five reasons to hold off killing yourself until after the weekend

People - myself included, hence the blog - are prone to talking a lot of shit. It's what separates us from the dumb beasts. We are still dumb beasts, mind, but we have A LOT OF NOTHING TO SAY AND IT'S ALL TERRIBLY IMPORTANT. This has become fabulously apparent during this bloated September sports schedule. If September were a person it would be spread-eagled across a sofa with loosened pants - like you do after Christmas lunch? Yes, plenty of sport this September, which means miles and miles of newspaper copy picking over the excruciating miniature of every possible angle and also the conjuring up of some impossible angles, too. It's rich, superlative-ridden stuff and it makes for great reading if you're that way inclined.

I was sailing along happily, having dismissed the grand final's significance with a lazy hand swat and a scornful head toss ("Manly? Auckland? Pooh!") until I read some (thirty or forty odd) articles and found my indifference dissolving faster than a Sunday morning aspirin. Really, if seeing photos of Steve Matai projected onto the Harbour Bridge doesn't razz you up you need to check your pulse and your priorities, because it was an arresting and stirring sight. Bigger than God, and with better hair!

So. Sunday's Grand Final. Yes, it's Manly vs New Zealand, and no, you can't spin a silk purse out of a sow's ear but there's still good stuff to be had here. It just requires some rifling through the rubble of having one team everone hates and one team no one cares about in the grand final. I am happy to do that rifling. Here's what I've found.

1. Shaun Johnson vs Daly Cherry-Evans.

Everyone is getting plenty of froth and lather up over the fact that the game could well come down to a battle between these two rookie halfbacks, and that earlier this year Johnson was playing in the NSW cup - having now only played 15 first grade matches - while a year ago Cherry-Evans was playing in the QLD cup. Everyone is also excited over Johnson's razzle-dazzle. He shows-and-goes! He steps! He jinks! He's Stacey Jones, Andrew Johns, and Benji Marshall! Especially Benji Marshall! He does seem to have some of the mercurial Marshall magic. I know, I YouTubed him. He also has a lovely baby face - it's Ferris Bueller-esque. Also get this; he has never played against Manly before. There's something sweetly thrilling about all this. However. If your tastes don't run to baby faced Kiwi boys it will still be worth tuning in purely to see the head on Cherry-Evans. It's pin-esque. Yes, he is a pin head of the highest order. All pin heads are great - Novak Jokovich is especially awesome - but Cherry-Evans is particularly amusing because his pin head sits atop a disproportionately thick and muscular neck. It's remarkable really. In addition to this, he is a very sweetly spoken and well-mannered young man, which is nice. Lastly, he's a pretty okay player too. I mean, he makes everyone he plays against his bitch, so if that's more to your taste you should definitely watch.

2. Manly vs David Gallop.

This is actually deeply unpleasant, this business. Distasteful. The fact that two years of animosity between the NRL boss and Brett Stewart threatens to boil over on Sunday - and by 'boil over' I obviously mean that Stewart may well lose his barely-held-together shit during the official presentation and go postal on Gallop - is a disgrace and YES I DO FEEL LIKE ALAN JONES WHEN I USE THE WORD DISGRACE WHILE WORKING MYSELF INTO A TOWERING RAGE. God. This is why I try to avoid talking about this fued - it inflames my righteous ire to talkback radio-like proportions. Anyways. The possibility that this might actually happen on Sunday is not too far removed from the realm of reality due to the increasingly undeniable fact that Brett Stewart himself is now so far removed from the realm of reality. God help the guy. Nobody else can.

3 Manu Vatuvei.

He made his gold teeth by melting down his grandmother's gold rings, he rocks a rat's tail like in a way that only one other man in the NRL can and he employs a ghetto-fabulous finger-waggle as his try-celebration of choice - what's not to love? Nothing! There is nothing not to love about Manu! He's Manu, muhfuggers!

4. Des Hasler vs Ivan Cleary.

This is night to day, sweet to sour, Betty to Veronica type stuff. While Des Hasler turns into a raving, head-set abusing piece of meat while encased in the coach's box, Ivan Cleary sits sphinx-like in stony, poker faced silence. Both are equally unnerving. The difference here is that outside the high-pressure confines of the coach's box Cleary is as humourless and hollow-eyed as Dessie is gruff and flinty and endearing. I love a man of few words but I just cannot abide Ivan Cleary. He is reptilian and glacial and when he does speak it sounds like he swallowed a computer manual at some key point in his development. Des Hasler, on the other hand, gives charmingly off-kilter interviews, rips doors off their hinges when his team plays badly and has that ever so slightly threatening air that those of us with an unreconstructed wish to be thrown over a man's shoulder find appealing. Plus, he has that fabulous, incredible mane of hair. He's basically the Paddle-Pop Lion. So, hands down, he's already won. Worth watching to see his hysterics in the box, though. 

5. Mnaly vs Everybody Else.

Rugby league is a tribal game. Less so nowadays, but still, it's why we love it. Manly make out like they understand and embrace this fundamental fact but I'm not entirely convinced they do. You know that old thing of there being two teams to support; your own, and whoever happens to be playing Manly? The Manly club and Manly fans over on the insular peninsula have always claimed to pride themselves on being that team that everybody hates but the slightest suggestion that it might actually be true sets their insecurities aflame to such an extent that we have this untidy saga of resentment and hostility slowly unfolding over two seasons and showing no signs of abating. Stewart, you deadeyed dumbshit, you were suspended for four matches - TWO YEARS AGO - for getting trollyed at your season launch. Let it go, for chrissakes. Write it on a piece of paper, if you can manage that, tie it to a balloon, release the balloon into the sky and LET IT THE FUCK GO. Enough already! It just really grinds my gears, y'know?

