Canberra Raiders 2014: Die Harder

My friend supports the Broncos. This automatically renders him incapable of understanding the slaughterhouse of the soul struggle of supporting a second-tier team. He is also a Queenslander. Frankly, seeing these sentiments strung together on a screen like this is making me question how we are friends at all. Thin ice!

Anyways, because no discussion of the Raiders is complete without reference to the astonishingly innovative ways in which they hemorrhage young talent, and because I still look back on said hemorrhaged talent with a honey-glazed glow I guess I was moaning some wretched sentiment regarding Carney or Monaghan or Ferguson or possibly, depending on the extent to which he had already inflamed me with his airy upper-echelon assuredness, Travis Waddell. I can’t remember the details exactly. It was only two days ago but my mind has a tendency to slip a gear when it comes to the Raiders. Mental health experts would have me believe that this, much like my night terrors, is a side effect from suffering under the sustained weight of terminal failure and disappointment.

 ‘Oh,’ he said, with the inane breeziness common to breakfast TV presenters, ‘you should be used to it by now.’ Of course, this is exactly the type of innately annoying and unsympathetic thing a Bronco supporter would say. Storm fans too, tenfold. The Gina Reinharts of the NRL. Totally out of touch.

Anyway. I told him it never stops hurting. Because it doesn’t. But I enjoyed the sound and sensation of saying something as arresting as this so I added an apocalyptic, cinema-trailer-narrator-type element to my delivery – IT NEVER. STOPS. HURTING.  

Because just like life in general, there is always another punishment, another casual outrage, another loss.
Well, so what. We die harder.

 

The Young & The Restless Raiders

I understand that blog wise I have – what is the correct terminology here – dropped the ball. This ball dropping extends to all areas of my life. Whatever. Dropping balls is as legitimate a lifestyle as any. Just ask the Raiders.

In the event, I actually blame the Raiders. Who doesn’t.  

The Raiders were the one relationship I trusted to sustain, distract and comfort me in times of uncertainty and I didn’t notice it happening at the time but at some point during the season this relationship took a grievous turn toward near-total apathy so that three months’ worth of incidents and machinations failed to elicit any emotion or response from me at all but seeing the Raiders describe Jarrod Croker as a “flashy” player on Facebook causes me to flip the fuck out.

Setting aside the season-spanning, serialised saga of ceaseless negativity, the Raiders appear to have reached a new juncture in their grim narrative by categorising Croker as a “flashy” player.

This is what they’ve come to. They are so parched of hope and devoid of talent that Croker now rates as a flashy player.

Ye Gods. Because no offence to Jarrod but I register strong objections to this claim. Actually, offence.  

He doesn’t pass, he can’t tackle, and even if you don’t take into account the permanent internal damage that missed kick in 2010 obviously inflicted he still looks like he’s perpetually on the brink of a psychic meltdown and needs his mum.

Here is Croker holding back the beckoning abyss

Leaving aside his undiagnosed and chronic PTSD, the nice – not flashy, nice - thing about Croker is that he has no desire to ever leave Canberra. He is HAPPY in Canberra. He enjoys a FULL AND VIBRANT LIFE in Canberra. He didn’t even want to leave Goulburn to move to Canberra and make grade because the carefully laid out roads alarmed and overwhelmed him. There is something essentially decent about this, especially in light of what has been happening at the Raiders for a long time but was thrown into rude relief this year so that they are now what are referred to in professional media circles as a “problem club”, which is also nice.   

Here is Dugan signing with the Dragons

Of course, the professionals are right, but most of this year’s unpleasant ‘problems’ are representative of a psychological syndrome at the Raiders that I notice has become steadily and now suddenly worse as the years wear on – that of finding Canberra a dissatisfying and dispiriting place to live and play in.

Canberra is not going to change. Young and restless players are going to continue to find themselves trapped in Sartre-like “huis clos” – a “no exit” hell of their own making, and will continue to lose fans and alienate people by seeking or forcing releases.

Here is Blake being bad 

Short of relocating the entire club to Perth I don’t know what can be done about this.  

Performance-wise, the Raiders veer between the passable and the incompetent. Off-field, they have always maintained a relatively calm surface which has been ruptured at obligingly spaced intervals by the sort of scandals that are better understood if you keep a copy of the ACT’s criminal statutes handy and prominent.

