Cameron Smith's Catastrophic Plan

It started off so innocently. Tell me something that doesn’t.

First it was Horse Weyman, for reasons which are still unclear, but, okay. He seems harmless, you let it slide, you’ve made a life out of ‘letting it slide’, after all.   

Next, G.I. Well, you can understand it; I’m coming from a place of respect, he’s a leading proponent of devastation and now that he no longer looks like Precious he has a certain sleek allure and has anyone actually ever made a successful tackle on him I mean one that he didn’t casually reel out of? I think not.

Now, though, Cameron Smith? If I keep this up there will be no one left to loath. Where the fuck will it END? What, with me liking Jamie Soward?? That is the last frontier. As far as I am concerned, if I cross that terrible threshold it’s finished I’m finished this blog is finished and I will surrender myself via voluntary admission to the nearest locked ward for some electroshock therapy and Vaseline-related violations. And that would not do. That wouldn’t do at all. Vaseline is vile stuff. 

I’ve always enjoyed detesting Cameron Smith. Now that I don’t, it feels like a loss.

The son of a bitch made a clean sweep this year. Captaining the Storm to a premiership, a seventh straight Origin series and 2 from 2 Kangaroo victories over the Kiwis. The only other players to achieve this are Lockyer and Langer and they’re Broncos and if there’s one team that annoys me more than the Storm the Rabbitohs and the Tigers it’s the Broncos.

Once I started empathising with him it was all over. It always is. Empathy is an irritatingly powerful tool for dismantling prejudice, ill-will and irrational dislike. The empathising began when I started watching him closely. I can’t remember when, or why, I started doing this. I can’t remember when the sight of poplar trees dropping their leaves started setting off my preoccupation with time and death that has come out of nowhere in the last two years. I can’t remember when I vowed to never read Ulysses because to read it is to condone it, or when I decided it was ethically okay to eat Hungry Jacks but not McDonalds. You just do stuff and say stuff until gradually and then suddenly it’s entangled within you and then it is you.

So I watch him, doing work, going about his terrible business all calm and laser-like and perfect and I know I FUCKING KNOW what is going on in his head with every play every tackle every kick every run every metre and most of all with every idiot opponent he encounters and the song lyric equivalent of this is that they are all, to paraphrase, microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan designed and directed by his red right hand and also Craig Bellamy.

Metallica Song Dedications For Rabbitoh Players

Damage Inc.  – Greg Inglis

Overkill – Adam Reynolds

Blitzkrieg – Michael Crocker

My World – Greg Inglis

Battery – Ben Lowe

King Nothing – John Sutton

Wherever I May Roam – Greg Inglis

Crash Course in Brain Surgery – Sam Burgess

Bad Seed – Isaac Luke

Motor Breath – Chris McQueen

Fixxxer – Greg Inglis

Don’t Tread on Me – Nathan Merritt

Master of Puppets – Greg Inglis

Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth) – Eddie Pettybourne

So What – Shaune Corrigan

The Frayed Ends of Sanity – Roy Asotasi

Nothing Else Matters – Greg Inglis

Aint My Bitch – Luke Burgess

Whiplash – Nathan Peats

All Within My Hands – Greg Inglis

Invisible Kid - Andrew Everingham

Carpe Diem Baby – Dylan Farrell

Better Than You – Greg Inglis

Trapped Under Ice  - Jason Clark

Leper Messiah – David Tyrrel

Human – Justin Hunt

Some Kind of Monster – Dave Taylor

Die. Die My Darling - Greg Inglis

Hero(es) of the Day – Josh Dugan, Sandor Earl, Joel Thompson, Blake Feguson, Reece Robinson, Josh McCrone, Sam Williams, David Shillington, Glenn Buttriss, Dane Tilse, Josh Papalii, Joe Picker, Shaun Fensom, Shaun Berrigan, Jack Wighton, Mark Nicholls, Tom Learoyd-Lars, Jarrad Kennedy, Travis Waddell.

