Blake Ferguson & The Case For & Against Caging Footballers

 

Blake Ferguson went to court yesterday and entered a not guilty plea to an indecent assault charge.

Court documents allege Ferguson “touched vagina”.

The matter was adjourned until September, so it is for Blake, as it is for everyone, a matter of waiting.

We all wait, at all times, for everything. For doctors, for hospital beds, for transplants, for tradesmen, for Telstra, for elections, for planes, for your number to be called at the deli, for something to fucking change, for death.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me – and if you are congratulations – you will appreciate the high stakes aesthetics of his courthouse style. Internationally, Lindsay Lohan and Michael Jackson set the ‘arriving at court in style’ bar at lofty heights, well out of reach of the general population, to which, if you heed the damning reports, you would know these vagina touching NRL footballers do not believe they belong.

Many recent incidents seem to have confirmed the increasingly commonly held belief that footballers can no longer be trusted to perform ordinary individual acts in any unsupervised capacity. Maybe none more so than Russell Packer, who not five minutes after failing to utilise the unadulterated access to amenities that the dressing sheds presumably provide, stood on field and, hands on hips and before an audience of thousands, released down his leg a great stream of urine.

I’m sorry but whether public or private there’s something unseemly about a man who doesn’t hold his dick to do this. It’s animal.

Packer’s proof that performing basic ablutions are beyond the realm of what we can expect from footballers works very much in favour of the advocates moving to cage and quarantine players for all but the 80 minutes of game time required of them each week. As a movement, it’s gaining momentum.  

They say that based on the current climate very little seems to separate NRL players from the animal world already. They argue that random vagina touching and flagrant hands free urination are but two more threads that make up the ever-narrowing link between footballer and beast.

I don’t deny this. I did, after all, see that stream of piss, those stained shorts, and the sunglasses Blake Ferguson wore on his way to court to plead not guilty.

Still, I am fundamentally opposed to this movement. In actual fact I’m an advocate for footballers gaining recognition as a protected species and being awarded certain civic and civil liberties that allow them to roam among us drones free and unfettered.

 

This could be a platform from which either side could win this fucking election we’re waiting on. And wouldn’t that actually be something worth waiting for, aside from grim death of course.