The Young & The Restless Raiders

I understand that blog wise I have – what is the correct terminology here – dropped the ball. This ball dropping extends to all areas of my life. Whatever. Dropping balls is as legitimate a lifestyle as any. Just ask the Raiders.

In the event, I actually blame the Raiders. Who doesn’t.  

The Raiders were the one relationship I trusted to sustain, distract and comfort me in times of uncertainty and I didn’t notice it happening at the time but at some point during the season this relationship took a grievous turn toward near-total apathy so that three months’ worth of incidents and machinations failed to elicit any emotion or response from me at all but seeing the Raiders describe Jarrod Croker as a “flashy” player on Facebook causes me to flip the fuck out.

Setting aside the season-spanning, serialised saga of ceaseless negativity, the Raiders appear to have reached a new juncture in their grim narrative by categorising Croker as a “flashy” player.

This is what they’ve come to. They are so parched of hope and devoid of talent that Croker now rates as a flashy player.

Ye Gods. Because no offence to Jarrod but I register strong objections to this claim. Actually, offence.  

He doesn’t pass, he can’t tackle, and even if you don’t take into account the permanent internal damage that missed kick in 2010 obviously inflicted he still looks like he’s perpetually on the brink of a psychic meltdown and needs his mum.

Here is Croker holding back the beckoning abyss

Leaving aside his undiagnosed and chronic PTSD, the nice – not flashy, nice - thing about Croker is that he has no desire to ever leave Canberra. He is HAPPY in Canberra. He enjoys a FULL AND VIBRANT LIFE in Canberra. He didn’t even want to leave Goulburn to move to Canberra and make grade because the carefully laid out roads alarmed and overwhelmed him. There is something essentially decent about this, especially in light of what has been happening at the Raiders for a long time but was thrown into rude relief this year so that they are now what are referred to in professional media circles as a “problem club”, which is also nice.   

Here is Dugan signing with the Dragons

Of course, the professionals are right, but most of this year’s unpleasant ‘problems’ are representative of a psychological syndrome at the Raiders that I notice has become steadily and now suddenly worse as the years wear on – that of finding Canberra a dissatisfying and dispiriting place to live and play in.

Canberra is not going to change. Young and restless players are going to continue to find themselves trapped in Sartre-like “huis clos” – a “no exit” hell of their own making, and will continue to lose fans and alienate people by seeking or forcing releases.

Here is Blake being bad 

Short of relocating the entire club to Perth I don’t know what can be done about this.  

Performance-wise, the Raiders veer between the passable and the incompetent. Off-field, they have always maintained a relatively calm surface which has been ruptured at obligingly spaced intervals by the sort of scandals that are better understood if you keep a copy of the ACT’s criminal statutes handy and prominent.

The gradual and then sudden unspooling of Todd Carney’s entire Canberra career, Joel Monaghan being blown by a teammate’s dog, Josh Dugan confounding everyone by turning out to be a total dickhead and Blake Ferguson making me so sad I can’t even bring myself to mention him beyond this point on here are some of the more seismic ruptures.

See also:

Coach Furner’s sacking

The senior player revolt that led to Coach Furner’s sacking

Hemorrhaging hundreds of points in a series of huge late season losses

Suffering the most catastrophic loss in club history – Storm 68 Raiders 4

Dropping from a lofty ladder position to one lower than Clint Eastwood’s balls but still higher than the Eels

Papa Josh announcing his plans to join the priesthood

Anthony Milford’s attempts to avoid having to suffer the dreadful corrosive reality of living in Canberra now that people outside of Canberra know his name        

Papa and Milford going rogue and getting on the drink two days before their must win match against the Warriors in Auckland which   

Papa throwing up in their hotel corridor

Letting Sam Williams go and now facing the very real possibility of going from having too many halves to no halves next year

Sandor Earl being awarded the opportunity to explore his capacities for regret, despair and banned substances outside of the NRL  

The death of #Dorguson

Ricky Stuart

Here are Papa and Milford being best friends



Here are Papa's shorts creeping into his crotch 

 

Here is Milford's hair
 

Here is Blake being bae

Here is everyone who has anything to do with the Raiders

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is This How Britney Felt

I just typed the words my interest in this season has collapsed like a and could go no further which is an actual perfect reflection of my absence of interest and another indication that the brain numbing tedium of it all is getting to me which is notable because there are few things I love more than a good hard brain numbing.

Nothing much interesting happens anymore because it has been determined that interesting things may alienate fans except a shift in focus has occurred whereby talk is less about fans and more about mums and dads and ugly eyeless little attempts to appeal to these mums and dads have rendered the game a colourless and flaccid imitation of its former self in kind of the same way that the Coalition and the ALP have reduced themselves to wrung-out and barely recognisable imitations of the parties they once were by focusing exclusively on appealing to the dim and pliant middle but still expecting loyalty from their traditional supporter bases after systematically neutralising every ideological difference that ever distinguished one from the other in the first place and despite practicing the modern art of apathy just existing amid all this lying dullness and cancerous bullshit is a devastating drain on the senses and spirit and is it any wonder I get sick just from being alive no not really  actually it’s a wonder I’m alive at all

 

 

 

Raiders v. Dugan - Judgment Day

Spending more time than is probably healthy suckled up to the Dugan tit? You’ve come to the right place.

