The Raiders are a Russian Novel

Last Sunday, my god.

That Raiders Roosters game was full of abominations too monstrous to describe or even name.

A week has passed. The immediate, astonished horror has worn off, but everyday objects still have the sharp angry edges they took on shortly after kick-off. I mean, MY GOD. I legit started thinking some kind of extraterrestrial invasion was underway. If I hadn’t been so transfixed by the suffocatingly slow unfolding of scenes on my television screen I would have been down on my hands and knees searching for hidden microphones in the kitty litter or something.   

As it happened, part way through the diabolical second half a tiny muscle under my right eye leaped and began to twitch and for the rest of the game the erratic behaviour of my face perfectly reflected the erratic behaviour of both teams. Once the rotten stinking curtain was rung down on the game my face stopped jerking but a kind of soupy, confused mist seethed into my brain and settled over things. Everything pretty much as usual for the week that followed, then, except for the grimmer than usual drive of blood in my skull and a great sense of foreboding – perversely gripping -  regarding Monday night’s Raiders Tigers game.  Football. Jesus God.

The thing about the Raiders is that they’re so unpredictable, so unknowable. And not in a good way. I believe, generally speaking, that if you can’t do it well then it’s not worth doing. Clearly not everyone agrees. As the damage to my nerves mount there are many alarming signs that the Raiders may not be entirely on top of matters. This is all very familiar.

Last week, before we both went cold on the entire organisation my brother and I decided that the Raiders need to buy someone, since every other club seems to be buying people in a frenzy of spending (whatup Titans) and signing. But who? I suggested Willie Mason, and my brother unexpectedly became very excited. Who knew?  

1.“I like him. We should go for it. ! Can’t see him moving to Canberra though, he would hate it worse than you!”  

2. “Going cheap isn’t he? I heard he might end up playing for the Toowoomba Pythons and work in the tomato factory there during the week!”

I looked into this and the offer, as reported back in December 2011, was actually to play for the Guyra (population 2500) Superspuds, who have won four of the past nine Group 19 grand finals and pay $250 per game.  Club official Terry Vidler said “We’d take him. He would cause a lot of interest in our town. We’ve got a tomato farm out here, it’s a big deal. He could work there.”  As rustic and charming and fuckoff-hilarious as this all sounds, I much prefer the idea of Willie getting an NRL start. If the skeleton of Matt Orford’s soul can be resurrected and made to dance and sing and drop balls and bungle kicks then Mason more than deserves the same opportunity. Also, he’s got mad game! He’s awesome! So what if he talks a lot of smack? It’s “refreshing”. I heard Daly Cherry Evans interviewed the other day and every line uttered was flat and robotic and entirely devoid of humanity and humour. It was horrible. I want boorish hooligans rearing up through the mist and blurting out robust and original opinions of the “everyone’s entitled to have one” variety. Decorum and decency are terribly over-rated.

Anyway. On the Raiders, I plan on rounding the corner and fully overcoming my crippling sense of resentment sometime today, in preparation for what will probably be more of the same tomorrow evening. This, people, is the way of the world.

One of the worst parts of the whole thing last week was that I got so goddamn excited after their win over the Titans. I convinced myself that some kind of seismic shift had occurred; that it was different to their first win of last season, when they annihilated the hapless Sharks in that unseemly opening match. There wasn’t much element of skill involved then and absolutely no pretense of two equally matched teams. The whole thing resembled hyenas tearing open a gazelle much more than it did a traditional game. It was terrific. God it was a good time. Really great.  What wasn’t so great was the fact that it was pretty much the only joy Raiders fans got to experience. For the season. That’s, like, months. Long, bleak months. Russian novel months.

After last week, the implications are profound and distressing:  Perhaps we are standing on that same threshold. Perhaps we have always been there.

Josh Dugan in 2011...& those other guys..

2011. I know all this eye-bulging, jaw-slackeningly mesmerising shit happened because I have a vague, sepia-tinged recollection of the overall season housed in my head. Problem is that this off-season has been dragging like an absolute bastard, and things are becoming blurry. Also, the tedium of the finals series forced my mind to retreat into a place of wind-blown splendour, where separated lovers think about each other and stare out of windows into rainy nights. It was a choice between that or confronting the hideous reality of Sydney's northern beaches, and my mind cannot process plague proportions of affluent WASPS any more than it can accept the carpet that covers the floor of my ensuite. Carpet around a toilet is, like people who live in Manly, a concept too terrible to bear. Anyway. Because my general posture is backward-looking and nostalgic I'll try to sift through the bored shards of my off-season psyche and dredge up some of the high and lowlights of last season.

