Canberra Raiders 2014: Die Harder

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

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

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

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

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

 

Regrettable Incidents Involving Tracksuits

Has your search for meaning in the NRL this year left you with feelings of futility, pointlessness, and the creeping realisation that this time invested would probably have been better spent searching for the colt from Old Regret?

If so, forget the grand final today. There’s nothing in that for us. What we need is relief.

This brings us, inevitably, to Blake Ferguson.

I normally take pleasure in the psychological destruction of grown men but there is really nothing pleasurable about watching someone who is too stupid to run their own affairs fall into the ruinous hands of Sam Ayoub. It’s a total depressant. 

 

 

When the Daily Telegraph isn’t classily covering the case of a well-to-do white boy who got a) a lot of ass and b) murdered, they do a little round-up of legal matters which in theory profiles vaguely notable members of the public who run afoul of the law but in reality functions as an installment-based chronicle of Lara Bingle’s failed attempts to master the art of driving, basic sign reading, and simultaneous driving and basic sign reading. Her efforts to overcome her limitations appear to be ongoing. It’s a process.

Anyway, they did a little piece about Blake Ferguson. The Telegraph is as we all know a subtle and nuanced newspaper not known for its dramatic flourishes but they seemed to be suggesting that Blake Ferguson is a culturally illiterate imbecile unsuited to performing everyday tasks - in this case, dressing himself – unsupervised.

 

It was all extremely cute. I mean, isn’t everything now? The cult of cute has colonised contemporary consciousness, and mine, to such an extent that I find a footballer who is abundantly unqualified to dress himself and stands accused of drinking and touching cute. What can I say. I am a product of my times. I’m not proud of it. 

 Before they got to the cute, though, the article led with a bold claim that there was a turn of phrase being used with increased frequency in Sydney conversations: “That’s so rugby league.”

Please. At best, Joe Hildebrand made it up while he was microwaving his muffin in the tea room or something. And let me ask you this, Joe. Are you able to enjoy a robust nocturnal social life in which you manage not to glass, attack, insult or urinate on anyone? Yeh. I didn’t think so.

“The expression refers to situations where a person demonstrates an extreme lack of self-awareness or understanding of potential consequences.”

“Think Todd Carney in a Canberra pub without a urinal. That said, over to you Blake Ferguson.”

The item goes on to describe the events taking place just prior to charges being laid against Ferguson, when plans were being put in place to take him from the Crowne Plaza in Coogee to Waverly police station. Ferguson’s only instructions, apparently, were “dress appropriately.” But when a group of managers and legal types arrived at the hotel to pick Ferguson up, they found him wearing a tracksuit, rather than a suit.

Further, “Law & Order understands it was not a matching tracksuit either.”

“Arrangements were made for Ferguson to swap attire with a dark-suit wearing manager.”

“Some time later Ferguson was still wearing a very white pair of socks. Law & Order contacted Ferguson’s lawyer at the time, who said ‘As a general rule white socks should never be worn with a suit unless you’re Michael Jackson.’”

 

 

Rugby league has a bad name already, so who really cares, but this article could well set back public perception of the noble mismatched tracksuit a decade or more.

In any event, I sympathise with Blake.. I too have been caught wearing a tracksuit in less than ideal circumstances. Like the time when I answered a knock on my door that turned out to be my estranged father who I hadn’t seen in 16 or so years. I was wearing a tracksuit then. Ugg boots, too. So rugby league.

 

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?  

 

 

Boyd's Bitchslap, Hayne's Backchat, Campese's Comeback

Can’t keep up? Allow me to bring you up to speed, time-poor peasant.

So. Six rounds down. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. You really wouldn’t want to spend much longer than six weeks with Pa Bundren though would you, even if he was your own creation.

·         In league, the 6 week mark is really when you are forced for the first time since season’s start; when you were all flush with that dumb optimism that exists irrespective of reality, to reevaluate your top 8 aspirations. Cowboy fans and the deluded loons who annually espouse their penthouse potential I’m talking to you.

·         Unless you are a Storm, Manly or, god help you, a Rabbit supporter, chances are that your club has already demonstrated a dazzlingly varied array of inadequacies designed to challenge your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Well, endure you must. This is football, and football, like life itself, mostly consists of endurance and suffering.

