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.

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.

Where to for The Wild Colonial Boy Carney?

We all have bad years.

Todd Carney just seems to have them more often than most. Annually, actually, if you discount last year.
(As it happened, 2010 was my own annus horribilus. In this sense, it would appear that I took one for you Todd. You're welcome honey).

So he's somewhat wayward. Hello? He's from Goulburn for chrissakes, it's practically Deadwood out there. You know when the courts banned him, for a year, FROM THE WHOLE TOWN? Seth Bullock was totally there with his sheriff badge on display to escort him beyond the shire limits. And Al Swearengen was totally giving them both the long-range stink-eye from the Gem's balcony as they went.

Anyway, I digress. As it happens, I have more HBO-influenced digressions daily than I care to admit, Unless I'm paying somebody with framed degrees on their wall for a 50 minute session that is.

I heard Mick 'Atherton Publican' Nasser say that he would be more than happy for Carney to return and resume tending his bar and playing for his footy team and occasionally being beaten on by hostile locals. I like Mick Nasser, in the same way that I tend to like most North Queenslanders of his generation and disposition.

Also, I like that Tablelands. I myself spent a thoroughly satisying and illuminating night in an Atherton pub once, where a bell kept sounding periodically to signify the sale of $1 pots, and things quickly became what you might describe as 'colourful'.

A man set out to demonstrate to me his illustrious trick of making a full schooner magnetically adhere, at eye level, to where two walls met in a corner using only the power of his mind. To say that his repeated and best efforts never quite lived up to expectation barely hints at the scale of the shattered glasses and volume of spilt beer. Not to mention the sprays of blood after he trod in the glass and sliced open the toe that was hanging over the edge of his double plugger.

Another man told me that he worked nights on a chicken farm. His job was to creep, by stealth and under a cloak of darkness, around the chicken yards, ambushing the drowsy chickens by seizing them around the legs and gathering them in bunches of three birds per hand per swoop. He provided plenty of technical detail and even a demonstration (North Queenslanders are, by and large, nothing if not a demonstrative people) of his "special high-step".

The finer details from here on in are a trifle sketchy, but MAYBE I asked what the hell he wanted with the chickens anyway, and MAYBE he gaped at me and said "to turn them into chicken", and certainly it was at this point that the exchange became *ahem* inflamed.

He became highly excited, and, in an incredible bar-room matamorphosis, took on the exact characteristics and movements of a highly excited chicken, albeit a three sheets to the wind chicken. I don't think he much liked me pointing out the similarities, but, really, they were astonishing. His Adam's apple became all over-active and erratic, and he was scratching and bobbing and ducking and looking all beaky and beady and peevish, much the same as Brian Smith tends to look in the coaching box, and tends to sound in post-match press-conferences, and pretty much comes across as in general, now that I think of it.

Anyway, we argued and raved until he eventaully left to go to work ambushing said chickens, at which point my boyfriend suggested that perhaps announcing my vegetarianism by saying "I don't eat meat" was less than ideal, and that in future I should use the less strident "I choose not to eat meat". I suppose he suggested this in the hope that I would appear less slogan-screaming activist, more zen-like pacifist. Or maybe he'd just wanted to take the chicken-catcher up on his invitation, extended pre-fight, to accompany him to the chicken yards "to see me in action", and was miffed that I'd blown it for him.

Either way, his suggestion erupted into something of an arguement of our own. Because we were well-oiled on $1 pots, it was one of those extravagantly wide-ranging and fairly good-humoured arguements that tend to occur among the happy and the half-cut, when things are generally going well and you're enjoying your surrounds.

Things picked up even more when the barman, with zero fanfare, started spinning a noisy lottery wheel of some kind from behind the bar. Due to the sheer quantity of $1 pots we'd consumed, and thus the sheer quantity of raffle tickets we'd amassed with each purchase, we swept the field and won three sixpacks of XXXX.

In light of our good fortune, we decided to book into a room upstairs so that we could settle in for some serious drinking downstairs. It was brilliant. I borrowed a mango farmer's enormous pair of pull-on work boots to clomp around the bar in and swapped shirts with a jillaroo, and when we finally retired to our upstairs quarters my boyfriend, leering out onto the street below, fell out of the open window and rolled halfway down the roof before regaining control of himself. Brilliant.


So, yes, I agree with Nasser. I think the Tablelands would be a fabulous place for Carney to defrag. Again.

I know he seemed by all accounts to settle comfortably into city life, and I've seen the pictures of him strolling on Coogee Bay Rd and Bondi Beach but in my mind I cannot reconcile The Wild Colonial Boy that is Carney with these urban and coastal surrounds. What is there for anyone at the Coogee Bay Hotel or the Cross other than the lingering possibility, however abstract, of finding shit in your food, and having PR girls draw all over your face with lipstick?

Failing Atherton, or a return to Canberra*, I would suggest a sabbatical in the West. Kalgoorlie, say, or perhaps Port Hedland. Good, solid, frontier-type towns full of good, solid sorts with tanned throats and, I imagine, a certain appreciation for an exiled outlaw from Over East.

That's all I'm saying, other than, again, and as always, you're welcome honey.

* the long-standing, million-to-one Pie In My Sky