Let's start with the people I love or approve of.

-Josh Dugan's Origin debut. Seeing him cross his arms and tap his sky-blue clad shoulders as he ran out of the tunnel looking hotter than the centre of the sun was a sight to squeeze the hardest of hearts. I shed tears.

Just on this -  it's been a terribly long time since I've seen any new Josh Dugan pictures and experienced the heart arrythmia that accompanies this. What, do 'they' think we have better things to do over summer or something? Because 'they' are wrong. Damn wrong. I can only assume he's doing okay there in Canberra. I mean, as okay as anybody can be in Canberra (don't start me). Josh Dugan underwent a brief excursion into irrelevance last season. I didn't like it. I can't imagine he enjoyed it much either. Bitch just kept on getting himself hurt, and the Raiders kept on losing and the whole season had a horribly monotonous, yet anxious rhythm and was as unsatisfying and unsubstantial as a bowl of rice bubbles: ie. shithouse. The essence of football is knowing what's going on, and knowing who's liable to do what in any given situation. Josh Dugan took this far too far last season. How many times do we gotta see him doubled over and clutching at a colt-like leg or limping from the field, grimacing so hard that his face looks like an old man's knee? How many times, Lord? His constant injuries resonated with me in a painful fashion. Usually I'm a fan of a little painful resolution, but not in these many instances. It fucking blew. On a vaguely related and similarly painful note, the Raiders receieved ten percent of the vote in Rugby League Week's readers' poll for the 'club that won't win another premiership in the next ten years' category. Sad.

-Todd Carney drinking himself out of another club. You gotta love him. Whatever he does he gives it his goddamn ALL. And we will know him by his trail of empties.

- Paul Gallan's audacious performance in Origin II. Gal played out of position at front row and for the whole eighty minutes. What a warrior. He should be stuffed and mounted in a glass case and hung on the wall over my fireplace.

-Terry Campese's seven minute season. Yes, Campese played for approximately seven minutes, for the entire season. On the upside, this gave him time to knock his wife up again about five minutes after she had their first baby, which is nice.

-Jarryd Hayne. He saved someone from drowning in the sea and then spent the rest of the season headbutting people with simple-minded merriment and considerable panache. Players, punters, whoever. He's brilliant. Such is his charm that everybody loves him all the more for his bursts of violence. Plus he rocks rosary beads like nobody else, with the possible exeption of Madonna circa 1986.

-The words 'he's just a grub.' Post game press conferences can be painful to watch. The air is often thick with unreality. Players and coaches (discounting Tim Sheens) habitually squander the opportunity to judge, slander and insult opposing teams, coaches, referees, fellow teammates and the people who set the prices for the stadium snack bars. This is a damn shame. A grim-faced Nathan Hindmarsh did his bit to rectify this when he capped off a spiteful Eels Bulldogs game by refusing to elaborate on Michael Ennis beyond these four words, forced from between gritted teeth: "he's just a grub." Excellent. More, please.

-Michael Ennis being voted the game's 'Biggest Grub' by fifty one percent of the RWL poll. Legend. He compounded this by extending his scope and burning the shit out of Brendan Cowell on the League Lounge with a derogatory comment about his cardigan. Bless.

-JT watching QLD celebrate their sixth straight Origin series from a wheelchair with his head lolling around like a bladder on a stick. This was actually a terrible sight, but JT is so cool that he can carry off wheelchair-bound weeping while loaded on pain-killing drugs and still look like Harry Callahan.

-Benji Marshall belting someone who yelled out "hey Benji, Lockyer's better than you!" outside McDonalds on George Street and being found not guilty. Good to see that his nifty sidestep also applies to matters of the law.

-Ricky Stuart losing his fucking mind in the coaching box when the Blues won Origin II and unleashing a frenzied flurry of punches into assistant coach Gavin Wood's ribcage.

-Jamal Idris rag-dolling the nippy but not nippy enough Nathan Gardner by lifting him up by his ripped-down shorts, like a piece of carry-on luggage, and tossing him around, bare-assed, for a good thirty seconds. Mark Geyer compounded the hilarity later by pointing out that "you could see his junk" You could, and we did.