Welcome Home (Sanitarium) – Greg Inglis

Fade To Black – Greg Inglis.

Issues My Brother and I Have Discussed This Week

A List of issues my brother and I have raised and discussed re. the Raiders Rabbits game over the course of the week, bearing in mind that every communication has ended with one or usually both of us sighing and murmuring “heady times”, “isn’t it exciting” or “I’M SO FUCKING EXCITED I WANT TO KICK SOMEONE IN THE SPINE”

1. Who will Josh Palalii who we now refer to only as The Young Bull be instructed to get on top of this time? Taylor? Or Crocker? We have decided that we hope it is Crocker. We hope he unsettles Crocker like he did Gallen, and causes him to blow whatever fuses are left in the burned-out back-lots of his brain, thereby earning him time in the sin-bin. This is highly likely.

2. Jack Boom is back! We love Jack Boom. We are happy for Jack Boom. We expect to see him come off the bench and inject exuberant youthful aggression into the game. Jack Boom!

3. What is Joe Picker doing in the starting lineup? He was in the game for the final fifteen minutes last week and had no touches and made no tackles. He was a ghost player, in other words. Joe Picker needs to step up “or it’s back to the Bega Roosters for him.” Joe Picker also needs a haircut. He looks like an extra, sex unspecified, from a Motley Crue video. Absurd.

4. Only two forwards are on the bench. We hope that is enough for the big men of Souths.

5. “The odds between Souths and Canberra are widening. You know what that means don’t you?” “No, what does it mean?” “Souths have a very large supporter base who like to have a punt…And they punt with their hearts, not their heads. In other words, it means they are stupid!”

6. Dugan will be goal kicker. We hope he has been practicing by day and by night, as well as visualising himself popping curling hooking and landing clean balls as he listens to Tupac and as he sleeps. We hope it doesn’t come down to a penalty kick ala 2010 Raiders Tigers ie. THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED AND A PART OF JARRED CROKER DID TOO. We hope someone else is practicing too, in case one of Dugan’s flimsy limbs malfunctions or is bent backwards and twisted like an allen-key by someone again like how Jeremy Smith did last week THAT DOG THIS IS THE REASON NODDY KIMMORLEY LAPSED INTO A REVERENTIAL TONE AND CALLED HIM “ONE OF THE GREATEST THUGS OF THE MODERN ERA” RECENTLY DON’T FUCK WITH BAMBI BITCH AND ANYWAY HAHA YOU’RE PLAYING FOR THE KNIGHTS NEXT YEAR LOL WHO?

7. Greg Inglis must be shut down. It is essential. If you feel this point needs further elaboration or embellishment, seek out Joey Johns.  

8. How much we hate Souths.

9. How much we hate Souths.

10. How much we hate Souths.

The Dream I had About Greg Inglis

A few nights ago I had a great dream it was about Greg Inglis and that’s not a sentence I ever expected to write but there you have it I was sitting inside a parked car and Greg Inglis was outside looming in teasing me about how good I thought he was while standing with his legs wide open as far apart as they could go and periodically rearranging his balls not in an obscene or menacing manner but in a toddler who hasn’t been taught the ways of the public world manner it was kind of endearing and sweet as balls themselves often are and he was saying “so I’m in your top ten then am I aye aye” grinning and fiddling and I said to get real don’t you know who you’re dealing with and woke up with that song in my head along with Greg Inglis and his balls maybe I ate too much cheese before bed that night. 

Kearney is a Country Song, Furner is a Fuckwit.

My brother texted me. You know how you can see the first line of text before you open it? Well the first line was ‘Furner has stood down’ –  four words that exude an undeniable romance, no? The rest of the text, not so much - ‘Dugan and Ferguson from Friday for being drunk. Another great decision’ – By ‘great decision’ I think he means to say that it was an act of startling originality and initiative that has left everyone gaping in admiration; acts which are typical of Furner.  

