Canberra Raider Fans - A Guide

Raider fans can be divided into two loose groups*.

You have your deluded fools – know them by their seemingly bright but actually dead-from-never-having-lived eyes - and you have your weary fatalists – jaundiced, hollow of eye, with a keen sense of the absurd and the tragic and a propensity for passing dark comments concerning the soul-crushing shuffle toward grim death that passes for life.

If you’ve ever trudged down the cycle way and through the tunnel in the bush out the back of Bruce stadium to return to your freely-parked car after a rude loss in what was most probably just one in a spirit-sapping string of rude losses you will know them, this second type. 

Few who have stared into the void can resist the lure of anarchic, mounted-curb parking**. Something – or everything - about it attracts the jaundiced fan while the perky optimists who have never seen into the abyss or screamed into the sky hand five dollar notes to men in hi-vis vests for the privilege of parking in an orderly and easily accessible fashion.

If you don’t attend Raider home games, and quite frankly who can blame you, the delusionals are still easily identifiable. Just follow the Raiders on Facebook and scroll through the avalanche of comments that appear after every post. Like most breeds of idiot they are not shy about making their presence known.

I think this is the year for the Raiders. Go Raiders. Mack us proud boys. Goo the green machine! 2013 here we come. With Berrigan back we can’t loose!

I have nothing against delusions. Some of my best friends are delusional. But the reality writ large on a brightly lit screen can be jarring if your nerves are at all raw. It is for this reason that I suggested several Raider fans I know start filing their nerve endings in February. I did not know that Josh Dugan would run sharply afoul of coach Furner after only the first round and have his $650 000 a year contract most probably evapourate in a dramatic swirl of pre-mixed liquor and profanity.  I praise Jesus that I didn’t know either because no amount of nerve-filing could have prepared them for this and they would have rotted out with the weight of it.

So when the Raiders announce their round 1 team lineup on Facebook and they’re missing three of their four spine players and are without a goal kicker and several hundred people who are blind to weird and volatile realities post comments like GREAT SIDE and WE WILL CRUSH THOSE PANTHERS LIKE ANTS  -  there’s that one guy who writes “we’re fucked”. 

Well, guess what? He was right. We really are fucked.

And you know what else? We kind of like it that way.

*Please note that I am ONLY talking about Raider fans here. Do not assume that fans of other troubled clubs *coughCRONULLAcough* have the same or similar characteristics. For example, it is my understanding that fair portions of the Shire’s population have been inspired to go out and get commemorative Sharks neck tattoos this last week, rendering them eternally ridiculous. No, they are a team with their own unique problems and fans, and just as Germany is a country now forever stained in our collective consciousness by a string of poorly-received 20^th century wars and related unpleasantness, so too are the poor Sharks. It’s all very unfortunate but then show me something in this world that isn’t.

**Because everybody knows that the way you park provides clues about your essential character. Like when George Costanza compares parking garages to going to a prostitute: why should he pay for it when, if he applies himself, he can eventually get it for free? Yes.

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”

This is Pretty Much All I've Done With My Life So Far

OhMama MY MIND. I’m going out of it.

I thought last weekend was bad. This is worse. But by worse I really mean better. Because obviously it’s fucking awesome and exciting and this week I have been as happy as I ever expect to be.

The tension, though, it takes a toll. I have an edgy nature and a diagnosed anxiety disorder and have carefully assembled my life in such a way so as to remove or negate as many extraneously stressful or disruptive elements as possible. Friends, for example.

Finals football is taking me right to the edge and I’ve also ramped up my coffee intake which has in turn ramped up the strength and duration of my facial twitches and people have been confined to their beds with leather straps for less or so I’m told but anyway it’s been great it’s been real.

((I’m just kidding about the facial twitching business. The majority of my twitching occurs when I eat big green feta-stuffed olives at Christmas time and it’s usually confined to one eye.))