-The Battle of Brookvale. Awesome. This was an explosion of violence so glorious that it should have been italicised with a burst of surging trumpets. Anybody who watched any of the three thousand replays of this charmingly retro incident without miming uppercuts in their living room has no business watching league and should switch codes immediately.

-The Rabbitohs Broncos game played in Perth on the world's worst-draining surface, ie. a lake. It was wild, as all things in the West should rightly be. Senior-cit Bunies coach John Lang launching into a celebratory, 'arthritis-be-damned' belly slide through a puddle afterwards was a lovely and altogether unexpected final flourish.

-Billy Slater holding up play, and David Williams' badly injured neck, after a tackle went bad. Billy Slater is no paragon of virtue - fact is I can't stand the prick - but this just struck me as very sweet and sporting. However, I also remember roaring my approval when Paul Gallan stomped, with undisguised savagery, on an opposing player's neck as he lay twitching on the grass post-tackle, so it's all relative.

-Reni Matuai and his at once attractive and repellant reptile eyes making their NRL return after a two year ban for drug use. He's hot, and he has a bankrupt-soul spookiness about him. Like I said: hot.

-Darren Lockyer kicking the field goal to get the Broncos to the qualifying round with a grotesquely fractured cheekbone. Bonus points for the fact that this put the Dragons out of contention for the season.

-Micheal Jennings handing out two thousand free tickets to fans from his own pocket as punishment for showing up to a training session blind drunk. That'll learn him.


So that's the champions. Now, to turn my attention to the fuckwits and fools.

-Brett Stewart breaking into a  ' giddy-up gallop' to celebrate the club try-scoring record at Manly in a stupid swipe at David Gallop for suspending him for four weeks in 2009.

-Brett Stewart telling David Gallop he owed him an apology when collecting his premiership ring. In the absence of hard proof and the ability to read lips, I can only assume that Gallop's response was somewhere along the lines of "boo-fucken-hoo."

-Brett Stewart becoming increasingly erratic, delusional and paranoid.

-Brett Stewart in general. Just a massively unpleasant person.

-Ryan Tandy. He poured ill-repute on the game like gravel off a fucking dump truck all year long.

-Mark Gasnier announcing his retirement and cutting short his comeback contract by two seasons, allowing him more time to squirt the sauce. Presumably.

-Isaac Luke's incessant canonballing. Small man syndrome. How else to explain his obsession with getting all up in David Shillington's grill (not literally - he only reaches Shilly's waist) on an annual basis in Four Nations games?

-William Hopoate quitting NRL to become a Mormon missionary. Just what God needs: another Hopoate on his hands. This is an exercise in industrial-scale pointlessness that only Ned Flanders could possibly approve of.

-Robert Lui. Ugh.

-Mal Meninga penning that inane column after the Origin series win calling elements of NSW rugby league 'filthy rats', among other things. About as novel as an SBS program with the words 'Nazi Germany' in the title.

-Matt Orford. What a disaster. This nuggety little fuck caused me and every other Raider fan (assumed) a considerable amount of pain early in the season, and as such I don't blame whoever it was that keyed his car at Bruce stadium in what was obviously a well-founded fit of maniacal resentment. His ineptitude was very hard to take, okay? That Titans Raiders game back in April? Where he inexpicably lost the ball in a scrum feed and pushed the game into golden point and then let some only slightly less inept Titan (Greg Bird, I think) cross to snatch the game? Dreadful. A defeat dished up in the incapable hands of the Titans was an especially low-point in a season littered with low points, the key one being that the Raiders suffered their longest ever losing streak. Historic horror.

-The disconcerting trend of players getting their surname inked on their body. No comment necessary.

-John Sutton. When he's not being incompetent on the field, he likes to spend his spare time being a Bra Boy. Deep though my respect is for all things Bra Boy, this guy just cannot fucking play. He's awful, it's fantastic. Watching Souths play disastrous football is one of life's great pleasures. It fires my core.

-Daly Cherry-Evans coming home from the Kangaroo tour with a massive hickey on his neck and being met at the airport by his girlfriend. The Tele provided breathless coverage of the issue as it unfolded, which remarkably did nothing to spoil his aura of apple-pie wholesomeness. (He said one of his 'teammates' gave it to him. Along with the crabs, ringworm and rickets.)