The gradual and then sudden unspooling of Todd Carney’s entire Canberra career, Joel Monaghan being blown by a teammate’s dog, Josh Dugan confounding everyone by turning out to be a total dickhead and Blake Ferguson making me so sad I can’t even bring myself to mention him beyond this point on here are some of the more seismic ruptures.

See also:

Coach Furner’s sacking

The senior player revolt that led to Coach Furner’s sacking

Hemorrhaging hundreds of points in a series of huge late season losses

Suffering the most catastrophic loss in club history – Storm 68 Raiders 4

Dropping from a lofty ladder position to one lower than Clint Eastwood’s balls but still higher than the Eels

Papa Josh announcing his plans to join the priesthood

Anthony Milford’s attempts to avoid having to suffer the dreadful corrosive reality of living in Canberra now that people outside of Canberra know his name        

Papa and Milford going rogue and getting on the drink two days before their must win match against the Warriors in Auckland which   

Papa throwing up in their hotel corridor

Letting Sam Williams go and now facing the very real possibility of going from having too many halves to no halves next year

Sandor Earl being awarded the opportunity to explore his capacities for regret, despair and banned substances outside of the NRL  

The death of #Dorguson

Ricky Stuart

Here are Papa and Milford being best friends



Here are Papa's shorts creeping into his crotch 

 

Here is Milford's hair
 

Here is Blake being bae

Here is everyone who has anything to do with the Raiders

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raiders v. Dugan - Judgment Day

Spending more time than is probably healthy suckled up to the Dugan tit? You’ve come to the right place.

The problem with Josh Dugan and Canberra was that the Raiders demand low maintenance superstars who hum along quietly. As Dugan developed from raw housing commission colt to sleek thoroughbred his self-regard developed along with him, healthily at first, then not so healthily, until, finally, it became toxic.

 

Basically the Raiders are chronic underperformers and need to conduct themselves accordingly. This means behaving in a humble and gracious manner, and keeping the ostentatious off-field flourishes to a minimum. Dugan’s spirited accommodation of all things ostentatious defied this and, as he tells it, led to him being very cruelly cast out of Canberra and onto some crude scrapheap.

Well, what of it? I mean he’s not the first sports star to suffer under the staggering weight of Australia’s idiotic dislike of grossly-disproportionate-to-talent egotism.

 

Anyway. Tomorrow the Raiders play the Dragons in what is without a trace of hyperbole THEIR GAME OF THE YEAR. Because who among us doesn’t want to see Josh Dugan pay and pay dearly never minding the fact that this desire is pretty much redundant I mean it’s been   months since he was driven out of Canberra and forced to seek asylum with the Dragons and it doesn’t seem to have cost him much at all other than the small matter of his reputation and any lingering shreds of likeability that his increasing abrasiveness hadn’t corroded in the last 12 or so months at the Raiders anyway?

Whatever. Raider fans take what they can goddamn get.   

And as it is I’ve been struggling with this whole sordid trajectory since back when Dugan’s name was first getting mentioned for Origin:

It may help to think of Dugan as an ex. You know how you don’t want to see them reduced to a quivering gelatinous mess without you, but you don’t want the bastard/bitch soaring to lofty new heights since being rid of you either? It’s a fine line and one which Dugan has already overstepped with crude insensitivity.

Before this, even, there was that incident during his first game for the Dragons that constituted an irreparable defilement and has squatted toadishly in a dark recess of my mind ever since – the moment where DAVE DUGAN filled the big screen at Kogarah, wearing a Dragons jersey, grinning and waving and looking as proud and florid as any father ever could. Galling! All those years at the Raiders and the most I ever saw of Daddy Dugan was in the god-awful tattoo of Mr. and Mrs. Dugan on their wedding day that roams across the lower half of one of his son’s legs and stretches even my elastic boundaries of taste.

Let’s not spend a lot of time on this. He is just an asterisk now, and I’ve already exceeded the limits of both my magnanimity and medication on the son of a bitch these last few months. Alls I hope for, aside from an emphatic Raiders victory, is that he comes out of tomorrow’s game ravaged and stripped of swag, like he’s just been worked over by a pack of wild dogs.

It would be nice if I could say this with even a shred of certainty, but of course I can’t what with the Raiders being an inherently untrustworthy outfit prone to fluctuations in mood and manner that make the Greek government look stable. In any case, it’s been real and it’s about to get realer.