Fucking Furner. The man is a deadest moron. His contract should be terminated, effective immediately. Not only does he lack the moral fiber and intellectual rigour to be a first grade coach, he doesn’t even have the courtesy to conduct himself in the manner expected of struggling coaches. Stephen Kearney does this very, very well. He doesn’t just wear that look of burnt-out weariness, of sad exasperation, he fucking owns it. He looks like a man who is saddled with a losing team and all the woes of a country music song – behind in his rent, no health insurance, a car that won’t run, walks with a limp from a workplace injury, can’t afford to pay his therapist… He also always looks as if he wants a cigarette. This is all very effective. Acknowledging the looming voids elicits respect and sympathy. Matt Elliot pretended to hang himself via his tie in a Panthers press conference and we not only ate it up, we understood. Furner just becomes flintier of eye and sharper of tone as the pressure and criticism mounts. It’s all wrong.  Additionally, awfully, he looks like a cop. A tightly wound, head-kicking cop.  

Of course, Kearney doesn’t have the reassuring presence of his similarly blockheaded brother in the boardroom safeguarding his job. This means that he comes across as genuinely distressed and apologetic and frustrated. Furner just looks stupid, stubborn, smug and despotic.   

Has he confused the gurglings of his unconscious with the voice of God? It’s a common mistake.  The same thing happened to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, to Silvio Berlusconi (BUNGA BUNGA!) and may have occurred inside the mind of Greg Inglis for a while there when he was referring to himself in the third person and flip-flopping on the Broncos and being fat and such. It happens. To wit: that pop-up weather guy from Prime, Daniel Gibson. He says the most random and bizarre things, in such an erratic fashion, and only ever fleetingly refers to either the weather or to what most of us would consider reality. He seems unhinged, but who cares? He’s a two-bit regional weatherman. Furner is a fucking coach. His idiocy and incompetence upsets a great deal of people. It’s not right.  

Daniel Gibson. Don't be fooled, he's fucking nuts.

The obvious validity of my grievances will be available for everyone to see tonight, when the rest of the Raiders (minus Dugan and Ferguson) play the Rabbitohs – who I look upon with a loathing that is slightly below bottomless. On free-to-air. In prime time. The Horror.

NO TRY! - The Inglis Incident, Origin 1

Ridiculous referee decisions usually aren’t reason enough for me to turn crimson and need a defibrillator. Origin is different, though. It’s fast and tight and brutal and it causes people tremendous amounts of excitement. They roam at large and wear wigs and bellow inane catchphrases (“QUEENSLANDER”, for example) and foam at the mouth and appear crazed and rabid. Emotions run high. Referees are required to adhere as closely as possible to what most of us would consider reality. In short, it is not the game in which they should play fast and loose with logic. The consequences are too great, right? Wrong. During the fifth or sixth replay of Greg Inglis knocking that ball forward a general sense of doom swelled inside of me. By the seventh? I could feel the artery on one side of my temple pulsing furiously, moments away from bursting into an aneurysm.

-Pause for protracted ‘mental health’ break and an unclenching of teeth hands toes and buttocks-

It is a hollow loss. This makes it a hollow victory. It was looking like it was going to be a loss anyway, but a legitimate one – brought about by that bizarre choice to kick for 2 and Todd Carney suffering from the yips on his debut and whatever else – but awarding that Inglis incident as a TRY???? That’s when the bottom fell out.       

Imagine if the situation were reversed. Jesus Christ; there would be mass hysteria. Burning effigies! Parliamentary enquiries! Widespread disintegration and missions of vengeance! Bob Katter! Things, according to W.B. Yeats’ take on dodgy 19^th

Century refereeing decisions (or those deranged enough to await the Second Coming of Christ - same same, really), would fall apart, the centre would not hold, mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world.