-The increasingly fickle and disposable nature of the whole NRL business. There was a dull sense of agitation and fatigue in the air this season. Players and coaches were shuffled, traded and shunted relentlessly. It was distracting. It's also an irritating and unwelcome reminder that the game is no game at all. We know this is the case, of course, but rude and ill-timed reminders (see: Manly one week after winning premiership, the poor bastards) detract from the joy of the game. We have so little opportunity for unadulterated escapism as it is, is there no place where we can retreat from this shit?

So that there is 2011 as I remember it. This has restored in me a sense that I am in charge of things - meaning my faculties, mostly, but also that all my grudges, obsessions and irritations are in order. This is comforting. It doesn't go so far as to suggests that my eye for the 2012 season will be infused with Sphinx-like focus and cathedral-like calm, but I imagine that kind of simple serenity would fucking suck.

Off Season:Off Rocker - join the dots.

Greetings, friends. Welcome to the abyss. That certain haunted quality you see in the eyes around you and, worse, the two reflected in the mirror? This is what comes of looking into the face of something horrible - THIS IS WHAT THE OFF-SEASON LOOKS LIKE. Don't be alarmed. Stick with me, and together we will familiarise ourselves with some of the symptoms and sensations you are likely to experience. For those of you who already know not of what I speak of, I hate you. I also demand that you leave and go be functional someplace else. ToddBlog is no place for the well-adjusted.

Okay. Lets proceed.

You may now be recognising the grinding monotony of life without football, i.e. life devoid of weekly displays of heaving, unbridled masculinity punctuated by explosions of violence - and finding it completely unacceptable. I know you are, honey, I know you are.

You may be finding yourself bereft of a sense of purpose. Aimless, loose-ended, potentially lethal. You're not alone. We will know each other by the yellows of our eyes and the whites of our knuckles.

You may be reflecting retrospectively on your team's season with a roughly 70/30 ratio of artery-swelling, throat-gulping pride and simmering dissatisfaction and resentment - bearing in mind that this is a sliding scale that very much takes into account ladder position, off-field and back-room shenanigans, coaching ineptitude (hey Furner, whatup fool?) season-spanning injuries (Terry Campese, word) and the like. Brace yourself. This can be a long and complicated process spanning the entire summer. Fortify your rage - because there will be rage - with a series of stiff drinks. This will allow you to take charge of your grievances as they arise; then master them, lay them to rest and move on. Ideally. Individual results may vary.

You may be shuffling around saying "bum a light?" to strangers in the streets and you don't even smoke. You may still be subject to unannounced and aneurism-inducing flashbacks of Paul Gallan's Origin heroics at the most unlikely and inappropriate of times - and if you're not then your behaviour troubles me, frankly. You may be contemplating the long run of gloom known as the off-season and thinking that perhaps a boyfriend could be a good way to fill the next few months. You may be feeling very fragmented and irritable and when people call you out on this you may be liable to bark "LOOK I'M GOING THROUGH A PERIOD OF SERIOUS MENTAL READJUSTMENT OKAY?!" into their faces from very close range.

You should be thinking of all the exotic and unknowable promise that next season holds, and reveling in the romance of the slight rushes of blood to the head and heart that this inevitably triggers. When it gets especially grim you should roll a little reel in your head of Johnathan Thurston laughing that remarkable, full-faced laugh of his, or go one better and remind yourself of his eyes and the bad things they do to you. You may find yourself investing heavily in the Australian Open. This is perfectly acceptable. Fact: Male tennis players are really, really good looking nowadays. Embrace it.

You may now find yourself unwittingly taking your problems back to their actual source, and consequently finding that the source is usually yourself. After spending many months blaming, say, Matt Orford for all the ills of the world this can be distressingly confronting. Ride it out. The off-season has long been the time when our weaknesses and deprivations are starkly revealed. To what end is entirely up to you.

Of course, there is also the very real possibility that you may not be going through any of this. I've heard rumours that well-balanced individuals whose highly capable and rational minds don't snag on and then give themselves over entirely to certain thoughts or things or themes actually do exist. Well, good for them. And by 'good for them' obviously I mean 'those bastards will get theirs soon enough'.

Ultimately, know that the football-shaped void within cannot be filled. Paper over it as best you can - barbeques, party drugs, summer fruits, the cricket, whatever works - and I'll see you on the Other Side. In other words, if anyone needs me prior to March 2012 I'll be in my bedroom, rocking.

