JoshDugan = Bambi II

That Michael Weyman statue in Moruya stirred something in me. Who knew a bronze rendering of an unattractive rugby league behemoth would speak of universal feelings and fiery passions?  It damn well stirred something in him too; did you see him go like a fucking bull at a gate to get first try in the opening minutes of last week’s game? He ran thirty metres! He looked like a moose! By the by, how the hell did I not know Weyman’s nickname was the Horse?? I found this out on the same day that I discovered there’s a Dulux paint colour called ‘Hog Bristle’. It’s the little things. It has to be, because the big things maul us to pieces. I wish his nickname had somehow been incorporated into his statue. Hooves, a mane, flared horsey nostrils, something.

So. I’ve been giving this commemorative statue issue some thought. So too have the Daily Tele. They’ve approached it from a slightly different angle, and arrived at a wildly different conclusion but, still. Nick Walshaw, I love you, you bogan. You are a top shelf sports writer. How’s this for a lead sentence: “A Nathan Hindmarsh statue would not be complete without a little bum crack showing.” Eels great Brett Kenny got involved. “You know that appearance Hindy has at the back end of games – exhausted, pants slipping down…mate, that’s him.”

The Tele also appears to have launched a campaign to give the idea traction. It’s called ‘Back the Crack’. They have, like, a logo and stuff.

I have no objection to this. Hindmarsh is a standup guy. Well, there was that time he called Michael Ennis a grub in a press conference last year, I didn’t much like that. It was unwarranted. Michael Ennis is a legend.  

Anyway, charming as this ‘Back the Crack’ business is, I like the idea of statues going up when players are still active and relevant. Plenty of time for retrospection later.  

This brings me to Josh Dugan. I think he warrants some kind of statue. Just because he’s got mad game, really. And he re-signed with the Raiders for another two years and gave playing alongside Terry Campese as one of his key reasons for staying. BALLER! He doesn’t have an animal alias, at least not in the public imagination. He does in mine, and he’s not the only one. Plenty of those rangy backs remind me of Dobermans, for example. Dobermans are fast and enjoy chasing people.

I’m thinking an interpretive rather than literal rendering could be the go – something capturing that ineffable essence – here are some of my ideas. Well, one idea, really – Dugan as deer. Behold!





Capital Punishment in Canberra.

Last night? ROUGH.

No point raking over the ashes and demanding retributive justice and probing independent inquiries. Been there done that BOUGHT THE FUCKING JERSEY.

No. The whole affair can be illustrated by two things. 1. The traumatised subtext of girl-J-bo’s text messages (I have selected just four but there were A LOT. Girl was in a lot of pain. Public pain.) And, 2. Laurie Daly’s shell-shocked post-commentary reaction.

1.

“I’m at the pub with a bunch of nth qld fans. I have ordered a BLT but I am not hungry anymore and at the very least it’s going to be embarrassing to eat juicy fatty pig while we loooooooose”

“I’m so not going to be able to eat that thing when it arrives. I’m dreading the beep of the bistro buzzer.”

“Well, I guess it’s fitting that I ended up with tomato sauce all over myself.”

“Waaaaaaah…Why oh why am I moving back there…….”

2.

By game’s end Laurie Daly was babbling and bereft. Soon after, when asked where to now for the Raiders or some such bullshit question he was rendered speechless and just… gaped into the camera with a pinched, wincing look. When he gathered himself pretty much all he could offer was the suggestion that Dave Furner enlist a psychologist. I’m with Laurie. The schizoid tendencies of the Raiders are completely out of control. Mental disintegration is afoot. Help is needed. Shit is dire. And that’s about all I’ve got to say about that.

Now. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me now, mid-season, I’m going overseas for five weeks, starting this Thursday. This means that I am taking the Raiders Cowboys game with me, into the fucking Himalayas, as my freshest rawest football memory, so help me God (or Buddha. Ganesh. Somebody! Anybody??) I’m taking my Raiders scarf, acrylic be damned. Maybe if the mood strikes me I’ll offer up some sort of high altitude agnostic prayer on their behalf. Yeh. And come home in May to find them riding high on the ladder and, like, completing sets and offloading and doing all that really fancy specialist shit. IMAGINE.

Fuck You Dad

Thinking about going to a cat show today. You know, participating in what is known as “real life”. This in itself is an uninviting concept, but, CATS. Fuck yeh, CATS! And cat shows are supposed to attract extremely odd and idiosyncratic individuals. Fuck yeh, WEIRDOS!

