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?  

 

 

The Raiders Dragons Hoodoo

On Monday night the bus carrying a full load of Red-V fans to Canberra clapped out in Goulburn. I was an unenthusiastic about this match as I have ever been, about anything, ever, until I heard this news right before kickoff and became inexplicably animated and highly excited. Something about hearing that the opposition supporters were in a pickle (and in Goulburn, which is really one and the same) fired my core. I don’t know if this was a possible side effect of my unprocessed rage toward the world or what, but it carried me about fifty minutes through the game.  The Dragon supporters arrived fifteen minutes before the end, just as the Dragons had pulled ahead 18-16 and looked certain to win. They immediately started making a lot of noise and waving their sophisticated and witty signs around and being fucking annoying and making me think murderous hateful thoughts that originated with them but extended rapidly to the whole damn world.

I’m not blowing any minds by saying that Bruce stadium is no longer the fortress it once was. Teams used to dread playing in Canberra. Ricky Stuart used to make it his personal responsibility before games to stand in the car park and meet visiting teams as they disembarked from their bus, raining threats and curses and making menacing comments about the cold and the unfortunate effects he foresaw it having on their game.  

These days are gone, of course. Today, all that remains is the air of a fairground’s faded loveliness.

The air of faded loveliness extends as far as the playing group, but not as far as the coach. Coach Furner’s incompetence is not charming or raffish. It’s just incredibly, incredibly annoying. He does not warrant the sepia-tinged splendor that the Raiders name and history bestows. The bell tolls for thee Furner: consignment to oblivion awaits.  

The faded glory thing is nice. Not necessarily useful in any practical sense, but nice nonetheless. The vice-like grip we have the Dragons in is another thing entirely. It is psychologically satisfying in a very deep sense, yes, but it is also the best and most enduring oddity in the NRL.

The fact that it is the Raiders who are the keepers of the game’s greatest hoodoo just enhances the highly improbable and excellent nature of the whole mystifying thing. I mean, any old team can just beat other teams indiscriminately and at will through hard work and good completion rates. It takes truly a strange and enigmatic a team to uphold a hoodoo as potent as this.

This hoodoo is the greatest mystery of the modern game. It is the NRL equivalent of the giant squids with eyes the size of dinner plates. It is the elusive thing that saw Sam Williams do some nifty stuff in the 78^th minute to get Reece Robinson over for a try to snatch the game back from the Dragons. It is the same thing that saw Josh Dugan slam down that audacious 80^th minute try off a short kick-off last year that won the game. It is the same thing that has kept the Dragons winless at Bruce Stadium for the last twelve years, and has kept that fossil Matt Cooper from ever beating the Raiders anywhere. It’s awesome. It's ours. Long may it endure.

Everybody Loves Weyman, or, The Horror of Long Haul Bus Rides

You know how when you talk a lot about football you end up talking almost as much about life, because the two so regularly intersect? Well, it was only a matter of time before the intersection between football and the visual arts demanded attention. Read on, culture vultures!

A fabulous life-sized bronze statue of Dragons behemoth Michael Weyman has been fashioned by a local artist in his hometown of Moruya and installed it in the park by the river. I can think of several hundred NRL players I would prefer to see immortalised in bronze ahead of Weyman (the visually splendid Carney astride the Big Merino, for one) but, still. From what I saw the artist appeared to have captured something of Weyman’s essential blue-collar, battle-axe spirit, as well as that look of piercing, squinting, enraged-bull stoicism he wears a while running at and/or over the top of opponents. (“Get Out of my Weyman”- humourous Red V sign)

I used to ride the Pioneer bus up and down that coast constantly from Bega to Nowra between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Months of my life were spent on that bus, nauseously watching landscape flash past though dirty windows. Moruya was the scheduled stop for the meal break*. It was a faded, seedy town in a state of nonchalant, not altogether offensive disrepair back then. Still, that river mouth or estuary thing lent the place a certain air of raffish elegance in a Mark Twain kind of a way. Towns with a river passing through them somehow always appear more interesting than towns without, even if they are filled with poor-looking people and mean-looking dogs and signs pocked with shotgun blasts. Perhaps the Weyman statue has added a new, more sophisticated dimension to the character of the place. I hope so. I hope the artist hasn’t misread his market. The Laurie Daly statue certainly lifts the tone of Bruce Stadium, but Laurie Daly is a very charming man so it almost goes without saying that his bronze rendering exudes characteristic charisma and charm.  So. Michelangelo’s David, Laurie Daly, and MICHAEL WEYMAN.