Soz, Bro....A Public Apology to Josh McCrone

Raiders! Their win on the weekend over the hapless Eels! I loved it, of course, but since then I've been too deeply immersed in Trick My Truck and Teen Mom 2 to string together anything much in terms of a comprehensive Victory Post. That will come next week after we play the Roosters, although realistically I could get it out of the way now because the writing is already all over the wall for that game. Sorry, Roosters, but I mean, honestly. You suck right now.

Let's leave it to Steven Kearney and his typically neat and succinct post-game summation when he simply said his Eels were "out-enthused". To this I nodded my assent and said, also neatly and succinctly, "damn straight, Kearney". By the way, he is a good looking Polynesian man, yeh? Yeh, I thought so.

Now. Turning to more important matters and the purpose of this post - what I really want to do is extend an olive branch, a live dove held in a white glove and a formal apology to Josh McCrone for the insults and abuse I heaped on him last year. Sorry, bro. Really. I apologise. Last year was rough on all of us.

What's more; and not meaning to deflect here, but I think the entire Raiders organisation also owes the kid an apology, and probably a nice apartment over Belconnen way too. Or a speedboat, in which case they should seek Greg Inglis' expert council. Call it compensation for what I imagine was a harrowing  and self-esteem shaking pre-season. In case you've forgotten, Terry Campese went down with an epic injury, Canberra was left with a gaping hole in their halves and Matt Orford was duly hustled in from the English wilderness and signed at considerable cost and to considerable fanfare before proving to be the dud buy of the 2011 season. What all this pre-season panic meant for McCrone was that a general lack of faith was shown in his ability to be at all effective in the halves.

I guess the fact that he actually was largely ineffectual in the halves had something to do with Furner's lack of faith, but I can't help but think that this was a fundamental coaching error. And yes, I am aware that coming from me this is an entirely hypocritical line of thought, given that I spent last season hating on him with the fervor of a flinty-eyed religious zealot. and followed the fight to sign Orford with breathless anticipation.

I mean, it's not like I egged his house or left burning bags of dogshit on his doorstep - try as I might I could never get a hold of his address - but I heaped hate on the boy like there was no tomorrow.Thing was, he was playing poxy football and I took a personal and somewhat irrational dislike to him. This sort of thing does happen. You could call it passion, I suppose, but there comes a point where it's easier and more accurate to just call it prejudice.

This descent from passion into prejudice was demonstrated when the Joel Monaghan With Dog scandal broke late last year. I heard the hijinks took place at a player by the name of Josh's house and immediately broke into an Iago-esque soliloquy damning Josh McCrone to the seventh circle of hell for  - obviously - masterminding such a stunt, and fuming, furthermore, that wasn't he just the type to have an eager to please golden retriever / yellow lab (the picture was inconclusive, remember) as a pet?

miss you Monaghs, not the same without you boo..

Never mind the fact that it was actually Josh Miller's house, no, never mind that at all. I mean, you can see how those Salem witch trials got ever so slightly out of hand can't you? All it takes is someone (me, say) to not like the cut of someone else's jib (McCrone's, in this instance, although he's not Robinson Crusoe here, trust) and all sorts of expansive and imaginative ideas take root in the skull and come to fruition with alarming force.

Anyway, not to put too finer point on it but his game really was as ordinary as unbuttered toast last year, and even though he got better as the year wore on the damage was fone and the die was cast.

When my brother came from Sydney to see Alan Tongue's 200th game with me McCrone made some characteristically foolish mistake and either he or his girlfriend, both of whom it has to be said are in possession of robust 'outside' voices, hollered in response "HE CAN'T SEE - HIS EYES ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER". I think they followed this up with some comments  of a more general nature, i.e. comparing him to a cyclops.


Still on them, somewhat inexplicably they had wound up sitting in the Chook Pen - both wearing sets of huge gold viking horns - at a Roosters Raiders match a few weeks prior and had reported gleefully that some repellant bogan-ette behind them (my brother thinks Roosters fans are the ugliest and most altogether abhorrent fans in the entire league, by the way - "They're not even FUNNY-FUCKED like Bulldog fans, they're just FUCKED") had spent most of the game screeching "SUCK-SHIT MOTHERFUHHHHHHCKERSSSSS!" at the Raiders, basically on their every play. Impressed, he brought this heckle with him down the Hume and employed it liberally in showing his appreciation of the Cowboys' cock-ups. Of which there were many. Bruce was a veritable slaughterhouse that night. A slaughterhouse with Willie Mason as overseer. Awesome.