·         Dave Taylor has been dropped, for reasons that nobody has bothered to make clear. Seemingly, nobody has had to bother because no one cares enough to ask. Those who would normally ask are too busy making off-colour and cruelly unsympathetic cracks about Josh Dugan. I suppose the word is that he has an attitude problem, but saying Dave Taylor has an attitude problem is as obvious and unhelpful as saying the Freemasons have an image problem.

·         Jarryd Hayne is a player operating under conditions of severe personal stress. He offsets this by engaging weekly in vigorous and one sided dialogues with referees. Sometimes he takes a few minutes time out in between bouts and plays a bit of football. The Eels are locked several years deep into their slow and untidy spiral of decline now, and the strain is showing.

·         Ricky Stuart is operating under some stress too. All coaches do, of course, but not all coaches front post-game press conferences with the brimstone of a southern Baptist preacher and not all coaches care enough to make a $10 000 investment in the future of the game which is going straight to hell as they see it.

·         Darius Boyd gave another arresting press conference. In it, he gave nothing away to the assembled media other than the one thing they already knew from years prior, which was that they were dealing with a halfwit who was still not even remotely acquainted with proper press conference etiquette. Far be it from me to dish out unauthorised psychiatric diagnoses but he does seem to have advanced several shades up the spectrum since becoming a Knight.  

·         Misery continues to seep through Ben Barba’s barely maintained façade. There’s an ocean breaking inside the poor boy’s brain. You can see the tide washing in and out of his eyes. Barba was last year’s excitement machine. Josh Dugan was once an excitement machine. The game is littered with broke-down excitement machines. It’s a veritable Somme, and very sad.

·         Terry Campese finally made his comeback. This just leaves us waiting on Jesus now. Of course, the thing about comebacks (and this is where Terry went wrong last year) is that you are expected to come back and stay back. It’s not compulsory, but it is the preferred method.  Seven minutes of flabby play does not a comeback make, although as exits go it was spectacular, in a tragic Shakespearean way. Raider fans, who are well accustomed to pain and tragedy, absorbed the psychic pain with trademark weary stoicism facilitated by extra lashings of class A narcotics.

·         Recently, the Raiders have overcome trying circumstances to win 2 games. In a row. I believe this is what hubris-bloated commentators officially refer to as “a roll”. The other week against the Roosters, when the Raiders finally, after 45 profoundly painful minutes of play, completed a full set of six, Brandy Alexander called that “a roll” too. Raiders. Severely lowering standards since the mid-90s.

·         Sonny Bill is back too. I find it hard to summon interest in someone who seems to be so solely committed to self-interest, but he has rendered the Roosters vaguely watchable, which is not a sentence I thought I would write in Braith Anasta’s absence. 

·         Paul Gal was supposed to hang his junk out for charity. He arranged his underpants into some sort of crudely fashioned G-string instead. The whole this was a touch underwhelming. As in, I wasn’t all like:

·         Finally, there’s Todd Carney to consider. Because I haven’t, for fucking ever. I realised this a couple of weeks ago. I made a note of it.

 

Look at that unmarked neck and chest flesh. This is so sad. Lest we forget.   

James Graham Grinding on an Old Lady

There is nothing more terrible than the NRL season yielding to another filthy and relentless Australian summer. Well, some things maybe. Being tasered to death by fucking cops when you’re just a Brazilian boy on acid.  And cops in general, the cunts. Tussling with the Kafkaesque qualities of Telstra. The faces of people in food courts. A guy I work with who I blather to about what cars I see myself owning in the future telling me he’s started pissing blood. Watching my littlest cat Gepeto crying and writhing on the carpet after an apparent but unfounded snake bite and thinking he was about to die right while I was watching Intervention (Michael, meth addict) last night. These things are terrible too.

Anyway. Summer is a horizon-less wasteland. People seem to enjoy it. I don’t understand this but I have also never understood people in fact I pretty much hate them uniformly.

Wanda – I can’t stand people. I hate them. Do you hate them?

Henry – No. But I seem to feel better when they’re not around.

