally, there’s Todd Carney to consider. Because I haven’t, for fucking ever. I realised this a couple of weeks ago. I made a note of it.

 

Look at that unmarked neck and chest flesh. This is so sad. Lest we forget.   

The Shoulder Charge

I tend to be too lazy and depressed to work myself into a froth of indignation and in any case I need to save my energy to expend on anxiety attacks but I appreciate the indignant people who froth and foam. Especially the ones who flesh out my half-baked and unsubstantiated theories. While they are busy doing that I usually just emit a sustained groan and descend deeper into an unseen void.

I understand that the outlawing of the shoulder charge has upset many people, including but not limited to Sonny Bill Williams, who tweeted about it. He also went to see a movie. He had a large popcorn, a Coke, and the clear eyes and smooth visage of one who sleeps soundly at night. Quade Cooper was with him. He didn’t look too good but that’s probably because he’s not, I don’t know. Anyway, the entity behind veritable website thepublicapology.net understood where my concerns rested and tweeted me this picture pointing out the sizes of the Cokes concerned while everyone else was in a shoulder charge related frenzy. It’s nice to be understood.

I myself see nothing much wrong and plenty right with any action that renders men 1. Concussed and lying prone like huge sweating hams, or 2. Reeling around like drunken Irish villagers.

Rugby league is a methodically brutal game punctuated by stylish explosions of violence. The shoulder charge is the very quintessence of the game.

Some are so good that if ever asked to present a solitary work for admittance to a higher realm, the perpetrators would surely consider submitting their finest and most destructive shoulder charge.

But now “people”; brain surgeons and former players, I don’t know, have decided the shoulder charge is a pestilence for all concerned. Dreary repetitive assembly-line mediocrity hangs in the air like the stink of beef tallow out the back at McDonalds. Where is the spirit in this life? The fervor in these times?

Their argument seems to be that it dulls footballer’s brains and wits. 

Footballers are not a people one normally associates with sharp practices. Most of them are already on the brink of incoherence at the start of their playing careers. They seem very nice but they do exhibit an almost effortless idiocy and can seldom maintain a satisfactory level of intellectual discourse as it is; what difference does it make if their brains start to crackle and smoke and sometimes shoot sparks like faulty wall sockets later in their lives, condemning them to a future of witless dereliction and semi-demented poverty? It’s more than most of us are promised.        

 Anyway, there are many things that can disorder and scramble a brain. Youthful pharmaceutical adventures, epilepsy, aneurysms, the heat, the horrors, being brought up from the bottom of the ocean too fast and of course the creeping ineradicable awareness of the decay eating away at the fabric of the world.   

Life is nothing if not a series of traumas big and small.

The Humanity and The Meth Trash

This is an age of disappointment. Most of us want our sport to reflect what is good in humanity. We want it to lift us from the mundane and the everyday. We want it to provide us with an understanding of the human condition.

I want all this. I also want sport to provide visuals such as this, and plenty of them:

Here is a closer look at the human condition, NRL-style.

From what I understand, the fact that Jarryd Hayne went grocery shopping instead of attending the Eels Manly game as supportive injured spectator was deemed by the Eels board to be an affront so rank that it was grounds to finally can coach Kearney.  Seems a little extreme, but he had only won nine games out of a fucking hundred or so…  

Anyway, who could blame Hayne for not wanting to watch his stinking team play? I have no emotional investment in the Eels whatsoever and watching Chris Sandow ‘play’ makes me writhe in discomfort, I can only imagine Hayne’s reluctance to do the same. In public. At Brookvale. Trying to hide your private despair from public scrutiny is THE WORST.

“I’m just barracking for Braith tonight. He has a new haircut” – text to my brother, re. the Roosters Rabbits game.

Personal hair care is clearly a very high priority for Braith. I would find this offensive in, say, a Rabbitoh, but it’s Braith, so it’s charming. Last week, in that Sharks game, Braith had “an infected face” and did not play. This was bad news for me. For Braith too, I imagine.

Braith’s complicated face is one of my five favourites in the NRL. I searched it this week for lesions and when I actually saw one I experienced photo-sensitive-epilepsy type flashes of Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, which was an occurrence I found unsettling.