 

 

The Dugan Saga

Fucking Josh Dugan. Ever since he left the Raiders he’s been a source of renewable energy as far as irritation is concerned.

I didn’t overly mind him going to another club at first. I didn’t want to go down the ‘if we can’t have him no one should’ pathway because it is an ugly way of thinking and one best left for the family court systems and dissatisfied fathers who kill their partners or children and then themselves. And just quickly while I’m here has Dugan’s stinking shitbag of a spawn been born yet? Because if any stinking shitbag is worthy of commemorative crockery this year surely it is Dugan’s and not, as general frenzy would have us believe, Prince William and his cardboard-cutout-gyro-reticulate-eyed wife’s Royal one?

Now though he’s just getting on my nerves. Everything gets on my nerves of course. Because they’re shot, mainly, but also because everything is fucking annoying, one vile task after another in a vile horizonless tapestry, so much so that my mother has developed a catchphrase out of my neuroses so that every time I say something is getting on my nerves including and often referring specifically to her she just says “you and your nerves”.

Yeah. Me and my nerves.

In any case, I hear he has said some derogatory things about the Raiders. I say ‘hear’ because I have not bothered to ‘read’ these things because I am ‘lazy’. And also because I like to adhere to that great and proud tradition of writing slanderous things about somebody without bothering to avail myself of the information on which I’m largely basing my slander. Yeah, cunts, welcome to the internet.

 

 

Whatever it was he said, it’s safe to say he doesn’t seem to have a sophisticated grasp, if any, of the delicate circumstances surrounding him, and really why would he what with moving fairly seamlessly from the Raiders to the Dragons to Origin?

As upward trajectories go it is fine and faultless, but rude post-Raider realities have forced me to concede that what he needed was an injunction, ala Todd Carney, in which to turn a few tight transgressive loops of a downward spiral.

 

This didn’t happen. Those stupid photos of him laboring manually on a building site while wearing a pristine white hoodie don’t count and neither do any of the other small indignities he has heaped upon himself recently and now the Dragons play the Raiders this Saturday and I guess as grudge matches go this will be a good one even though there is no justice because were there any justice my personal preference for Dugan’s punishment would surely have been implemented post haste and instead of playing football he would be spending his weekends  tonging sausages on a hotplate outside of Bunnings because this far more than football is a test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man and quite frankly who wouldn’t want to see that?  

 

 

Blake Ferguson & The Case For & Against Caging Footballers

 

Blake Ferguson went to court yesterday and entered a not guilty plea to an indecent assault charge.

Court documents allege Ferguson “touched vagina”.

The matter was adjourned until September, so it is for Blake, as it is for everyone, a matter of waiting.

We all wait, at all times, for everything. For doctors, for hospital beds, for transplants, for tradesmen, for Telstra, for elections, for planes, for your number to be called at the deli, for something to fucking change, for death.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me – and if you are congratulations – you will appreciate the high stakes aesthetics of his courthouse style. Internationally, Lindsay Lohan and Michael Jackson set the ‘arriving at court in style’ bar at lofty heights, well out of reach of the general population, to which, if you heed the damning reports, you would know these vagina touching NRL footballers do not believe they belong.

Many recent incidents seem to have confirmed the increasingly commonly held belief that footballers can no longer be trusted to perform ordinary individual acts in any unsupervised capacity. Maybe none more so than Russell Packer, who not five minutes after failing to utilise the unadulterated access to amenities that the dressing sheds presumably provide, stood on field and, hands on hips and before an audience of thousands, released down his leg a great stream of urine.

I’m sorry but whether public or private there’s something unseemly about a man who doesn’t hold his dick to do this. It’s animal.

Packer’s proof that performing basic ablutions are beyond the realm of what we can expect from footballers works very much in favour of the advocates moving to cage and quarantine players for all but the 80 minutes of game time required of them each week. As a movement, it’s gaining momentum.  

They say that based on the current climate very little seems to separate NRL players from the animal world already. They argue that random vagina touching and flagrant hands free urination are but two more threads that make up the ever-narrowing link between footballer and beast.

I don’t deny this. I did, after all, see that stream of piss, those stained shorts, and the sunglasses Blake Ferguson wore on his way to court to plead not guilty.