-Barfly

Still, it’s not like there’s nothing going on. Just yesterday I say photos of the Kangaroos. In training shirts. With necks and shoulders spilling out of every outlet. JT, and Billy. Good stuff, this. But insubstantial. Not enough.

I also saw photos of a gathering Tigers  Sharks coach Shane Flanagan had orchestrated; a meet, greet and get elegantly soused in the yacht club event to welcome the entire Tigers team minus Robbie Benji and Lote all the incoming recruits. And Todd Carney and Luke Lewis were seated together looking fucking lewd and generally bringing credit to their entire species just by sitting there. They can’t help it. They just have a seedy air of salaciousness about them that renders them automatically awesome.

(My brother took a long range punt on a Sharks Bulldogs grand final next year, with Bulldogs for the win. If they make it to the grand final it will totally inspire me to go out and get a commemorative neck tattoo. I don’t go for them or anything but they’re that kind of team. A team to, I don’t know; bring you to your happy place just by having a go.)     

And naturally the Bulldogs Mad Monday fallout bullshit continues. I say ‘continues’ but I mean ‘is now being perpetuated by radio stations and the like who in admirable attempts to really get to the crux of the sensitive and contentious issues at hand have started asking highly qualified media commentators and social analysts LIKE LAURYN EAGLE to comment on said issues and then immediately reporting on her comments and having others pass comment on her comments and reporting dutifully on that and so on and so forth seemingly forevermore until suck me off you dumb dog becomes, like, this decade’s Carpe Diem or whatever’. I don’t know. It’s cannibalistic and unseemly. I love it. (Not really, though.)

Probably what really happened at Belmore version #1

& #2

Things have strayed into Woodward and Bernstein territory what with talk of tapes and recordings and allegations of highly sophisticated spy equipment and meticulously researched revelations like did you know there is a 91 second YouTube video of that fiend James Graham grinding on a very old woman in the lounge area of a northern English pub that culminates in the very old woman putting her hands down his pants and going the grope and that the Bulldogs are attempting to argue that the whole Mad Monday incident was a misunderstanding stemming from this video whereby a player who is recounted as  saying “There are some ladies here to stick their heads in your pants” actually said “There’s no old ladies here to stick their hands in your pants”???

I didn’t know this. Did Channel 9 know this? Did it really happen like that or are the Bulldogs attempting to create an entirely new version of reality? Does it even matter now?

I do not have the answers to these questions but I too grapple with the underlying issues of truth and reality on a daily basis and understand the elusive nature of both. For example, today I finished one squeeze-bottle of sauce and opened a fresh one and the old one was labelled 40% lower in sugar and salt but I hadn’t know that when I bought it otherwise I never would have bought it because I love sugar and think very highly of salt too I mean for much of human history the pursuit of salt drove men to every edge of the world and anyway I hadn’t thought the reduced sugar and salt sauce tasted particularly different or particularly offensive until I opened the regular sauce and holy fuck it tasted amazing it was sweet it was salty it was altogether delicious and in that moment I knew that the sugar and salt reduced sauce had been a lie and  that I had lived that lie but hadn’t known it was a lie until I tasted the truth. 

Anyway. I don’t see the sense in asking Todd Carney’s girlfriend (Lauryn Eagle that is) what she thinks about women’s role in society, even if she is an ex-waterski champion. Personally, I would have approached Kochie’s Angels for comment long before asking for Eagle’s opinion. You know, step off Catherine Lumby and Eva Cox.    

I understand though, all of this inanity. It’s the off season, after all. The Daily Tele sports section seems to be experiencing a slump similar to the one currently over/underwhelming me. This is why they did a full page article on balls. Nuts, I mean. Not, like, Steedens and Sherrins and the teeny tiny child fingers that stitch them in unlit and unregulated hives of exploitative labour all over India in an appalling but all too common example of fat first world manufacturing industry’s reliance on and exploitation of developing nations and their heinous role in perpetuating global inequality and repression.

No.

“League star proves he’s one tough nut.”

Well, shit. You don’t buy a meat pie for the meat. Nor do you buy the Daily Tele for the (metaphoric) meat.