The problem with Josh Dugan and Canberra was that the Raiders demand low maintenance superstars who hum along quietly. As Dugan developed from raw housing commission colt to sleek thoroughbred his self-regard developed along with him, healthily at first, then not so healthily, until, finally, it became toxic.

 

Basically the Raiders are chronic underperformers and need to conduct themselves accordingly. This means behaving in a humble and gracious manner, and keeping the ostentatious off-field flourishes to a minimum. Dugan’s spirited accommodation of all things ostentatious defied this and, as he tells it, led to him being very cruelly cast out of Canberra and onto some crude scrapheap.

Well, what of it? I mean he’s not the first sports star to suffer under the staggering weight of Australia’s idiotic dislike of grossly-disproportionate-to-talent egotism.

 

Anyway. Tomorrow the Raiders play the Dragons in what is without a trace of hyperbole THEIR GAME OF THE YEAR. Because who among us doesn’t want to see Josh Dugan pay and pay dearly never minding the fact that this desire is pretty much redundant I mean it’s been   months since he was driven out of Canberra and forced to seek asylum with the Dragons and it doesn’t seem to have cost him much at all other than the small matter of his reputation and any lingering shreds of likeability that his increasing abrasiveness hadn’t corroded in the last 12 or so months at the Raiders anyway?

Whatever. Raider fans take what they can goddamn get.   

And as it is I’ve been struggling with this whole sordid trajectory since back when Dugan’s name was first getting mentioned for Origin:

It may help to think of Dugan as an ex. You know how you don’t want to see them reduced to a quivering gelatinous mess without you, but you don’t want the bastard/bitch soaring to lofty new heights since being rid of you either? It’s a fine line and one which Dugan has already overstepped with crude insensitivity.

Before this, even, there was that incident during his first game for the Dragons that constituted an irreparable defilement and has squatted toadishly in a dark recess of my mind ever since – the moment where DAVE DUGAN filled the big screen at Kogarah, wearing a Dragons jersey, grinning and waving and looking as proud and florid as any father ever could. Galling! All those years at the Raiders and the most I ever saw of Daddy Dugan was in the god-awful tattoo of Mr. and Mrs. Dugan on their wedding day that roams across the lower half of one of his son’s legs and stretches even my elastic boundaries of taste.

Let’s not spend a lot of time on this. He is just an asterisk now, and I’ve already exceeded the limits of both my magnanimity and medication on the son of a bitch these last few months. Alls I hope for, aside from an emphatic Raiders victory, is that he comes out of tomorrow’s game ravaged and stripped of swag, like he’s just been worked over by a pack of wild dogs.

It would be nice if I could say this with even a shred of certainty, but of course I can’t what with the Raiders being an inherently untrustworthy outfit prone to fluctuations in mood and manner that make the Greek government look stable. In any case, it’s been real and it’s about to get realer.

 

 

PETS! WITHOUT MAKEUP!

Hello who wants to wade into dark waters and partake in a process rife with psychological implications ie. marvel at the passing of time through the prism of my farmyard pets to underscore a common humanity and the unavoidable fact that life is a too short misery alleviated by fleeting moments of self-deception and Orwellian dystopia awaits in very near future?

Just kidding. God, relax. But here are Babs and Claudia, then and now. Like how the magazines do it to show weight loss and weight gain, or Sophie Monk’s lips, or people just getting uglier as they age because it’s awesome to be reminded via magazine that whimpering ruin is imminent and don’t forget it you pig-jowled losers?

 

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?  

 

 

Rude Realities of Origin Aftermath

When something you bother to believe in ends in disillusion AND NOT FOR THE FIRST FUCKING TIME OH NO THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME WE’VE SADDLED UP THIS HORSE NAMED HOPE it resonates in a painful and very personal fashion.

But, oh well. Show me something that doesn’t. Aside from this guy of course, who seemed to grasp which way the wind was blowing in terms of our need for comic relief and acted accordingly and at some personal expense:

 

Here is a quick education in the rude realities of recent Origin history. Multiply this picture by 8. I am not in the mood for subtleties.

 

Further inflaming my ill temper is the just dawned realisation that next year the referees will have TWO opportunities for their annual demonstration of just how pliable and open to intimidation and manipulation they are.

Cameron Smith - who according to popular sporting opinion is said to be as charming and welcoming in his dealings with referees as a pie cooling on a windowsill – talks pretty to them and they practically drop drawers and bend over on the spot for him. Jesus Christ. It leaves me feeling unclean just talking about it.

It also further proves the theory that popular sporting opinion does not always refer to what I consider reality. This, incidentally, or so the psychiatrist who I avoid making eye contact for once a fortnight suggests, may have something to do with why Matt Shirvington and his big swinging balls present pre-game panel shows on Foxtel while I post on a grossly underappreciated blog?

 

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.