People occasionally make obnoxious comments of the ‘crazy cat lady’ variety. I don’t mind. I don’t think I’m quite there yet but I do aspire to achieve certified, crazy cat lady status in the future. There was one time I did mind though, and it was a couple of months ago, during a conversation with my father, who I have been estranged from for more than fifteen years. Sixteen, seventeen, something like that. He’s okay, I guess, but he’s one of those men who shows no courage when it counts. At the end of 2010, when I saw him after all that time, he was just this small stranger standing on my doorstep who I was taller than. He was moving to Canberra at the exact time that I was preparing to leave Canberra. I had several dozen reasons to be leaving already but that one was a solid late entry because seeing him totally unsettled me, all he did was cry and ask me irritating questions about my mental health. Like had I ever considered suicide? We spoke on the phone a few times since then and the last time we did he asked me if I still had four cats and when I said yeh he started, like, cackling, weirdly, for a long time, like he was laying an egg, it was terrible. When he’d stopped and composed himself he said into the stony stretched silence something like” wow, you really are a crazy cat lady aren’t you”. I wish I could have said what I wanted to at the time, I wish I could have suggested that perhaps the reason I find cats preferable to people may have something to do with him turning out to be a turncoat and a terrible father who fucked with my soft bird-bone early-adolescent head and sent sadness and suspicion to settle into my hardening bones.

I didn’t say that though, and, as is the way when you don’t say what you should have said and needed to say, I taste metal in my throat when I think about it now.

Anyway, whatever the reasons, I have an ever-intensifying infatuation with cats and just imagine the fun of moving among other, more motivated enthusiasts who not only find cats to be creatures of unparalleled excellence but believe they necessitate rigorous exhibition.

“They get stretched out so they can be judged on their structure, but if they bite the judge it’s a big disgrace.”  That’s the line that attracted me in the article announcing the show. Also, the special mention that one of the judges was coming “all the way from Minneapolis, United States.”

-I’ve compiled a list of things that could have made this story better – Camaros, corsetry, hills carpeted with flowers, David Koresh, seafood extender, being sprayed by a skunk……… But, you know, then I remembered that Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were all huge fans of the cat, Bukowski in particular made constant references in his later-in-life letters to the way his bunch of adopted strays lifted his soup-stain suicide moods just by the way they crossed a rug or sat in sunshine and slept. Nothing can get better than that.

Billy Slater's Neck&Thighs: "thick all round"

Things are looking up down here in Victoria. Maybe it really will one day be “the place to be” like the inane number plates announce. My newsagent Carl was eager and very excited to tell me recently that my specially ordered Daily Telegraph is now delivered ON THE DAY, as opposed to a day later, and that he had been working tirelessly since Christmas to achieve this. “How many do you actually sell?” I asked him. “Oh, four or five…” “Yeh well maybe the suits in charge of programming at WIN will fall into line with you and acknowledge the existence of NRL – you could be a pioneer, Carl – you’re Burke and Wills right now!” This was met with an unblinking silence, a softly furrowed brow, and, finally, a low nervous laugh. AFL dimbulbs, what can you do? Actually, on second thoughts, Victoria still has a ways to go.

When the ray of light that is the All Stars game shone upon us and signaled the thawing of the off-season frost and the passing of the soul’s winter those fuckers at WIN showed Big Momma’s House. Astonishing. I actually watched the opening scenes wondering where Josh Dugan was and if he was possibly playing off the bench…

Well. Several weeks later, and who knew my shaken disgruntled fists and muttered voodoo curses could be laid to rest (transferred elsewhere, whatever) now that WIN has started showing Friday Night Footy on its digital sister channel?? Sometimes, life, you’re only seemingly sub-par. Let’s never fight again.

NRL on free to air television sparked the interest of my best friend, hence:  

WHAT CHANNEL I CANT FIND IT

-Got it

-And I thought I was the only one person to have shorts ride up in my crotch. These boys and their big thighs

Me - Note the Storms heritage collared jerseys, fabulous neck extension. Every team should bring them back. Need all the neck help they can get.

-Thick all round

Before I move on, I should point out that it took years of evolution for the human race to get to the point where our chins reside in lofty isolation, elevated from our shoulders by a vertical expanse widely known as “the neck”. Now to be fair, not every “neck” resembles the graceful nodding stem of a daffodil (see above). Tyra Banks understands this, which is why she is forever critiquing contestant’s photos on America’s Next Top Model with words to the effect of “YOU NEED MORE NECK”. The Morris twins understand this. Billy Slater understands this. NRL jersey designers do not understand this. To my mind this is the greatest flaw in the modern game. It is also the most easily rectified. Who gives a fuck about chicken wings, rolling pins, chin straps and crusher tackles, JUST MODIFY THE FUCKING JERSEYS ALREADY.