As it happens I think balls are great in both a general and specific sense so an entire and alarmingly graphic article all about them and the injuries they are evidently able to withstand was and remains very pleasing. Some of my favourite phrases and sentiments are as follows:

 “When trainers performed an X-ray on Livers, they found his testicle had ‘shattered like a light bulb’”

“…had his scrotum ripped open”

 “…had his scrotum torn”

“…leaving one testicle hanging free”

“…after being rucked viciously by a Frenchman”

“…had the physio stitch up his scrotum, then returned to the field before he was concussed by a blow to the head. Shelford does not recall any of that game”

“…was struck by a knee to his groin and his testicle exploded”

 “Surgery was performed to remove his right testicle”

“He returned to the rink two days later to the chant of ‘Balls of Steel’’  

“…his scrotum swelled up so badly he could not run properly”

“Livers recovered to father two children”

Paul Gallen & Graciousness

Yesterday I had to suspend my feelings for Paul Gallen. I thought this was going to be a problem. I thought I would be emotionally conflicted and in turmoil. The reasons for this are manifold but the basic thrust of it is that Gallen is more than just a player. Gallen is an ideology.

But when the Raiders ran out into ALL THAT GREEN I dismissed him entirely. In any case, I was busy shedding some polite tears. They were the type of tears that the Raiders, who are a gracious and dignified team, would have approved of. Just like them, they were nothing hysterical or showy or too overwrought. Just a quick weep and a series of small, full-body shudders punctuated by an abrupt re-gather.

Histrionics in general are met with quiet but pointed disapproval in Canberra. You have to understand that the whole city is a monument to failed ambition. This lends it its unique air of bleak, burnt out wistfulness. Drive around civic on a Sunday afternoon when all that stirs are the falling leaves. It’s the most melancholy place in Australia and probably, excluding certain cities of Eastern Europe, the world.  

The general tone and ambience is one of faded down-trodden dignity.  

Inside of course I was frothing with nervous hysteria and a churning, roiling nausea (who wasn’t?) even though I knew that they would win and would win well. Which they did.

See the gracious way I mentioned that? That’s how it’s done.

                                                                       - - -

There was also Todd Carney to put out of my mind. I didn’t know how I would handle having Josh Dugan and Todd Carney -  two players of impeccable deportment and lethal elegance -  on the field together but in the event Carney didn’t prove any trouble at all, either to me or the Raiders. Which is sad, in hindsight.

Fittler’s sideline interview with Carney after he was carried off injured and reappeared iced and strapped and bundled into a parachute jacket and altogether devastated didn’t go very well. Hushed tones and overt sympathy that verges on pity make even the most stoic person feel like crying lavishly Fittler you fuck!! Carney kept his composure though. He maintained a steadiness of voice and gaze common to someone who knows their way around a disappointment or two.

Here are Carney and Freddy in happier times:

And after the game, Gallen’s face! Grim! Like something you would see at a Serbian truck stop. Also, he called Josh Papalli “the boy”. It wasn’t like when Bert Newton said it to Muhammad Ali but fucking hell it was patronising but that’s okay Gal I know you were in a good deal of psychological distress at the time so I will excuse you your chilling air of restrained and toxic menace and in any case I kind of liked it actually I totally loved it DON’T EVER CHANGE GAL.

And, because I am graciousness personified I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that Josh ‘The Boy’ Papalli totally won the spiteful battle he had going on with Paul ‘He’s got me twice I’m gonna get him back there’s nothing you can do about it’ Gallen suffice to say that it was deeply satisfying.

And if Papalli gets a NZ jersey which he totally will him and Gallen will get to go at it all over again next month and I will be under no obligation to be polite and Papalli won’t either and is rugby league awesome or what?

                                                                                
                                                                                   - -  -
      
Here are my friends J-bo and GavSpaz on the big screen yesterday. They are unspeakably cool, it doesn’t surprise me they showed up on the stadium screen. J-bo is the one down front left doing the huge full-body upward fist drive while her other hand is furnished with a can of beer. Awesome.

And here is J-bo’s thigh this morning, bruised from being slapped yesterday:

I don’t know, maybe I was wrong about Canberrans keeping a lid on things. There was that game in the first round of semifinals in 2010 when the Raiders beat the Panthers at Penrith and the travelling Raider fans were so overwrought they surged forward and collapsed the stadium barrier and fell all over the Raider players they were trying to congratulate, that was pretty wild…

In any case and as you can probably appreciate, after the game was won the string that holds my emotional baggage together came undone entirely. The last seven minutes of play I spent sobbing. Rugby league. What a great game.