After taking Monday off and giving serious consideration to not going in all week I showed up on Tuesday but warned my boss not to expect much too much as “It’s a big week for me.” He is used to my nonsense and he doesn’t ask questions, aside from the rhetorical ones he barks continuously (see several posts back). Like yesterday, noticing that I was extremely early “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE YOU SHIT THE BED DID YOU” at a volume that suggested he was communicating from the midst of a roaring blizzard and not, you know, leaning into my car window and about fifteen centimetres away from my face.  

All week I have been slightly obsessed with Josh Young Bull Papalii. His fiery exchanges with Paul Gal took me completely by surprise. They also seemed to surprise and unnerve Gallen. Here is what The Young Bull said: “Furnsey just told me to look after Gallen out there, it was a big ask and I still can’t believe I finished it off. He’s real experienced and a real scary guy, too.”

Here is what the Old Bull said: “I don’t really care about Papalii, he hit a dog shot with a swinging arm, and once in the back without the ball. He was coming from the blindside a lot. He got me high and from the back, he did well the boy.”

I feel terrible for Gal and wish the Sharks could have made it through too so I can’t go to town on this too much. I’ve tried. What happens is I think of Gal giving the Origin losers speech this year and last, and Gal being interviewed after the Raiders knocked them out, and Gal finishing his eighth double scotch of the evening at home in Cronulla every night since Saturday like a character out of a Raymond Carver story, blankly staring into the middle distance and considering the irrevocable march toward middle age, early-onset arthritis, death, and the very real possibility that the Sharks may not win a premiership on his watch and perhaps anybody else’s watch either during his lifetime which is rapidly ticking down tick tick tick jesus christ it’s enough to make you sick it’s enough to make any man take to drink hmmm that reminds me look at that mine’s empty again ANN?? ANN!!!!!  

But, Papalii. He really did do well. Every item written about him mentions his soft voice, his shy nature, his gentle soul and his enormous appetite. All viable topics. But - and I can scarcely believe it myself - no one has addressed the enormity of his thighs. I don’t know. Perhaps – just a hunch - my priorities differ from other people’s. Someone complained that this blog had become increasingly “unnecessarily homoerotik (sic)” to which I said a. no homoerotika (sic) is unnecessary and b. are you familiar with rugby league at all hello?

I don’t think it matters what I write about the thighs. If your world view is anything like mine and you see the chilling dystopian landscape through a graphic, luridly perverted lens you will be mesmerised by the comically muscular thighs and the unfortunate cut of short from which said thighs burst forth from volcanically in the above photo and will find your eyes swiveling back there because you find the sight so attractively appalling.

His head is also hilarious. My brother says it reminds him of a totem pole. I say it looks like something you would see on Easter Island. Either way, it too is enormous, and awesome, obviously.  - *Automatic eyeball swivel* -  But sweet jesus those are some truly thick thighs!! Thicker than molasses. Thicker than thieves. Thicker than Trent Barrett. Not as thick as Mark Gasnier.

"And now Blake Ferguson's gran-mama 'aint the only girl callin' him baby"

 - Raiders Sharks Semi-Final -

Joey Johns picked Blake Ferguson as his “impact player” yesterday which as I understand it is the ‘player’ he thinks will make an ‘impact’ of some significance. He would have been my choice too, had Channel Nine have asked me to contribute. I had actually opened up 60 minutes of my schedule to specifically address the “impact player” issue in the hours prior but the call never came through..