Apparently, teams are always looking for “the edge”, and despite the unfortunate current situation whereby the Storm have said edge over every team in the competition (but only just over the Raiders – GO RAIDERS) there is no doubt in my mind that their V-necked and collared jerseys provided additional ‘edge’ last night. The Knights looked second-rate in their collarless jerseys and they played second-rate football. Do the math. Kurt Gidley did the math, worked himself into a towering lather and eventually lost his shit entirely. He claimed he was screaming abuse at himself – “I CAN SAY WHAT I LIKE TO ME’SELF” – but the ref disagreed and penalised him for dissent. Of course, Gidley is one of the players who would benefit most from a collared jersey.  

It was a night for all the senses. Aside from the Storm’s elegant appearance I got to listen to Rabs and Gus commentating. Ok, so neither of them possesses the honeyed tones of Jeremy Irons. We have Brad Fittler on the sideline for that.  What they can do is emote. Goddamn are they emotive. Rabs is excitable and astute and Gus is full of bluster and hyperbole and they bitch and bicker at each other like a cantankerous old married couple and it’s the most awesome and entertaining thing ever and may they both live on eternally.

Gus was in good form last night; he said “wow” (Billy Slater, who else..), which is one of life’s great aural pleasures, and he also suffered some mental slippage and got stuck on the idea that the Storm were more soldier crab than human. I mean, who hasn’t?? He returned to the theme continuously over the course of the game, dreamily droning sentences such as “Like little soldier crabs, aren’t they – just marching up the field, marching marching…”  He also cast his gimlet eye over a Knights player, Zeb somebody, who knocked on for no apparent reason and under no apparent pressure, and ran right over Rabs’ sympathetic murmurings with the words “I KNOW, I FEEL SORRY FOR HIM TOO – BUT HE DOES PLAY THIS GAME FOR A LIVING!” Brilliant. Leave it to Gus to bring down the cold boot of truth.

Other stuff happened, like Cameron Smith berating his players lustily and at length after the final siren, despite them winning, and there was another game, featuring the fucking Broncos, as per, and they won, also as per, and the whole thing was very rewarding. You watch Friday Night Footy and feel the world disappearing. People say they experience the same sensation when a big gun goes off in their hands. I don’t know about that but I did have vague face-ache at the end of it all. Viva Victoria.

A Bible Reading for Cooper Cronk.

The high stakes game of player signings and contract skullduggery is about to be taken to a new and questionable level. Shit, as “they” “say”, is about to get real. This is due to happen at precisely 10:30am AEST this morning, and because Cooper Cronk has scheduled this press conference personally and he is without question the most tightly wound human being outside of the Stasi you better damn well know that it’s going to be precise. I use the term ‘human being’ loosely and with certain nagging doubts here because he actually appears to my eyes as an assemblage of gears and electric circuitry. In any case, anyone, human or otherwise, who is that uptight is clearly masking a personality disorder. That frightful hum of intensity? Heavy. Not without a certain seductive severity, but heavy nonetheless. This is not my immediate concern today. It may be of renewed interest if he signs with the Titans though. I’m not an accountant, but I think the Titans have got financial problems. Just a hunch. Haha.

Anyway, as I have no job and no place to go today I’m going to be all over this press conference like a cheap suit. And lest anyone confuse the gurglings of my unconscious with the voice of God, and because I have a few hours to fill, I’m going to ramp up the tension by turning to the Good Book and issuing a thundering eleventh-hour biblical warning to Cooper Cronk. For real.

 “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.”

-Christ’s warning in Matthew 7:15.

Your move, Cronk.

Retro Raiders!

Round 4, Raiders vs Tigers.   

Best Bits:

1.      Terry yelling at the refs. Terry arguing with the refs. Terry entering into disputes with the refs that had nothing to do with him. Terry been scolded by a ref: “I don’t need your help Terry”. Terry in general. TERRY.

2.      Warren Smith in commentary observing Joel Thompson leaping to his feet with intent to agitate after a tackle and saying mildly “yesss…always looks to be happy to accommodate somebody if it gets a bit frisky out there is Joel…”

3.      Jack Whighton, who my brother and I have taken to referring to only as Jack Boom, giving it to Benji Marshall around the chin and leaving him reeling and drooling like Brendan Fevola at the 2009 Brownlows. Do not be fooled by his sweet nineteen year old sugar-face and baby animal eyes, people: he is an agent of aggression – less sunbathing Labrador puppy, more chained-up-overnight-at-the-wreckers-attack dog. My approval is wholehearted.

4.      Reece Robinson. He just… SEEMS SO NICE. And he hustled back from injury early – risking messing up that pretty face with his fractured cheekbone – to fill in at fullback for Dugan and had a high-octane and audacious blinder. He ran! He leaped! He contested! He caught! He did it all and he looked fine doing it! Consequently, he was the subject of pervy texts – not for the first time – from my girl J-Bo. Example: “Robinson I love his assssssssssssss!!!!!” He pleased us both greatly. This makes him a people-pleaser, and proves that he really must be very nice.