In any case, if you haven’t experienced a long distance coach ride you really haven’t lived. To ride on a cross country coach is to engage with a sordid underside of sad and awful lives.  You only really go on a long distance bus because you can’t afford to fly, you can’t afford a car, or you are a delinquent who has been forbidden from driving, and possibly from living within three hundred meters of schools and daycare centres as well.  As a result, most of the people on long distance buses are one of the following: actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, or just released from prison.  

In the same way that you do not buy a meat pie for the meat, you do not expect to meet the finest and best of mankind on long distance buses. I mean, you wouldn’t expect to slip into an empty seat beside the corduroy-wearing Stephen Fry, would you? Hardly. The whole experience is infected with an inexpressible melancholy, punctuated by occasional eruptions of violence as passengers lapse into psychotic episodes and are abruptly ejected from the bus. Additionally, there is the smell. It is a heady bouquet of stale, BO-steeped upholstery and grim, unspecified despair, and it increases in intensity the further back into the bowels of the bus you go. Apparently the Pioneer bus company has become the Premier bus company and has drastically cut back on trips and drastically jacked up their prices.  I wonder where this has left the dangerously disordered and the chronically down and out who genuinely need the bus service to travel up and down the coast? When is the world going to be arranged to benefit the people who need small mercies such as these?  

In other NRL art news (not a sentence I ever expected to write, but something I feel we could all do with more of in our lives), a portrait of Ryan Tandy has been entered in the Archibald competition. It’s a full frontal nude and he is depicted, just as nature intended, with a blue pig lying by his side. It took me aback when I saw it. I stared in a kind of frozen astonishment. The last I saw of Tandy he was being unceremoniously evicted from his apartment, hauling boxes and sweating profusely. He was locked into the slow, untidy spiral of decline that had seen him charged with match fixing and fired from the Bulldogs amid accusations of a gambling problem and substantial debts.

Clearly his personal decision making processes leave something to be desired, but, still, moments of mental collapse happen to the both the best and worst of us, and, if they didn’t our lives wouldn’t be enriched by wonderful moments such as Mel Gibson being caught driving with an open bottle of tequila clenched between his thighs and calling a cop “sugar-tits”. Mad respect to anyone who brings the term sugar-tits back to public prominence.

Really wakes up your interest in the visual arts, all this, doesn’t it?

*Me- “Was that takeaway in Moruya called the Red Rose Café?”

-Brother- “Yeah. Wasn’t that where we used to buy footy cards too?”

Todd Carney: Sands Through the Hourglass

This Todd Carney saga, my god. It's dragging like Nate Myles' knuckles. Settle in with a bag of salted nuts and a dash of weary fatalism as it enters another week, with eleventh hour interest from the Dragons putting the kaibosh on what was to be a certain signing with the Sharks. Allegedly. All of this is alleged, meaning no one knows what the fuck they are talking about but continue to publish wildly speculative articles in which everyone and anyone even remotely connected to the story refuses to comment.

On the other hand, I have no idea what's happening but am gagging to comment. This is the very essence of the internet and especially of blogging, no? I am singularly unequipped to grasp the appalling complexity of the cat's cradle of vested interests at stake in the high stakes game of SIGNING TODD CARNEY. I am also singularly unimpressed with the glimpse into the machinations of the masters of the League that this saga has provided. But then, my perspective may be ever so slightly distorted. Since I'm still hung up on the belief that the Raiders committed the crime and cock-up of the decade by sacking him in 2008. So yeah. There's a certain sense of ideological betrayal still lingering. Whatever. It keeps me sharp.

Obviously the thought of Toddy playing for the Dragons turns my stomach. This is an entirely unpalatable prospect, and is in no way a part of my coherent world view. There are many reasons for this; including but not limited to the fact that I don't much care for the Dragons, but the biggest is that basically I don't want my loved ones mixing with Jamie Soward. No sir, no way. That boy is bad news. Jamie Soward is a detestable player, and one that is sunk so deeply into his own needs and wants that rudeness has become inevitable and ingrained. And if you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas. And probably crabs, in this case. Anyways, this is no time to start in on Jamie Soward. I just had a shower and I want to retain my clean feeling. 

This is all very tiring. I can only imagine how exhausting Toddy must be finding the whole ordeal. Oh no, wait, he's been tearing it up in Thailand. With sweet and sad-faced Raider AND FELLOW GOULBURN SON Jarrod Croker. Sweet merciful Christ on a cracker. Still, this is what dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool hooligans do when the spectre of oblivion looms, it's what separates the contenders from the pretenders, don't you know?

Even my mother has got in on the drama of it all. During phone calls she has taken to assuming a tone of genuine, maternal, sympathetic concern and asking "and how is Toddy?" whenever I mention anything about league and occasionally even when I don't. You know, like Carney and I share some kind of an actual relationship instead of me just writing a blog loosely based on his life and times? Yeh. Delusion runs in the family.