I love Blake Ferguson. As well as being my favourite “impact player” I also pick him as my favourite ever “DOCS graduate”. Not only because he wasn’t found dead and stuffed in a suitcase as a baby, but because he is just generally awesome and adorable and athletically freaky WHAT IS WITH HIS FINGERTIP CONTROL HOW DOES HE GET THOSE PICKUPS AND HAVE YOU SEEN HIM UNDER A HIGHBALL WHAT ABOUT WHEN HE ACCELERATES HOLY FUCK HE GOES LIKE A GREEN STREAK AND HOW ABOUT THE WAY HE CAN TIPPY-TOE WHO TAUGHT HIM TO TIPPY-TOE LIKE THAT IS IT A NATURAL GIFT OR WAS IT COACHING STAFF AT THE SHARKS BEFORE HE DISSED THEM AND UNCEREMONIOUSLY DEPARTED FOR THE RAIDERS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND PREMIERSHIP GLORY THAT HE DID NOT BELIEVE THE SHARKS OFFERED BUT BELIEVED THE RAIDERS DID AND DOESN’T THAT APPEAR TO BE THE BEST DECISION OF HIS LIFE HOW HAPPY DOES HE LOOK PLAYING ALONGSIDE SANDOR EARL AND JOSH DUGAN HOW GANGSTER ARE THEY HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING CUTER NO YOU HAVEN’T HAVE YOU EXCEPT MAYBE WHEN HE SAYS HI TO HIS GRANDPARENTS AFTER A GAME THAT’S PRETTY CUTE TOO ISN’T IT HUH HUH HELLO IS THIS THING ON  -  -  -

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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.

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The Humanity and The Meth Trash

This is an age of disappointment. Most of us want our sport to reflect what is good in humanity. We want it to lift us from the mundane and the everyday. We want it to provide us with an understanding of the human condition.

I want all this. I also want sport to provide visuals such as this, and plenty of them:

Here is a closer look at the human condition, NRL-style.

From what I understand, the fact that Jarryd Hayne went grocery shopping instead of attending the Eels Manly game as supportive injured spectator was deemed by the Eels board to be an affront so rank that it was grounds to finally can coach Kearney.  Seems a little extreme, but he had only won nine games out of a fucking hundred or so…  

Anyway, who could blame Hayne for not wanting to watch his stinking team play? I have no emotional investment in the Eels whatsoever and watching Chris Sandow ‘play’ makes me writhe in discomfort, I can only imagine Hayne’s reluctance to do the same. In public. At Brookvale. Trying to hide your private despair from public scrutiny is THE WORST.

“I’m just barracking for Braith tonight. He has a new haircut” – text to my brother, re. the Roosters Rabbits game.

Personal hair care is clearly a very high priority for Braith. I would find this offensive in, say, a Rabbitoh, but it’s Braith, so it’s charming. Last week, in that Sharks game, Braith had “an infected face” and did not play. This was bad news for me. For Braith too, I imagine.

Braith’s complicated face is one of my five favourites in the NRL. I searched it this week for lesions and when I actually saw one I experienced photo-sensitive-epilepsy type flashes of Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, which was an occurrence I found unsettling.

To steady the nerves I reminded myself of that time Braith hollered ‘AW YOU’RE OFF YER HEAD!!” at some hapless ref. This was an occurrence I found awesome. Poor Braith. It must blow being the captain of the most penalised club in the competition. Not to mention being coached by that croaky halfwit Brian Smith. He is a shrunken straw-man. Under no circumstances should he be coaching. He should be tonging sausages outside Bunnings of a weekend.

The Roosters are still persisting with that inane practice of slapping each other’s backs and hands after an error. Of which there are many. I can’t help feeling that this weird charade is symptomatic of some of the deeper problems at the Roosters. Of which there are many.  Like Brian Smith being a total shonk. As tactics go I prefer Mitchell Pearce’s last week against the Sharks when the Roosters were packing a scrum with nine seconds on the clock. He screamed “NO FUCKIN PENALTIES!!!” and it appeared to work because they didn’t concede any penalties, and god knows they are partial to a penalty or twelve. In the event, the game went into golden point the three dozen or so attempts at field goal addled my mind and dazzled my eye so much that I can’t remember who eventually even won the goddamn game. *Oh, right. It was a draw.

I think Mitchell Pearce is experiencing some hiccups in employee relations at the Roosters. I believe this is true in the same way I believe that that creepy father totally felt up his cretinous daughter during that limo ride home from the airport on The Shire last week. Some things you just know.