But that sound you hear? That’s the Queenslanders, collectively scoffing CRY ME A RIVER or other, less astute words to that effect, and, yeah, cunts, if your attitude towards logic and justice is a laissez faire one, by all means deride the inevitable NSW-based outcry as we engage in a few weeks of light existential angst, finger-pointing and recrimination. We down here know ya’ll are too deep into your sun-baked delirium, too lacking in moral fibre, too misshapen of head and too wasted on Bundy to care.

Russell Crowe & the Rabbitohs

Everyone knows that Australians are great sports lovers and that they’re great barrackers but does anyone ever mention how much we like being able to boo? And hiss? And hate? On a whole variety of teams, for a whole variety of really rude and entirely subjective reasons? Not enough, no. Unless of course the subject at hand is Collingwood, which is an unlikely prospect on this blog. Supporting a team to the point of just about having a stroke every time they play over the course of a season is a rich and satisfying occupation. Barracking is but part of this experience.

It was in this spirit that I engaged in an expansive conversation with my brother, via text, regarding our shared loathing of the Rabbitohs yesterday. It was great. How could it not be?

Apparently – and this is what started it - Daly Cherry Evans is being pursued by the Rabbits. By which of course I mean that the at once attractive and repellant Russell Crowe, equipped with that formidable gravelly voice, pungent charm and considerable authority, is wooing him, all whips cracking. I’m not used to saying it, but this doesn’t bother me. Cherry Evans plays well and seems friendly enough but he is obviously devoid of humour and personality and is therefore of little emotional interest to me. He’s very vanilla, isn’t he? Or white bread. He’s the human equivalent of a piece of white bread, untoasted, and spread with Flora margarine.  And Crowe, well, I love a wildly egotistical and morally muddy man, so I have no issue with him either. HOWEVER. On the morals thing: Cherry Evans needs to be prepared to watch his evaporate should he sign with the Bunnies. He will also need to ensure he is in rude good health, mentally, because goddamn if the Bunnies don’t turn most of the players they buy into burnt out husks with piss-hole eyes and poorly disciplined games within two or three seasons of being there. How do they do this??? They are astonishingly, mesmerisingly adept at it. Whatever the process, the reality is that the club does not encourage towering individual performances.  My brother said as much yesterday, texting about our hope that Coal Train Taylor goes back to the Broncos: “Yeh he was better when he was there. In fact, everyone goes crap when they go to souths. Greg who?”  Touche.

In any case, I approve of Russell Crowe’s involvement in league. It adds an element of absurdity to what is already an acutely absurd theatre sport. Matty Johns, who suddenly seems to have developed a diamond-sharp edge of anger to go with his mongrel-instinct intelligence and now sports a hairstyle reminiscent of Tony Mokbel on the worst day of his life, said the other week that league is a pantomime and you have your good guys and your bad guys. This struck me as very clever. Soon after, some deranged Warrior fan tweeted him asking if he was on drugs and he barked “No you have me mistaken for someone else”, and this struck me as very cruel, especially as he accompanied it with a steely-eyed look and I thought of Joey’s sad canine eyes and soft-shell crab demeanor and felt awful for him. I love Joey. I love Joey to such a degree that every time I see or hear him I instinctively think and usually murmur “Oh, Joey” and feel my heart wince. He has that certain haunted look that I very much admire - eyes imbued with the hollow despair of the damned that indicate he has looked into the face of something horrible. He’s lovely.  