To steady the nerves I reminded myself of that time Braith hollered ‘AW YOU’RE OFF YER HEAD!!” at some hapless ref. This was an occurrence I found awesome. Poor Braith. It must blow being the captain of the most penalised club in the competition. Not to mention being coached by that croaky halfwit Brian Smith. He is a shrunken straw-man. Under no circumstances should he be coaching. He should be tonging sausages outside Bunnings of a weekend.

The Roosters are still persisting with that inane practice of slapping each other’s backs and hands after an error. Of which there are many. I can’t help feeling that this weird charade is symptomatic of some of the deeper problems at the Roosters. Of which there are many.  Like Brian Smith being a total shonk. As tactics go I prefer Mitchell Pearce’s last week against the Sharks when the Roosters were packing a scrum with nine seconds on the clock. He screamed “NO FUCKIN PENALTIES!!!” and it appeared to work because they didn’t concede any penalties, and god knows they are partial to a penalty or twelve. In the event, the game went into golden point the three dozen or so attempts at field goal addled my mind and dazzled my eye so much that I can’t remember who eventually even won the goddamn game. *Oh, right. It was a draw.

I think Mitchell Pearce is experiencing some hiccups in employee relations at the Roosters. I believe this is true in the same way I believe that that creepy father totally felt up his cretinous daughter during that limo ride home from the airport on The Shire last week. Some things you just know.

I’ve spent this whole season squinting at Adam Reynolds, trying to work out where I’ve seen him before. Now I know that every time I’ve caught a train to or from Bomaderry HE’S BEEN ON IT. He’s the guy nipping off at Minamurra and Thirroul to suck down a few sneaky durry drags on the platform. He’s also the guy wearing athletic snap-pants. Because nothing better signifies a disdain for societal norms than athletic snap-pants. Last time I rode this train there was a guy, to avoid confusion let’s just call him ‘Adam Reynolds’, talking explosively to someone whose acquaintance he had just made, telling them about his neighbours in Sanctuary Point. “Cunts on one side, cunts on the other.”

Incidentally, this blog has been receiving a substantial amount of traffic off of the key search words ‘how to get rid of meth trash’.

Luke Lewis. He is perfect for Cronulla. Cronulla is perfect for him. You know he would say “my dog barks at Asian people”. He was spotted last week buying a pie in Cronulla. This was early evidence of his plans to sign with the Sharks, certainly, but it was also confirmation that footballers can perform ordinary individual acts, completely unsupervised, such as basic pie consumption.

I was hoping dimly that he would come to Canberra. You wouldn’t though, would you? Not if you’re in form, not if you’re in possession of your wits. Lewis has sharp bleached blue eyes suffused with a strange Bunsen burner flame like vitality. He’d also most likely be one to bite his beer bottles open. He is basically a VB ad come to life. He knows what’s up.

Anyway, it’s heartening to know that he chose Cronulla because he wants to see out his career being captained by Gal. It’s like when Josh Dugan said he wanted to stay at Canberra to play alongside Terry Campese. Except that Campese ended up out injured for the season for a second year running, damnation. The only upside of this, by the by, is that Terry’s long stretches off the field give him plenty of time to impregnate his wife and expand the Campese dynasty. I want the whole Queanbeyan and Jerromberah area crawling with Campese babies in the next five years. See to it, Terry.

I’m also happy for Gallan. Greg Bird’s inglorious departure tore their ‘Bruise Brothers’ alliance asunder. Having Lewis alongside him to pummel bodies into barely identifiable hunks of meat will be good for him.

“Hi, I’m Sonny Bill. You may remember me from four years ago, when I committed the greatest act of treachery in the game’s history.”

Sonny Bill’s departure from the NRL was spectacular. I understand that his re-entry in 2013 will cause something of a sensation too. Sonny Bill is ridiculous. The Roosters are ridiculous. This situation where they’re letting him carouse all off-season and then piloting him in twenty minutes before kick off in round one is ridiculous. Where is the time for team bonding – running up sand hills and roofy-ing and getting shit tattoos - during the summer months? It tells everybody everything they need to know about the Roosters ethos, in case anyone missed it over the last hundred odd years. There is no fairness in it. There is no fairness in life. Sad.