Obviously, then, I can't possibly go for Manly on Sunday. Football blinds me to my principles but even I have limits.

Okay. There's my five reasons, picked from the rubble, to watch the game on Sunday.
Do with them what you will coz come Monday you're on your own again.

Josh Dugan: Throw Your Diamonds In The Air If You Feel The Vibe.

Last year I lived In Canberra and damn near lost my mind. It was not a good time. Putting aside my myriad of mental irregularities, I had a seven month long headache, so I didn't get a lot done while I was there. Generally I'd get out of bed, buy newspapers, return to bed, and then get out again in time to watch Judge Judy at Three. You do start to wonder where you've gone wrong when Judge Judy features that heavily in your daily regime.

Anyway. Aside from seeing the Raiders running out of the tunnel at the Cathedral of Cold that is Bruce Stadium most weeks, there were still several other stand-out moments. One time, I went into Woolworths and saw two rats tails in two minutes. Not in Queanbeyan, you understand, but Canberra itself. That was a good time.

Rats tails really lift my spirits enormously. I see them and I automatically get an overwhelming sense of well being. Obviously then, Josh Dugan is the high priest and patron saint right here because bitch rocks a rats tail that could shake an empire.

I overheard a guy behind me at a game in Canberra say to his mate in an altogether approving tone that Dugan looked "like he should be smoking crack in an underpass... he looks like a right rough cunt don't you reckon?"

Say what you will about rats tails, because they are entrenched in the NRL in much the same way that non-consensual sex and all manner of assault charges are. If nothing else they signify the host's sustained commitment to a cause. Those things take some growing. I applaud this. I also applaud any refusal to conform to patterns of grooming and presentation put forward by the likes of twits such as Joh Bailey and Napoleon Perdis (I've never heard them condemn rats tails per say, but I assume they would. I know their kind).

If you ask me there should be more of them among us. Attached to the right heads, obviously. Anyone who wears a hi-vis shirt for the course of their working day qualifies. Anyone who's ever spoken the words "dog's eye" and/or "dead horse" while buying their lunch in a bakery*. Boys from Dapto, and Deniliquen. General hoons, hoodlums, hooligans, hayseeds and yahoos. And carnies, of course.

Imagine then my shock when I read that the magnificent meat axe that is Michael Ennis disapproves of rats tails. I actually think I felt my world tilt off its axis a little. According to him, they are an eyesore of the highest order. It was at this point, and this point alone that I came to the realisation that Ennis and I are not cut from the same cloth.

Regarding Corey Parker's now defunct rats tail he says "I've always wondered how the bloke could seriously run out in front of 50,000 people with one of those things attached to his head?" He also says he pulled Parker's offending hair, back in '09, "but that's when he had the rats tail so what choice was there?... I think footy would be better if they were extinct".


Now, I love Ennis. I went to write 'as much as the next person' there, before realising that, well, I'm talking about Ennis, and in all likelihood the 'next person' may well wish for all hell to rain down on him daily.

Not me though. I think he's fantastic. What's not to love about a barbaric hooker who's genuinely partial to throwing down and punching on at the drop of a hat, and seems to love nothing more than getting all up in every bitch's business? Nothing. There is nothing not to love right there. He's old-school, and he plays some brutal, balls-out football. And, if he gets a bee in his bonnet he can hemorrhage penalties like its nobody's business, for good, for ill and for awesome.

Now, lest I play a part in perpetuating the Great Grub Myth, let me point out that Parker was groomsman at Ennis' wedding, and is godfather to all three of his children. Ennis pulls Parker's hair and Parker, says Ennis, is "always good for a sly shove", and they're totally best mates. They talk two times a week! I approve of this entirely; reading things like this delights me no end. Sometimes I even clap my hands in glee. Really.

Also, the man is nothing if not balanced. In much the same way that he cultivates inter-team friendhips, he's also a staunch, stand-out ambassador for the on and off field fued. This also meets with my approval. The fued is a fine feature of the game which I suspect is sorely misses by many a league fan. Most of all me.

In one corner: Ennis the no-frills country hooker who cares not for poncy haircuts. In the other: Farah the flashy city hooker who is possibly the most well-groomed man in league. (He also has something of a shark-like demeanour: it's odd and intruging). I especially love that Ennis apparently banned Bulldog teammates friendly with Farah from attending the opening of his restaraunt, as I too am an ardent subscriber to the 'if I don't like you nobody should' school of thought.

In short, rats tails rock. Sorry Ennis baby but there's no middle ground on this one.


*I myself am rigidly specific in the wording of my orders in bakeries, partly because of the vego thing, but mostly because of this one time when I asked for an iced donut in a fly blown, one horse town bakery and answered "surprise me" to the "what colour?" question only to nearly run myself into oncoming traffic a ways down the road when I discovered that I had bitten into a toxically yellow iced abomination THAT TASTED LIKE FUCKING BANANA. I felt this was a rank affront. I mean, everybody knows that iced donuts are either pink or brown, right? What the hell kind of renegade bakery was that anyway? I'll never know. Nor have I ever asked to be surprised again; not by a bakery, or any other establishment, organisation or individual either. I live in constant admiration of other people's willingness to fly by the seat of their pants though, and I appreciate rhyming slang as much as the next person.