Anyway, Crowe could, I imagine, turn a brain-numbing preamble about contracts and salary caps into the most gripping of soliloquys and effortlessly shift the mood from comedy to edge-of-seats suspense and back to comedy before the more slow-witted members of the football fraternity knew what had hit them. In saying that, I think the more intellectually lively players know what’s up. This is why, for example, Sam Burgess is a Bunny and Cooper Cronk is not. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sam Burgess. That great big head atop that great big body? Fantastic. A drooling Great Dane of a man with a peanut-sized brain rattling exuberantly around inside that big British skull? What’s not to like? I also like the fact that Crowe, clearly suffering from a chronic irony deficiency, seems to fancy himself as the Jim Jones or David Koresh of league. Well, why not? Every pantomime needs a handful of charismatic and unhinged egomaniacs; they add an unintentionally surreal and comic edge to proceedings. So, go forth Russell. Woo and charm and seduce and sign and never surrender to the soul-shrinking pointlessness of trying to buy a powerful Bunnies team. If nothing else, my brother and I appreciate the high comedy of the effort, and the ongoing opportunity to hang shit on the entire Rabbitohs organisation. It’s the Australian way, this booing and hissing and dancing on the grave of a despised team’s failings, and we are nothing if not patriotic.

Wild Colonial Carney: SADDLE UP

Football, god love it, is a morality tale without the morality.

Just as the unnerving thought that Todd Carney may not be playing rugby league AT ALL next year was beginning to take hold there came the news this morning that the Cronulla Sharks are circling him. This is fantastic. The news excited me so much that I can't remember how I got to work. I assume I drove, but such was my elation that I have no recollection whatsoever. Goddamn you Toddy, see the hold you have over me? I told you, it's over. Release me from your kung fu grip!

Nobody is better (or worse, depending on how you choose to view it) suited to the Shire than Toddy. If he can't be in Canberra, shit, why not Cronulla? My entire family - ON BOTH SIDES - come from the Shire - most notably my renegade mother and her "Rules are for fools" father. He dropped dead of a heart attack upon exiting the water after smashing out a vigourous set of laps in one of Cronulla's sea baths right there on the beach, how's that for living and breathing the Shire?

I was having a hard time believing the line that the NRL were not fighting like dogs over the carcass of Carney's career. As it turns out, they are. Just, y'know, behind closed doors, which is where everything worthwhile and important takes place (except for Toddy's drinking and the machinations of Manly's board, apparently).

Anyway. Cronulla. This is a great fit for Toddy, great fit. Say what you will about them, those Eastern suburbs really do require a certain proclivity for pretension. This is a fundamental truth that even Greg Inglis recognised, and he's a knob from way back - he drove Choc Mundine's hummer home to Kempsey for Christmas last year for chrissakes! Even so, G.I. grasped this truth and moved away from Bondi as soon as he could - and if this was a strategic move to almost make me like him all I can say is well played G.I., well played. For extra points, get this: He moved into some kind of estate filled with cretinous people who know nothing of league and quickly became the neighbourhood go-to man for carrying out all minor household repairs for the weak, the elderly, the inept and the lazy. Way to expose and destabilise my increasingly irrational dislike for you G.I...prick.

Now. Paul Gallan as mentor, let's talk about that. He's lovely, isn't he? Hasn't he come into his own beautifully? Other than that small matter of stomping on someone's head a few months ago, which we will put down to him still being tired and emotional in the Origin aftermath and never speak of again, he has been a model of stolid, bovine obedience this season. Putting his meaty paw in the air (coz you just know that's how it went down at Sharks HQ) and offering to mentor Toddy just ices the cake in terms of his inherent awesomeness. Wait, is that last sentence too wimpy? I think so. Gal doesn't ice the cake; he puts his fist through the cake, he takes his clothes off and he shits on the cake, BITCH. Better?

It is for this reason (directly above) that I think Toddy will flourish under Gal's leadership. If anyone is going to be able to reign in the Wild Colonial Boy Carney while still allowing him to retain the semi-wild glint in his eye it's Gal. And there's something strangely affecting about Gal offering to shine a light into Toddy's dimmer parts. Gal gives me an inexplicably serene, tranquil feeling. I imagine he'd smell like fabric softener. In short, this is a man Toddy needs in his life.

Also, Toddy; pale blue, black and white will be way better against your complexion. You was way too ruddy for that red and navy, even when you weren't on the sauce. 

Saddle up, Toddy. Get 'em.

Real Men Eat Couscous. Greg Bird Understands This.