Something else that is sad: Nathan Hindmarsh having to wrap up his career surrounded by dysfunction and incompetence. Did everyone see him go back and pick up the last esky for the groundskeepers after everyone else had left last weekend? His shorts were loose and sagging and his Eels had just beaten the Storm from last position and he’d scored his first try of 2012 and he was rolling this enormous esky off the field, WHAT A GUY. Age shall not weary him.

Elvis was so clapped out by the end of his career that he couldn’t have shifted an esky if he’d tried.

This Steve Price guy, who the fuck is he? Whoever he is, he is not cut out for this coaching gig he’s found himself in. No man with such an alarmingly sloping chin should be in an authoritative and public position. He is limp and surly and petulant and evasive, which is exactly what the world expects of a weak-chinned man. Fittingly, he defended that dirty little hamster Jamie Soward when he marched off at Bruce without shaking hands with a single Raider. I think he even encouraged people to forget it, get over it. Not on my watch Soward. Lest we forget.

Speaking of dirty little hamsters, the fact that Chris Sandow gets to be coached by Ricky Stuart next year resonates with me in a very painful fashion. It sticks in my craw. All the speculation and conjecture about him signing on to coach Canberra, all that fucking ‘strong mail’ that sports writers like to reference to bolster their hopelessly ill-informed stories, all of it has ended in disillusion.

Show me something that doesn’t.

((Minutes after writing this I find myself grinning inadvertently at an inane Suzuki ad featuring Slater Smith and Ryles - a terrible transgression, on all of our parts.))

Josh Dugan's Sweetness..& other stuff

Weird things are happening everywhere.

It’s a strange season. Cosmic aberrations abound.

Darius Boyd has taken to weeping in dressing sheds at half time, and probably at full time too, poor little pie.

Mitchell Pearce is picking up Pussy Cat Dolls and maybe (unsubstantiated) Nicki Minaj while on Blues training camp in Melbourne.

Luke Lewis has been stood down as captain; a masterstroke devised by Ivan Cleary and designed to simultaneously demoralise and galvanise while at the same time helping to keep Lewis’ self-esteem in check.

Des Hasler has nothing to maniacally rake his fingers through after shaving off his lion-like mane.

Krisnan Inu has abruptly been sold to the Bulldogs and may turn out to be coachable after all.

The Sharks have been winning games.

Jamal Idris has gained weight and grown so puffy that his edges resemble rising pizza dough that’s been set aside in a bowl on a windowsill. 

Todd Carney came down with a shocking case of the Yips during his Origin debut and made numerous strange and unhelpful contributions to the game.  

Brent Kite took over Billy Slater’s high-ball duties in Origin because Billy Slater couldn’t take one to save his life. His uncharacteristically tenuous command of a fairly simple skill was a welcome development. It was also totally disorientating.

The Bulldogs and the Eels have become my favourite teams to watch; for entirely different but equally rewarding reasons, including but not limited to Jarryd Hayne's lazy charm and Josh Reynolds' abrasive feistyness.

There are some unshakable certainties though.

Brett Stewart remains as aggressively petulant as ever.

Luke Lewis continues, despite his tribulations, to trail a vague air of menace and mongrel behind him.

Laurie Daly’s eyes still look like cornered rats.

The police have netted another Rooster in their wily civic net.

Chris Sandow continues to do his best imitation of somebody who can play.

Timana Tahu continues to do his best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath.

Dane Tilse still looks like someone who is making good progress on his learn to read program but still has to move his lips to get through the longer words.

Queensland continues to win with a good amount of ease.

Josh Dugan’s sweetness and beauty continues to trouble the air around him.  

Cameron Smith is as irritating as ever.

Braith Anasta’s head is still magisterial and profound.

Dave Taylor’s head still looks like something on a spit.

Wayne Bennett’s press conference comments still have no chance of being mistaken for an author being interviewed on Radio National.

Daniel Vidot is proving to be just as much of a liability for the Dragons as he eventually became for the Raiders.

Hating on referees is now seen to be an even more legitimate and desirable pastime for players, ex-players, fans, coaches, journalists, children, livestock and judges on The Voice.

Willie Mason is still boss.

- All this is about all I ask out of life.

In Loosely Tied Shorts We Trust. Tight Ones Too.

Rivalry round, bitches!  Gird those Loins!

I am a total whore for history. I think it's because I feel so profoundly uncomfortable and ill at ease in the here and now. The prospect of a sepia-tinged rivalry round never fails to stoke my imagination, even though I don't really buy what the NRL are selling here.


