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?  

 

 

Coping With Canberra - A Raiders Progress Report

For the football fan, summer is the soul’s winter.

For the footballers themselves, summer is the season in which to comfortingly return to character.  As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly: Proverbs 26, 11.

In Canberra, the Raiders are busily engaging in vivid and unrestrained off-field activities which cast an impression of quality living.

>>Quality living by Canberra standards I mean. Some other, non-geographically specific things which cast impressions of quality living: STD’s, rural road signs all shot up with bullet holes, getting bit by an animal while trying to get it stoned, ever using the word ‘repo’d’, seafood extender, painting unventilated rooms, ugly dogs hurling themselves against chain-link fences, trawling YouTube for footage of Flynn from Australian Idol’s rendition of Push Up! in morning’s earliest hours, tobacco-stained ceilings, managing to have both long hair and a sunburned scalp, throwing up in potted plants and any type of heaving be it dry or otherwise, threatening loved ones with shoes, staple guns or other unconventional weapons, having part of an eyebrow missing, petrol station pies, Lowes.  

It’s grim there you know. Faded, and with a weird melancholy. So while Bernard Tomic is brawling with his friend in a spa at 5:30am on the Gold Coast, which sounds hedonistic and hot, the Raiders are making the most of things in their own ways. Recent efforts have achieved some solid results, and ACT police have netted several Raiders in their wily civic web.

-         Jack Boom was thrown out of the Foreshore festival and into the drunk-tank for several hours. I read this in the Tele and then never heard a thing about it ever again but I totally buy it the boy is clearly a fiend anyone with a face as sweet as his is a certified fiend.

-         Blake Ferguson was ejected from the same festival for allegedly “spitting” “on” “several patrons”.

-         Joel Thompson has been interviewed about a bottle being thrown at a cyclist during a post-Foreshore party at his apartment. And there are non-existent reports that coach Furner was caught throwing a car battery through a senior player’s car windscreen.   

Well, shit. We liked Brando as Stanley Kowalski didn’t we, all mute surly attitude and explosions of raw seething brutality? What’s the goddamn difference?

Just as the game itself is an acquired taste, the occasionally unwholesome extracurricular activities of the most abhorrent members of society ie. football players are seen to be unpalatable by many also.  These are probably the same flat-pack people who have never slept with a second cousin more than once, never had a dark and savage night of the soul, and never sawed the roof off their car.      

So, whatever. Football is an acquired taste. My best friend told me her boyfriend regards with distaste footballers and the women who love them. He takes it to mean they’re rough or whatever.

But, Canberra. It’s weird there. As anyone who has lived there for any stretch of time will appreciate, the urge to throw bottles from balconies at cyclists is a powerful one which is not easily denied. I myself had to consciously keep two hands positioned on the steering wheel at all times when driving such was my urge to run cyclists down in my car. Nothing personal, you understand, it’s just that they somehow became a very visual and ever-present reminder of my culturally bankrupt and capitalist wasteland surrounds. This created an uneasy atmosphere of foreboding and also made driving something of an ordeal.

So I understand and sympathise with any bottle-throwing, spitting, heavy drinking, drug use, destruction of property and homicidal rampaging that goes on in Canberra. I actually endorse it. Distractions and delay tactics employed by those seeking to avoid the inevitable incursion of real life are a necessary component to coping with Canberra. If I wasn’t so burnt-out and unambitious I would run for office and seek subsidisation for it from Medicare myself.

((*not talking about J-Bo, Gav or Terry Campese anytime I talk about how fucked Canberra is. They all come from Queanbeyan, anyways, and besides which they are three of the best and most well-bred things – animal mineral vegetable or other - to come out of this stinking age we live in.))

Run Ben Barba Run!

Yeah Nah The Boys..

Making a really negative blog post is great. It relieves me of my many stresses. Kicking someone repeatedly in the head while wearing a pair of jack boots probably has the same effect. Or so I imagine. I don't know. I'm a pacifist. The Von Trapp to your Nazi. And if the Von Trapps taught us anything it is that Nazis can be thwarted by girls in pinafores. The End.  

With this in my more relaxed and at ease mind I can now turn my attention to several highlights of round 16.  

The second greatest thing this week was Ben Barba’s man of the match performance in Mackay.

The best thing was that there was a game in Mackay, between the top two teams. I have spent a lot of time in Mackay and the surrounding hinterlands. It’s one of those sensational places that manages to be both offensive and charming, albeit charming in an abrasive, amphetamine-edged way. It’s rude and rough and full of mean looking men who work in the mines and their mean looking dogs and women.

Once I spent a night in a rainforest shack getting wasted on rotgut wine with Scott Prince’s mother. CD’s of Guido Hatzis’ greatest radio moments boomed on continuous loop all night, at her insistence. Not my thing, but Guido Hatzis is a lifestyle choice.  

Anyway, Mackay is Ben Barba’s hometown, and the place he referenced in 2011 when he said that as a youth he developed his step by running from cops. He is now, according to every section of the media, an official “excitement machine”. I think the last person to be labeled an excitement machine was Josh Dugan. He's busted a lot nowadays. He still makes me coo like a dove though, which is nice.

Ben Barba has excitement up the wazoo. He was awesome in Mackay against the Storm, he whipped the crowd into frenzy, and he blew kisses and waggled his finger like G.I. used to do and afterwards he said the whole experience was “the best thing besides my kids being born.”