Still, I am fundamentally opposed to this movement. In actual fact I’m an advocate for footballers gaining recognition as a protected species and being awarded certain civic and civil liberties that allow them to roam among us drones free and unfettered.

 

This could be a platform from which either side could win this fucking election we’re waiting on. And wouldn’t that actually be something worth waiting for, aside from grim death of course.   

 

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.   

In Dugan's Defense

Poor Dugan. Poor Boy-Bambi.

He has become a human punch line.

So he’s run his ship up onto some rocks. Who hasn’t? I’ll tell you who hasn’t – the flat-pack fuckwits who don’t have the guts or sense to get down in it. Fuck them. Fuck their lame tweets; 140 characters or less of dull, putrid, limping nothingness.

There should be no shame in a bit of flailing around amid the deeply fallible seas of human social congress. Larry David made a career out of it.

It’s tough for the modern footballer. Their wits are inevitably already dulled from having their heads driven down into their necks and their necks driven down into their shoulders since they were young and soft of skull. Their brains probably slop around inside those misshapen skulls like crème caramels released from their ramekins too soon. It is unreasonable to expect their behaviour to be better than that of the average firm brained citizen. It is remarkable that they can even keep abreast of the tackle count or recognise their teammates if you ask me, which obviously no one does, frustratingly.  

Then, there’s the relentless tracking of personal lives, and invasive technology allowing everything to be conveyed within seconds to the wider world which, frankly, is an ugly and undignified place full of ugly and undignified people who fight like half-starved dogs over every scrap of information as it comes and clamber to post their small utterings of inanity which we now call comment.

They are poised now, haunches flexed and empty gazes narrowed, ready to fight and froth dog-like over the corpse of Josh Dugan’s career.

 

 N.B. - All the existentialism in the world will not make you question the universe so much as an idle scroll through a standard comment section or exchange in the online NRL community. The only thing that sets this little exchange apart from the ceaseless shit-stream is Dugan’s correct use of ‘too’, which no one seemed to notice or find cute, so caught up were they in the tedious indignation that passes for controversy. Whatever. I found it cute.   

My Brother is a Self-Hating Raider Fan

The Raiders.

Maddening.

They madden no one more than my brother.

It pains him to follow them, yet he does so forensically.

They drive him to aggressive distraction, yet he cannot stop with them.

It’s a deeply complicated business. To cope, he does what we do when those we love but wish to Christ we didn’t love disappoint and pain us – he treats them with obsessive cruelty and holds them in serious contempt.

And while he claims to wish he could quit them, somewhere, in the dark recesses of his brain and bone marrow, there is great love and tenderness for the Raiders.  The conflict this creates  - great and abiding loyalty overlaid with everyday weariness and woe – is essentially what makes him a self-hating Raider fan.

My phone reception was down all night so we didn’t get to exchange the usual stream of profound and brutal texts. He doesn’t have Foxtel so he goes out in public to watch them and this probably magnifies his pain when they lose but he seems to like sitting among down-and-outs and listening to their unique commentary and some of the things he hears we immediately incorporate into our own commentary, like a few years ago, when Daniel Vidot made a break, and an old man stiffened, sat up ramrod straight and screamed “RUN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!” We use that one a lot.

In the early hours of the morning my sleep was ruptured by my phone barring up and receiving texts, including the mysterious question from my best friend: “Are you the feminist environmental league????” but mostly coming from my brother.

They are looking alright but no better than the Warriors. What happened to Shillo? Is Earl down too?

William called. No voicemail message was left.

God Croker is a ball hog – pass it to your winger you fool IT’S A TEAM SPORT.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is turning into rot.

William called. No voicemail was left.

Total rot.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is the worst set I have ever seen.

William called. No voicemail was left.

This is killing me.

 

Apparently it didn’t kill him because after he’d left (“the place went OFF after that last Lee try!”) and returned home he had the wherewithal to call my old broke-down phone, which I had had the wherewithal to switch on, and after raving excitedly about the mystifying nature of the Raiders, which is what we do following 90% of their wins and most of their losses too when I think about it, he said “Alright I have to go – my Kiev’s will be overdone – I slipped home at halftime to put them in the oven – but I tell you, if they’d lost I would have come home and thrown them against the wall!”

He would have, too, and the thing is it requires almost no imagination to envision the circumstances in which this could have occurred. Maddening.