Anyway, so McCrone's eyes are close togather. All football players have their crosses to bear. Just as Josh Dugan has to contend with being ridiculously, inexplicably good looking and Cameron Smith has to (or should) shave his shoulders twice daily, (see exhibits A and B below) so too must Josh McCrone deal with looking like some kind of cyclops. Who cares?

 

I can afford to be cavalier now given his remarkable and revelatory surge in form this season - who knew he had it in him; other than Joey, of course, who spent most of last year simultaneously training him and talking him up? Now? Word to opposing teams: Give the boy a mere touch of the ball or an inch of space at your peril! How many linebreaks did he make against the Eels, about a dozen? Amazing. And how well does he partner with Sam the-best-thing-out-of-Cooma Williams? Also, it seems hardly possible, but he looks to be even swifter and nippier than last year, and, best of all, he conducted a post-game interview while wearing a mouthguard. Respect.

Yes, I am impressed and humbled, well spotted.

Remorsefully  and respectfully apologetic, too; so here's to you, Mr. McCrone - may the wind always be at your back, and may bitches such as myself never breathe a cruel word in your direction again.

Last Drinks for Mark Riddell - Make it a Double & take Matt Orford too

So Mark Riddell has retired. Don't think there's going to be any Jonestown-style mass suicide movements over the news, somehow. The way I see it, the only thing that could sweeten this announcement - ice the cake, as it were -  would be news that Piggy has inspired Matt Orford to the same, thereby clearing out two decrepit and slow-moving old fossils at the same time. I believe the technical term for it is 'getting rid of the dead wood', but 'taking out the trash' covers it too.

I considered including some photos of Piggy and the Ox here, but I couldn't find any photos of the only thing Mark Riddell's ever done that I actually approve of, which was that incredible try celebration where he leaped into the stands and took a seat and casually applauded HIS OWN TRY. Youtube it, bitches.

More importantly, I don't particularly want pictures of crusty men I don't much like fouling up my blog, what with it being pure as the driven snow and all, so I've opted instead to post pictures of Pete Doherty.

The Roosters signing Riddell confused me from the get-go. The Roosters are a confusing organisation in general, really. I know they rate buying over breeding and that Politis and Noyce and the rest of the Rooster fat-cats would climb over their own mothers to get a big name signing but Piggy had practically been put out to pasture over in England, what the hell did they want with a flabby goose of his kind when they could steal *ahem* I mean lure basically anyone they wanted to their esteemed club? (I'd insert a smug 'except Josh Dugan' crack here but I have no faith in the assurances from either party that there is nothing going on in terms of offers and courtings for 2013 and as such I try not to think about it because it pains me beyond belief and I have enough problems as it is).

Matt Orford, despite proving to be, along with Timana Tahu for the Panthers, probably the NRL's worst off-season buy, looked good on paper at least. The Raiders had a gaping hole in their halves and how were they to know that Joey Johns' specialist halves coaching was going to pay off and that all Joshy McCrone's chickens were finally going to come home to roost in 2011? Some would argue that it's the coach's responsibility to foresee such developments but us Raiders fans know not to expect too much from David Furner. He has enough on his plate this year just trying to get his head around the newfangled idea that his forward pack needs to be going forward, cut the bitch some slack.

Anyway, Orford's signing proved educational if nothing else, because a costly lesson was quickly learnt; namely, that 'on paper' and 'in person' are two monumentally different things that are as far apart as, say, Tori Spelling's misshapen tits. As such, Orford proved to be a monumental fizzer. Some - me, at least, and probably those people who keyed his Audi after another diabolical performance - would even go so far as to call him a fucking liability. Watching Orford play early in the year made me realise that I had hitherto not known what a truly terrible kicking game looked like. I guess I could thank the Ox for the educational element he provided for me, but I would have preferred to have learnt how bad someone could be while watching the Rabbitohs or some other such team that I can't stand, rather than, you know, the team that I love savagely, so it's safe to say that a fruit basket will not be forthcoming. Unless he announces his retirement. And even then I'd still be more likely to send him a lump of calcified dog shit or something.