Round 21: the Rabbitohs Rob the Raiders

August and September? Not.A.Fan. Maybe if I was a Storm supporter I would feel differently - wait, no. If I was a Storm fan I would have to like at least one of either Cameron Smith or Billy Slater, right? Forget it.

They say this is when things get exciting. I beg to differ. Tell me what's exciting about your team languishing in the bin-juices at the bottom of the ladder with the Roosers and the Eels for company and thanking god for the abominable consistency of the cellar-dwelling Titans.

This 'feeling grateful for the Titans' thing doesn't sit well with me. I don't like being indebted to teams like the Titans, it makes me feel unclean. Poor Scott Prince, though. I mean, honestly. Shit is dire. I don't even dream about David Gallop ordering the demolition of his illegal house these days. No. That would make me really, really mean. Months ago he was wearing a look more commonly seen in forced labour camps, and now it's spread to and deadened his once-twinkly eyes. Normally I'd offer advice along the lines of 'the way out is through'. Not this time. The stench of defeat that surrounds him is far too strong, and as such I spurn him in the same way that I spurn the advances of Nickleback enthusiasts, i.e. with extreme prejudice and occasional violence.

No, August and September are not for me. I much prefer the sense of potential and promise and POSSIBILITY that pervades the NRL air throughout May and June. You know, before things go all awry? Before things go to shit? Yes, better days. Happier days.

Still. It's not like I'm mired in misery. I said weeks ago that I looked forward to the Raiders; unencumbered by pesky top eight expectations or responsibilities, getting loose and lairy and playing some exciting, flamboyant footy. A backline of Josh Dugan, Blake Ferguson and Daniel-'I'm back bitches'-Vidot is an exciting prospect if youthful exuberance is your thing. I want to see them throwing it around with wild abandon and unbridled enthusiasm. Y'know, like they're onstage at Mooseheads loaded up on stilnox and whiskey sours? But no. All quiet on the baby Raider backline.

Speaking of throwing it around, how is the flaming intensity of Johnathan Thurston's sideline manner? I know, he's injured, which means that I'm supposed to be hoping he makes it back into his hot-hiding headgear and onto the field asap, right? Forget it. JT's maniacal behaviour at the Cowboys' games has been the highlight of my NRL week now for three weeks straight. Don't go hurrying back now, JT. Steady as she goes.

Now, I would find a cardboard cutout of JT endearing and alluring and endlessly charming. Note my use of 'would'. Not 'do'.. *eyes dart shiftily*.  Obviously, then, Thurston on the sidelines, dressed in tidy civilian clothes and emoting like an audience member at an Oprah taping is a sight to behold. Bitch goes bananas! The highs! The lows! JT rides them like he would a burning clutch in a stolen Datsun180b. Hard, in other words.

So, there's JT sideline and monitoring the Cowboys' every play with the ruthless intensity of a pimp. At least we have that. But, sans Paul Gallan and Micheal Ennis, well, there's a VOID now, no? Not just in the teams - it's not like I give a damn what's happening to the team dynamics of the Dogs or the Sharks, just quietly - but in the general fabric of the game.

It's not like it's a veritable snoozefest, by any means. Exciting things are afoot. I think I'm just fatigued. Burnt out. It's tough, this business of fandom. Tougher than even I knew.

I got right onboard with the Roosters and Bulldogs game last weekend, the one where both teams, but particularly the Roosters, did away with defence altogether? That was a treat. Refreshing as a mint julep served on a Southern porch. Otherwise? Aside from Luke Lewis creeping up on Alan Tongue in the 'Face Like a Smashed Crab' stakes, I'm officially on the nod.

Now. One last thing - and may I recommend reading this with gritted teeth since that's how I wrote it - I found the Bunnies' audacious comeback from 20 -0 against the Dragons to be both a personal affront to me, as a Bunny hater, and, worse, an insult to my delicate sensibilities as a Raider fan. I mean, way to overshadow our 80th minute pressure-play demolition of the Dragons last Monday! I know, I know, the Rabbits have so little, I hear you say, how can I deny them this victorious moment given their status as a team full of failed potential who have only made the finals once in the last TEN years? Well, it's because I am an irrepressible bitch, that's how. And because they stole our thunder, goddamnit. Now it looks like any old shitkicker team can come out and beat the Dragons on their day. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Raider fans were meant to marinate in the juices of that win until at least the end of the year, and Dragons fans were meant to feel the burn of unexpected defeat for many weeks to come.

The Rabbits have rendered this redundant. Thanks a bunch, Rabbitohs. RETRIBUTION AWAITS.
Right after I take this nap.