Apparently this round is meant to evoke ideas of bloodstained histories, proud heritages, simmering grudges and ongoing class divides. This is what we're supposed to believe, anyway. I don't know if any of it exists anymore, I really don't. But we allow meaning to be ascribed to things far more unbelievable than this, so I'm happy to play along and indulge in a little embellished imagining.

It would be immeasurably easier to do this if the NRL actually got into the spirit of things and abstained from blanketing the field with alcohol advertising, and maybe suspended forcing Centrebet plugs down our throats for a minute. That'd be nice, wouldn't it - imagine not being urged to have a punt FOR A WHOLE ROUND! What would they fill all the those extra minutes spent telling us the odds with, actual talk? That would be some heritage-listed shit right there. Pies in the sky, I know, I know.


Nevertheless. The Passion still rages. How else to explain these good folk?

So. I looked forward to the Roosters Rabbitohs game like some heavily armed zealot looks forward to Zion. I wanted to see if the Roosters could hold it together after last week, and, on the flipside, I really, really wanted to see the Rabbitohs come undone. Those were my two objectives. Both of these are entirely legitimate reasons to watch a game, of course. Is there a team in the NRL who are able to unravel with such spectaucular, theatrical flair as the Rabbitohs? No, no there isn't. When they are off, the Rabbitohs are operatic in their awfulness. It's a skill worth bottling.  Or baking into a cake. Mmmmm, the taste of Failure!

The Rabbitohs are that one team for me - the team that I loathe but love to watch. Not so much when they play well, but that hardly ever happens so I'm rarely troubled. The other teams I hate passionately I have no interest in watching - Broncos, Dragons, Titans, STORM, Manly - but this may be because, with the exception of the Titans, they're all highly competent and clinical sides who defend like fucking wolves in territorial takeover mode.

Just on that - this is the lowest scoring season since 1993 or some absurd date. I blame teams like those mentioned above grinding their opponents into the fucking ground with relentless, tedious tenacity. They make my eyes glaze over and my jaw lose all elasticity.


Anyway, here's what happened, according to me.

-Russell Crowe was there. I'm not gonna lie. Knowing he was on the premises definately added a certain frisson and a handful of stardust to proceedings, even if he was wearing a fug anorak. And having Todd Carney, Braith Anasta AND Russell Crowe under the same roof? Talk about star power, it nearly blew my superficial little starcrossed mind and I wasn't even there breathing their air and experiencing severe heart arrhythmia.

Crowe was in man-of-steel mode last night, meaning he did not emote freely and extravagantly as he has in the past.

-Mitchell Pearce did good from the get go. He threw a ball in the tenth minute that made me stop chewing my toasted cheese sandwich for at least twenty seconds. Sam Perrett lost it and got thrown into touch but no matter, no matter at all. Exquisite.

-Baby Burgess was out there for the Bunnies. I could tell it was him because his flanks were whiter than a water-logged corpse.

-The Bunnies started in on the bizarre play early in the piece, predictable as ever. Nathan Merritt let a Carney kick bounce in very curious circumstances. A minute later Eddy Pettybourne lost a loose ball and bellowed at - HOW DARE HE - my favourite ref Brett Suttor in frightening fashion. Audio picked up Suttor snapping peevishly at the other ref that "he's swearing at me and I don't appreciate it". Neither would I, Brett, neither would I.

-Things started going a little haywire from here on in. The Chooks repeatedly rip open the Rabbits like they're casually segmenting an orange. John Sutton does nothing much other than prowl around looking surly as hell. Ex-outlaw sandwich technician Jake Friend works like a maniac and wins my approval. The Roosters play some promising footy but fail to make anything of it. No-one seems at all interested in giving Greg Inglis the ball. He looks incredible, by the way. Staying well away from the white bread, by the look of it. I don't despise him nearly as much as I used to, I can't figure out why, and I worry briefly that this will knock on to the other players I hate - will I start feeling a dim affection for them too? This is not a line of thought I want to continue with, so I cease and desist.

Bra Boys represent.

Chris Sandow, represent.

Second Half.