---

Dugan & Carney: Clams & Chowder.

 

1. 

“Feeling good about this arvo?”

“Not especially but HELLO the Carney and Dugan action – feel the fierce.”

After that abomination of a game against the Titans I didn’t pay any attention to the Raiders this entire week. I was all like TALK TO THE HAND - it was the (lopsided) equivalent of a week-long dose of the silent treatment. This ended ten minutes before kickoff when I heard Josh Dugan was back and I yelped “DUGAN AND CARNEY?? LET THE CLAMS MEET THE CHOWDER!”

Obviously, in regards to the actual game, I had no lofty expectations. I left them behind in 2010. Along with a half-finished thesis and any chance of a mentally regular future.    

Trying to foresee what the Raiders will do on any given weekend is an exercise in futility. It’s like expecting Courtney Love to keep her lipstick on straight – you can’t do it. It’s just not feasible.

2. 

 “Toddy looking more meek than fierce.”

“I’m enjoying his pain.”

“SO.AM.I. Especially that shocking kick!”

"He’s got the wobbles. He needs a stiff drink, steady his nerves."

"Ha! Old fella sitting next to me just said the same thing!"

Todd Carney. He didn’t look so good. When he coughed up the ball at one point I think I heard a muted trombone make a wha-whaaaaaa sound.

I can’t say whether the highly relative assertion that Origin rattled him is right or wrong. But he looked like a young man with more on his mind than in it yesterday.

This concerns me because he seems to have an easy and affectionate nature – one which enables him to patiently suffer the indignities heaped on over the years.

Look at this sweet footage of him giggling with Joey. Is this a man seduced by the allure of cheap bravado and self-hatred? I find it so cute that I can’t tell.

3.

“How sharp is Dugan’s game! Dooogz!”

“Doooooooogggggggaaaaaaaannnnnn!!!”

Dugan is back. Dugan is fucking gangster. Dugan is a PIMP. Holla.

Todd Carney - Never Trust a Tea-Drinking Man

Around this time in the afternoon before Origin 2 a few weeks ago Ricky Stuart and Todd Carney sat down and had a cup of tea together.

I really have no further comments. Well, I have one, and it is that I DON’T TRUST A TEA-DRINKING MAN. But, whatever. I don’t entirely trust the Blues to get the job done tonight either, but that may just be me transferring my festering sense of inadequacy elsewhere.

Speaking of, my brother is unconvinced that Carney is a big-game player. He also believes he has some obvious and severe mental issues. This is unwarranted. Look at these photos. They are enough for me to put aside my distaste for men - no - footballers who drink tea, and they should absolutely put to rest any concerns about Carney’s mental regularity. No one with a slipped mind or a deficiency in self-belief would wear lycra leggings with this much panache. Unless of course they were so far gone that they no longer knew what they were wearing, which is not the case and god-willing will never be the case.  

No, these leggings announce two things:

-Don’t fuck with me, &

-Who gives a shit?

This is really everything you can ask of your clothes.

In any case, now is not the time to question Carney’s grasp on reality. Now is the time to say GO SON. GO FORTH AND BE FABULOUS.

Jarryd Hayne's Big Fat Booty

God. The Raiders’ self-destruction mission so inflamed me that I completely dropped the ball on this Origin business.

It didn’t take much to get me up to speed. Here’s what I learnt:

The Blues are in camp. They are ready to punch on. Bird (obviously), Jennings, the lot of them. I wish them every success (obviously). The end.

Now let’s look at some photos.

The Hayne Plane came out of the hangar on the weekend.

This got me thinking about the track listings on this mysterious tape that was found on the street in south-east Michigan. Y’know, because Hayne has huge hind-quarters? He’s stacked! See also: Sir Mixalot.

If you’re after someone who looks to have more tattoos than teeth and cares not for being cowed by authority of any kind, here’s Todd Carney, being as awesome as always:

Go Blues - seek & destroy.