Things I've Tried Telling Myself Today To Paper Over The Pain of Losing Josh Dugan

1.      His inherent douchiness was getting harder and harder to defend

2.      The more weight he’s put on the less I’ve liked him

3.      He’s having a baby and look what happened to Lleyton Hewitt when he had a baby HE LOST HIS MONGREL AND WENT TO SHIT

4.      He’s having a baby and will instantly become less cool, more fool

5.      He’s having a baby and I am unable to relate to people with babies SO BYE

6.      The Ray Lewis tattoo

7.      He is constantly CONSTANTLY fucking injured. Why bother packing on all that unsightly extra muscle if you’re still doubling over grimacing in apparent agony twenty minutes into every game you play which due to your underlying flimsiness is actually only every fourth or fifth game anyway? I believe this is what old man Hellier called a Catch 22, although I have not read the book I mean have you no I didn’t think so.

8.      Reece Robinson makes a fine fullback

9.      Reece Robinson is *fine* generally

10.  His beard I mean why hide the hot especially if its dwindling anyway

11.  What was with the boil outbreaks

12.  The senior players no longer wanted to play alongside him and by play they mostly mean witness him injure his ribs ankles knees shoulders ego

13.  He has a Staffy and in real life I hate Staffys and the men who own them so this was doing nothing for my integrity frankly

14.  You can’t polish a turd

15.  He’ll always be my Bambi

Canberra Raider Fans - A Guide

Raider fans can be divided into two loose groups*.

You have your deluded fools – know them by their seemingly bright but actually dead-from-never-having-lived eyes - and you have your weary fatalists – jaundiced, hollow of eye, with a keen sense of the absurd and the tragic and a propensity for passing dark comments concerning the soul-crushing shuffle toward grim death that passes for life.

If you’ve ever trudged down the cycle way and through the tunnel in the bush out the back of Bruce stadium to return to your freely-parked car after a rude loss in what was most probably just one in a spirit-sapping string of rude losses you will know them, this second type. 

Few who have stared into the void can resist the lure of anarchic, mounted-curb parking**. Something – or everything - about it attracts the jaundiced fan while the perky optimists who have never seen into the abyss or screamed into the sky hand five dollar notes to men in hi-vis vests for the privilege of parking in an orderly and easily accessible fashion.

If you don’t attend Raider home games, and quite frankly who can blame you, the delusionals are still easily identifiable. Just follow the Raiders on Facebook and scroll through the avalanche of comments that appear after every post. Like most breeds of idiot they are not shy about making their presence known.

I think this is the year for the Raiders. Go Raiders. Mack us proud boys. Goo the green machine! 2013 here we come. With Berrigan back we can’t loose!

I have nothing against delusions. Some of my best friends are delusional. But the reality writ large on a brightly lit screen can be jarring if your nerves are at all raw. It is for this reason that I suggested several Raider fans I know start filing their nerve endings in February. I did not know that Josh Dugan would run sharply afoul of coach Furner after only the first round and have his $650 000 a year contract most probably evapourate in a dramatic swirl of pre-mixed liquor and profanity.  I praise Jesus that I didn’t know either because no amount of nerve-filing could have prepared them for this and they would have rotted out with the weight of it.

So when the Raiders announce their round 1 team lineup on Facebook and they’re missing three of their four spine players and are without a goal kicker and several hundred people who are blind to weird and volatile realities post comments like GREAT SIDE and WE WILL CRUSH THOSE PANTHERS LIKE ANTS  -  there’s that one guy who writes “we’re fucked”. 

Well, guess what? He was right. We really are fucked.

And you know what else? We kind of like it that way.

*Please note that I am ONLY talking about Raider fans here. Do not assume that fans of other troubled clubs *coughCRONULLAcough* have the same or similar characteristics. For example, it is my understanding that fair portions of the Shire’s population have been inspired to go out and get commemorative Sharks neck tattoos this last week, rendering them eternally ridiculous. No, they are a team with their own unique problems and fans, and just as Germany is a country now forever stained in our collective consciousness by a string of poorly-received 20^th century wars and related unpleasantness, so too are the poor Sharks. It’s all very unfortunate but then show me something in this world that isn’t.

**Because everybody knows that the way you park provides clues about your essential character. Like when George Costanza compares parking garages to going to a prostitute: why should he pay for it when, if he applies himself, he can eventually get it for free? Yes.