-Braith ("It's Braith, Bitch") Anasta blows his stack and several fuses when the Bunnies score off a dubious pass that looks blatantly forward. Braith blowing up gives me an enormous sense of well being. I feel like he'd be the guy you'd want with you in a hospital emergency room or any place where the causing of a scene in order to get urgent attention is necessary. No wonder Jodi Gordan wants him to put a ring on it. WHO WOULDN'T? is my unanswerable question.

-A bit later, in the corner of the screen, Braith plays the ball and Chris Sandow gets up on his tippytoes and pushes his hand into Braith's head with what looks to be a fair bit of force. Braith makes a lunge and I get ready to start miming uppercuts. Nothing comes of it, sadly. That is a fight I would climb over my mother to see, trust.

-The 70s called Steve McQueen, they want their hairstyle back.

-The Roosters keep touching and hugging each other, it's hot.

-Shannon McPherson bangs heads with Frank Paul Nuasala and comes up with a massive crevass-like gash over his eye. He gets several metres of white bandage and an entire roll of electrical tape wrapped around it, and while that happens we are treated to at least four super slow-mo replays of the collision, from every conceivable angle.

-Souths sabotage themselves every time momentum swings their way. This falls squarely into the 'what I like to see' category.

-Sandow struggles out of a tackle and unloads into Shaun Kenny Dowell with tiny fists of fury. He is a runt, so he looks ridiculous and terrier-like. SKD, who is tall and lithe, appears untroubled by the flurry of punches being thrown somewhere below him, in the direction of his mid section. I once saw a Rooster fan with a sign that said SKD ROW. Brilliant.

Pearce & SKD & Carney have happyclappy times last year. This seems a long time ago.

-The Roosters respond to Sandow's inanity by taking the ball the length of the field to score in the next set. Cut to John Lang writhing in his sideline seat in obvious and unadulterated anguish. Doubley brilliant.

-Anthony Mitchell is finally injected into the game in the 68th minute. I approve of this because he's adorable and he looks awful pretty in his new Roosters colours. I thought when he left the Eels he might leave a gaping, handsome-man-sized hole in the team but Reni Matuia sailed right on in after his two year suspension and refilled the hot quota to capacity. Well played, coach Kearney, well played.

-Croker - I have no idea what his first name is - drives his whole head into Nate Myles' torso in a tackle. He gets flung back and hits the ground like a felled tree, flat on his back, lights extinguished. Everybody holds their breath, everybody wonders if he's broken his enormous neck ala Ben Ross. The medi-van arrives to ferry him off but he hauls himself to his feet like a bear recovering from a tranquilser-dart induced coma and lumbers off to the side. Everybody exhales.

-The game goes to golden point. Frenzied scenes in the stands.

-The awful pretty Anthony Mitchell gets KO'd and departs for Disneyland. When he makes it to his feet he reels and staggers drunkenly and a minute later, when he gets the ball from a scrum the effects of his concussion become clear because as well as his eyes being rolled well back in his head, he passes to Jason Ryles instead of, oh, say, Anasta or Carney, both of whom are waiting to receive the ball and win the game. Ryles is forced to try for field goal and throws up his hands in astonishment and disbelief the minute the ball leaves his boot. Mitchell remains serene, i.e. OUT.OF.IT.

-Chris Sandow brings Russell Crowe to his knees when he pots a 49 metre field goal. This is an unfortunate outcome, and one I wish to forget immediately.

I managed to do this because the good times kept coming. Was that a night for rugby league lovers OR WHAT? If Gus Gould had been commentating he would have melted down from the excitement of it all  - he would have seen me my heart arrhythmia and raised me a stroke, for reals.

Anyway, more golden point out at Penrith, more heart-in-mouth stuff.

Luke Lewis got caned and caused me to murmur "oohh, mein schatz" - 'my precious', in other (English) words, Jarryd Hayne had a blinder at five-eighth and Reni Matuia looked reptilian and scary and hot all at the same time. He has mad skills, does Reni. And cold snake eyes that burn, too.

Anyway, what happened was that Parramatta failed to rage against the dying of the light and Penrith snuffed them out and as a result Nathan Hindmarsh's smile after the game - his 300th - had a somewhat forced, 'fuck this shit' quality to it. This was a shame.

Still, he managed to maintain the tradition of repeatedly losing his loosely tied shorts and, for me, that was more historically significant than any rivalry round or anniversary occassion.