Rugby league is in great shape, make no mistake. Still, there are two things I wish I could change about the game (three if you count my proposals for radical wardrobe changes including the abolition of all Spanx-like undergarments and the reintroduction of V-neck jerseys, but this is not my immediate concern today).

Neither of them have any bearing on the actual game, mind, because I think the players and the greater NRL organisation ('sup Politis!) have a pretty good handle on that side of things, and I'm no expert. I could be, but I'm not.

No, my two key concerns are largely superficial. I'm nothing if not consistent.

The first thing I would do away with is the bizzare unspoken law that appears to forbid footballers from talking about themselves. Ever. In any fashion. We know it's a team game, guys. The swarms of men running around in identical jerseys kind of acts as a permanent reminder. I know, right, who knew?

Lest we ever forget, though, we need only look to any player during any interview, ever. Any attempt by an interviewer to elicit from the player a comment, however vague or benign, that relates to themselves, is met with automatic and repeated reference to "the boys". So "You had a great kicking game tonight Toddy" is met with "Yeah, nah, the boys played really well." Slight variations of this exchange make up the meat of every interview with every player. It's maddening. Effective too, in terms of  giving nothing away whatsoever. I'm thinking of implementing it in my own life, actually.

Full credit to The Boys

The peculiarities of footy-speak is a topic unto itself, really. Their ability to string any number of cliches together into a sentence, with varying degrees of succes, it has to be said, is in itself a remarkable talent and one that is deserving of an entire post, if not a thesis.

Sadly though, this is not our theme today. No, our theme today concerns the second thing I wish I could change; namely that I want The Facts on what these big bastards eat.

Footballers must eat a lot. I mean, look at them.

I'm a huge fan of hearing about their dietary details. I feel this is something we could all do with more of in our lives. Well, why not? We are deep into the age of food as fetish as it is; why not enter into the spirit of the season? Never mind for a moment that I find the current obsession with food - the slavish and erotic first world devotion to it I mean - to be slightly depraved and in terrible taste. No, never mind that at all, because one of the things that made me really want to get on the Twitter was reading that Greg Bird had tweeted about spending all afternoon cooking shanks and spicy couscous. And about his plans to brutalise Parramatta in an upcoming game, lest we lose sight of what a hard cunt he is even for a moment, but still. Greg Bird eats couscous? He cooks couscous? Amazing. My world totally tilted on its axis for a second there.

I can't help but feel Greg Bird should be eating something more like this:

I suspect I'm not alone here in my desire for dietary detail. If you ask me, we the public don't get nearly enough information here. Oh, sure, we get the odd fragment, but it's always in passing and it's mainly through reading articles about Greg Inglis.

My brother saw a bunch of Sharks eating at Sizzler once. I know, how retro, right? He kept an eye on them and said they were remarkably restrained and ate only from the pasta and salad bars. None of those steaks that drape like curtains over the sides of the plate, in other words. He also said they all looked like they were about to explode out of their T-shirts in the manner of metamorphosing superheroes, i.e. they looked FIT.

Anyway, he is a fan of competitive eating. Not in any official, regulated, hotdog eating contest sense - he's strictly freelance - and the main point he wanted to drive home about the encounter was that he easily ate them under the table. Which is the whole reason you go to Sizzler of course. No-one goes there expecting to walk out with their pants still buttoned, do they? Nobody in my family does anyway.

That wasn't a fat jab at Greg Inglis earlier, by the way. I can't stand the guy, but I sympathise with his struggle to, uh, be likeable and come across as an even remotely pleasant human being. Good luck with that personality thransplant then, G.I.

All that eleventh hour reneging on handshakes and the shilly-shallying around with his legal bills and the dicking around of the Broncos really took its toll on the guy at the start of the year, apparently. This is when he began a kind of savage descent into squalor and started to bear a striking resemblance to Meatloaf, circa 1992.