Elsewhere, in a game preceded by Mad Dog McDougal waving a wooden spoon around obnoxiously on the sideline (Matty Johns, later – “What’s happened to McDougal, has he got stuck in a dryer or something – he’s Benjamin Button – he’s shrinking!”) Nathan Hindmarsh pretty much single-handedly steered the Eels to a victory. Now there’s a sentence I’ve written never. Hindy was Paul Gallen-esque. AND it went down to golden point and we have all seen far too many heartbreaking scenes of a heartbroken Hindy after far too many golden point losses, I really didn’t know how many more he could take before he went on a shooting spree or something. The situation at Parramatta these last few years have pummeled a once robust and irreverent Hindy into an apologetic, barely identifiable corpse. On the weekend he rose up from the ashes of his faded glory and fucking flew. Here’s what he said about his man of the match performance: “I just thought bugger it I’m just gonna enjoy meself”. He’s a true treasure.

Another standout event was the courts stripping Josh Dugan of his driving license. We’ve been through this before. We will probably go through this again.  He is in the middle of a vivid and impressionable youth, after all – surely he is entitled to scatter witches hats at roadwork sites and speed through school zones extravagantly? (I’m not saying he did this. What I am saying though is that I would do this (below) if he were to pass me in the street.)

After his court appearance he said that he is much smarter for it. Footballers say the stupidest things. Where do they learn these phrases? At what point in their careers are they taught not to make unconstructive remarks? Around the same time they are taught to preface every remark – particularly if they are responding to a compliment relating to their existence as an individual – with “the boys”,  and preferably with “yeah nah the boys…”

Here’s how it works: (Picture a post-match sideline interview, and prepare to gain no insight whatsoever into the interviewed footballer’s mind.)

“Ben Barba that was an outstanding length of the field run you pulled off there in the 76^th minute, you slipped past at least five Storm tacklers and chasers, some would say you’re slippery as a greased pig and twice as fast..”

“Yeh nah the boys put in a real solid effort we trained well all week and we’re just happy to come away with the win.”

There are three components to this sentence that basically constitute everything a footballer has to say in interviews, ever, no matter how hard the interviewer tries to get the player to say something interesting or expansive about themselves. And because the interviewers are invariably box headed ex-player buffoons - Gasnier, Tallis, Fitler, KIMMORLEY - who spent their playing careers making the same evasive comments they never try particularly hard anyways. Also, they are all invariably dim-witted. Michael Parkinson, your job is safe.

Let’s break it down.

1.       “Yeh nah the boys”. This negates any suggestion of individual effort, excellence or indeed existence. It just shuts it right the fuck down. Next! 

2.      “We trained well all week”. This is like me saying “I looked at Facebook well all week”. Of course they train well. They’re professionals. It’s what they do. In the same way, of course I look at Facebook well. I’m between jobs. What else would I do?

3.      “We’re just happy to come away with the win”. This one is readily interchanged with “We’re just happy to get the two points”, or “We’ll take the two”. Usage usually depends on the nature of the win. If it was an ugly, hardscrabble, or offensive match or one that the victors had no business winning but somehow did, they’ll go the “We’ll take the two” route – see: Paramatta Eels. “We’re just happy to come away with the win” is used after a confident, decisive or spectacular victory, such as Manly’s 38 point thrashing of the Roosters on Sunday. “We’re just happy to get the two points” lies somewhere in the middle of these two. Usage is suggestive of inconsistent, erratic, thrilling or outlandish passages of play and a score that seesaws extravagantly and unpredictably over the eighty minutes - see: Wests Tigers, South Sydney Rabbitohs.

Anyways, moving on from the assertion that footballers are robotic, witless and mentally slow on most fronts, let’s now return to Josh Dugan, who is obviously none of these things (coochie-coo!!)

Here is an actual visual image of what went down when I was there to watch him walk out of the courthouse in Canberra after he lost his license in 2010, bearing in mind, of course, that I am the Hoda to his Beyonce.

He is becoming as thickset as a steer now. This is sad, but inevitable. The NRL: Turning fawns to fat necked steers since 1909.

Now, turning from steers to snakes: 

Obviously I still think Brett Snake Stewart needs to pull his head in and get a hold of himself before further mental disintegration and hair loss occurs. But that article in Good Weekend about his accuser’s father and family background had the unwelcome effect of making me feel great sympathy for him.

Which is annoying.

In my experience sympathy leads to empathy and from there it’s a slippery slope that usually leads to eventual feelings of warmth good will and camaraderie.

When it comes to Brett Stewart, none of these are feelings that I need to feel.   

This one time I found out all this stuff that this girl I had not been able to handle for years had been going through with her wayward miscreant of a boyfriend and baby daddy. The sort of galling, how DARE he stuff that would make you want to throw things against walls. (As it happened, she did throw things against a wall – and by ‘things’ I mean ‘him’. I know. How awesome. Go girl.) Anyway, all this had the strange effect of making me feel great sympathy and a good deal of tenderness and good will toward her. It was a strange sensation. Unfamiliar. I waited for it to pass but it didn’t.

Is this now what I have to look forward to with Brett Stewart? Fuck. Football is supposed to be simple. Love the Raiders, hate the Rabbitohs, respect the Storm. END OF FUCKING STORY.