I’ve spent this whole season squinting at Adam Reynolds, trying to work out where I’ve seen him before. Now I know that every time I’ve caught a train to or from Bomaderry HE’S BEEN ON IT. He’s the guy nipping off at Minamurra and Thirroul to suck down a few sneaky durry drags on the platform. He’s also the guy wearing athletic snap-pants. Because nothing better signifies a disdain for societal norms than athletic snap-pants. Last time I rode this train there was a guy, to avoid confusion let’s just call him ‘Adam Reynolds’, talking explosively to someone whose acquaintance he had just made, telling them about his neighbours in Sanctuary Point. “Cunts on one side, cunts on the other.”

Incidentally, this blog has been receiving a substantial amount of traffic off of the key search words ‘how to get rid of meth trash’.

Luke Lewis. He is perfect for Cronulla. Cronulla is perfect for him. You know he would say “my dog barks at Asian people”. He was spotted last week buying a pie in Cronulla. This was early evidence of his plans to sign with the Sharks, certainly, but it was also confirmation that footballers can perform ordinary individual acts, completely unsupervised, such as basic pie consumption.

I was hoping dimly that he would come to Canberra. You wouldn’t though, would you? Not if you’re in form, not if you’re in possession of your wits. Lewis has sharp bleached blue eyes suffused with a strange Bunsen burner flame like vitality. He’d also most likely be one to bite his beer bottles open. He is basically a VB ad come to life. He knows what’s up.

Anyway, it’s heartening to know that he chose Cronulla because he wants to see out his career being captained by Gal. It’s like when Josh Dugan said he wanted to stay at Canberra to play alongside Terry Campese. Except that Campese ended up out injured for the season for a second year running, damnation. The only upside of this, by the by, is that Terry’s long stretches off the field give him plenty of time to impregnate his wife and expand the Campese dynasty. I want the whole Queanbeyan and Jerromberah area crawling with Campese babies in the next five years. See to it, Terry.

I’m also happy for Gallan. Greg Bird’s inglorious departure tore their ‘Bruise Brothers’ alliance asunder. Having Lewis alongside him to pummel bodies into barely identifiable hunks of meat will be good for him.

“Hi, I’m Sonny Bill. You may remember me from four years ago, when I committed the greatest act of treachery in the game’s history.”

Sonny Bill’s departure from the NRL was spectacular. I understand that his re-entry in 2013 will cause something of a sensation too. Sonny Bill is ridiculous. The Roosters are ridiculous. This situation where they’re letting him carouse all off-season and then piloting him in twenty minutes before kick off in round one is ridiculous. Where is the time for team bonding – running up sand hills and roofy-ing and getting shit tattoos - during the summer months? It tells everybody everything they need to know about the Roosters ethos, in case anyone missed it over the last hundred odd years. There is no fairness in it. There is no fairness in life. Sad.

Something else that is sad: Nathan Hindmarsh having to wrap up his career surrounded by dysfunction and incompetence. Did everyone see him go back and pick up the last esky for the groundskeepers after everyone else had left last weekend? His shorts were loose and sagging and his Eels had just beaten the Storm from last position and he’d scored his first try of 2012 and he was rolling this enormous esky off the field, WHAT A GUY. Age shall not weary him.

Elvis was so clapped out by the end of his career that he couldn’t have shifted an esky if he’d tried.

This Steve Price guy, who the fuck is he? Whoever he is, he is not cut out for this coaching gig he’s found himself in. No man with such an alarmingly sloping chin should be in an authoritative and public position. He is limp and surly and petulant and evasive, which is exactly what the world expects of a weak-chinned man. Fittingly, he defended that dirty little hamster Jamie Soward when he marched off at Bruce without shaking hands with a single Raider. I think he even encouraged people to forget it, get over it. Not on my watch Soward. Lest we forget.

Speaking of dirty little hamsters, the fact that Chris Sandow gets to be coached by Ricky Stuart next year resonates with me in a very painful fashion. It sticks in my craw. All the speculation and conjecture about him signing on to coach Canberra, all that fucking ‘strong mail’ that sports writers like to reference to bolster their hopelessly ill-informed stories, all of it has ended in disillusion.

Show me something that doesn’t.

((Minutes after writing this I find myself grinning inadvertently at an inane Suzuki ad featuring Slater Smith and Ryles - a terrible transgression, on all of our parts.))

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.