5.      Footage of the Raiders belting out the victory song in the sheds, and Blake Ferguson accompanying with his half River dance, half stroke victim choreography. It has a name, his collection of moves – ‘The Fergie Dance’.  A sublime visual representation of victory.

6.      Laurie Daly’s chickens finally coming home to roost. He is clearly burdened with a psychic blockage that prevents him from tipping against the Raiders, no matter how diabolical their form. You just don’t see loyalty and resolve like that anymore.

7.      Jarrod Croker – sweet sad eyed man-child, summing things up beautifully in his post-match interview with the stirring words “Guess we played a bit of Raiders of old.” Croker! Jesus me! That is the most deeply meaningful and poignant post-match sentiment I have ever heard.

8.      Raiders 30, Tigers 16. Ye olde Raiders REPRESENT.

The Raiders are a Russian Novel

Last Sunday, my god.

That Raiders Roosters game was full of abominations too monstrous to describe or even name.

A week has passed. The immediate, astonished horror has worn off, but everyday objects still have the sharp angry edges they took on shortly after kick-off. I mean, MY GOD. I legit started thinking some kind of extraterrestrial invasion was underway. If I hadn’t been so transfixed by the suffocatingly slow unfolding of scenes on my television screen I would have been down on my hands and knees searching for hidden microphones in the kitty litter or something.   

As it happened, part way through the diabolical second half a tiny muscle under my right eye leaped and began to twitch and for the rest of the game the erratic behaviour of my face perfectly reflected the erratic behaviour of both teams. Once the rotten stinking curtain was rung down on the game my face stopped jerking but a kind of soupy, confused mist seethed into my brain and settled over things. Everything pretty much as usual for the week that followed, then, except for the grimmer than usual drive of blood in my skull and a great sense of foreboding – perversely gripping -  regarding Monday night’s Raiders Tigers game.  Football. Jesus God.

The thing about the Raiders is that they’re so unpredictable, so unknowable. And not in a good way. I believe, generally speaking, that if you can’t do it well then it’s not worth doing. Clearly not everyone agrees. As the damage to my nerves mount there are many alarming signs that the Raiders may not be entirely on top of matters. This is all very familiar.

Last week, before we both went cold on the entire organisation my brother and I decided that the Raiders need to buy someone, since every other club seems to be buying people in a frenzy of spending (whatup Titans) and signing. But who? I suggested Willie Mason, and my brother unexpectedly became very excited. Who knew?  

1.“I like him. We should go for it. ! Can’t see him moving to Canberra though, he would hate it worse than you!”  

2. “Going cheap isn’t he? I heard he might end up playing for the Toowoomba Pythons and work in the tomato factory there during the week!”

I looked into this and the offer, as reported back in December 2011, was actually to play for the Guyra (population 2500) Superspuds, who have won four of the past nine Group 19 grand finals and pay $250 per game.  Club official Terry Vidler said “We’d take him. He would cause a lot of interest in our town. We’ve got a tomato farm out here, it’s a big deal. He could work there.”  As rustic and charming and fuckoff-hilarious as this all sounds, I much prefer the idea of Willie getting an NRL start. If the skeleton of Matt Orford’s soul can be resurrected and made to dance and sing and drop balls and bungle kicks then Mason more than deserves the same opportunity. Also, he’s got mad game! He’s awesome! So what if he talks a lot of smack? It’s “refreshing”. I heard Daly Cherry Evans interviewed the other day and every line uttered was flat and robotic and entirely devoid of humanity and humour. It was horrible. I want boorish hooligans rearing up through the mist and blurting out robust and original opinions of the “everyone’s entitled to have one” variety. Decorum and decency are terribly over-rated.

Anyway. On the Raiders, I plan on rounding the corner and fully overcoming my crippling sense of resentment sometime today, in preparation for what will probably be more of the same tomorrow evening. This, people, is the way of the world.

One of the worst parts of the whole thing last week was that I got so goddamn excited after their win over the Titans. I convinced myself that some kind of seismic shift had occurred; that it was different to their first win of last season, when they annihilated the hapless Sharks in that unseemly opening match. There wasn’t much element of skill involved then and absolutely no pretense of two equally matched teams. The whole thing resembled hyenas tearing open a gazelle much more than it did a traditional game. It was terrific. God it was a good time. Really great.  What wasn’t so great was the fact that it was pretty much the only joy Raiders fans got to experience. For the season. That’s, like, months. Long, bleak months. Russian novel months.

After last week, the implications are profound and distressing:  Perhaps we are standing on that same threshold. Perhaps we have always been there.