 His diet went awry and he turned to white bread. He drank three cans of Coke a night - he was really livin' la vida loca, obviously, and here's what he had to say: "I love my Coke. I love my white bread".

Tell it again, Inglis! Now, I have never been able to swallow even a mouthful of fizz so I don't get the Coke thing, but I can relate to G.I. with  the white bread bit. I am a fucking bandit for white bread, the cheaper and nastier the better. I blame my mother for this, as well as for all the other ills of the world (shoutout to Freud: respect!) because I had one of those wholesome childhoods devoid of sugar and television and  - as I have bitched about extensively - SALT. This meant that I had embarrasing brown bread sandwiches when all I wanted was a lunchbox full of Rollups and Le Snacks and Ovalteenies. The residual effect of all this is that my favourite food in the world is lavishly buttered ,white sesame-seeded bread rolls.

Anyway, I would love to be able to tell you that this fragment of information endeared me to G.I. but I cannot. Still, it hasn't hurt. Baby steps.

Inglis has now banished the white bread and the Coke from his life and is ON. THE. UP. For reals. He looks as severe and as muscular as a mountain range. Fierce, even, and he's definately shaken off the sluggish, vague vibe he had going on for a while there. Early in the year I saw him sitting injured in the stands with Sam Burgess watching a game and it looked like nothing so much as a surly, sunglasses wearing thundercloud sitting alongside a shining sunbeam of sweetness. It was around this time my brother did away with his name altogether and started referring to him only as 'that slug'. Me: "Did you hear G.I. got hitched on the weekend?" Him: "What?!! What woman would marry that slug?!!" etc, etc....

For those of you who are interested in such intricacies - and how could you not be - he now drinks Coke Zero, and "It's rye bread instead of white".

I don't remember G.I. ever looking like this, but there you have it. The hips don't lie.

Now, far be it from me to rain on G.I.'s parade, but I've got news for you, homeboy. New studies just in have shown that in the long run drinking diet fizz will basically make you quote FAT AS FUCK unquote.

Entirely by the way, did you know that Paris Hilton pointed this out many a moon ago in her Confessions of an Heiress book? "Never drink Diet Coke. Diet Coke is for fat people".

I don't know if G.I. has read this book. I'm not entirely convinced that he has read a book, actually. Anyway, this totally makes Paris some kind of whore-bag Nostradamus because seven years after she made that astute observation the University of Texas has released a study finding a 70 per cent increase in waist size among people who drank diet fizz compared to those who drank regular fizz. If you care to investigate this in more detail the study is titled "Diet Soft Drink Consumption Is Associated With Increased Waist Circumference in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Ageing." Cue Stampede.

Let's turn now to two football players I hitherto could not give two hoots about: Trent Merrin and Adam Cuthbertson, and their attempts to keep their weight in check.

For the past TWO YEARS Dragons prop Merrin has eaten the same meal for dinner EVERY NIGHT. Can you imagine? Chicken breast, steamed vegetables and one cup of pasta FOR TWO YEARS? Me either. Hence the liberal use of caps - that means I'm aghast, people.

Likewise, Adam Cuthbertson revealed that he worked hard to drop weight over the pre-season and that in order to keep it off he does things like take the cheese off his sandwiches. This rivets me. Somewhere else I see it written that, prior to the lifeline the Dragons extended to him he was a footballer who "Ate recklessly". That is a gloriously ambiguous and intruiging phrase, isn't it? It excites my attention no end.


I don't know what all this means. Perhaps there is some comfort to be had in the knowledge that footballers are not insulated from the larger ills of society, be they struggles with weight or struggles to stay on the right side of the law or what have you?

Or maybe it's like the Stars without Makeup syndrome. Maybe I like reading the stuff that reconfigures them, for a minute at least, as white bread loving bogans who can stack it on with the best of us. You know, as opposed to the carved-from granite behemouths that run out of the sheds every week and knock the stuffing and the shit out of each other for our entertainment?