Afl

Big Bad Bazza - Barry Hall - has gone through the wringer and emerged as a new man, ironing out all those kinks. Who would have thought that Bazza could reverse his fortunes after one too many brainsnaps at the Sydney Swans?

Bazza - we were waiting for you to trip up again as a ferocious Bulldog. We were waiting for another almighty brainsnap.But it didn’t happen. Instead, Bazza treated us to high-flying marking and a string of match-winning goals. Bazza’s seven-goal haul in the NAB Cup grand final on Saturday night was legendary, elevating him to cult status.

Bulldogs’ fans – celebrate hard. It’s been 40 years since you charged your glasses to toast the Doggies as night premiers.

Continue reading "Someone let the Dogs out" »

Surviving in a losing culture on the non-yuppie side of Melbourne must be hard to stomach - decade after decade.

Imagine barracking for a club for more than 50 years and never winning a premiership. Nasty. But Western Bulldogs’ fans are still waiting for the glorious moment they dream of.
With ordinary facilities in the past, and having fans without big wallets like the late Richard Pratt, how can a team expect to match it with the affluent Melbourne clubs of the east?

Continue reading "Why the Bulldogs will win their first flag in 56 years" »

The debate on the World Cup bid has been conducted thus far like some grandmother who’s freaking out after being told 32 soccer teams are arriving on Friday and we’ve nowhere to play, don’t know where to put them up and haven’t done enough grocery shopping. I’m half expecting the next front page on the issue to read: “Australia’s Bathroom Not Clean Enough to Host World Cup, What Will The Guests Think.”

Would it be too much to ask that people step back, take a breath and relax about this thing?

The politics of this seems to be overshadowing the facts for all three codes concerned. The facts being that we’re almost certainly not going to get the 2018 tournament and that if the codes sit down calmly they’d realise there’s plenty time to work out a solution for 2022.

Continue reading "Can everyone just relax about the World Cup bid" »

Flush with cash, the AFL is heaping shovel-loads into its new western Sydney venture, conveniently ignoring its more important community role in encouraging young people, and especially girls, to get more active.

In its most direct attack yet on Rugby League, the AFL has cracked open the war chest, backing it with legendary player and coach Kevin Sheedy and even sabre-rattling suggestions of high profile poaching of top local NRL players like Jarryd Hayne.

But it is worth considering two less reported issues from only days before the latest flurry of AFL promotion: the NSW Government’s latest investment in preventative health and new research that highlighted a shocking plunge in activity rates among young girls as they approach their teenage years.

Continue reading "AFL should lift its game with girls to win hearts in Sydney" »

The biggest problem for the AFL in getting a successful presence in Western Sydney won’t be the choice of Kevin Sheedy as coach, it won’t be the home ground or sponsorship and isn’t even the popularity of rugby league as such.

No, the largest hurdle for the AFL in setting up shop in Western Sydney is this: Australian Football is still predominantly a white Anglo/Celtic sport with a culture that doesn’t look anything like Western Sydney.

Right now the AFL doesn’t even reflect the ethnic make-up of its own Melbourne heartland, so how does it expect to sell itself to kids and their parents in the most ethnically diverse part of Australia?

Continue reading "A game white people like: the AFL’s West Sydney problem" »

The Harbour City is abuzz with excitement today at news that Kevin, um, Spacey has agreed to be the foundation coach of the AFL’s Western Sydney team.

The star of such films as American Beauty and The Usual Suspects, Spacey – no, hang on, it’s not him, it’s another Kevin. Some bloke called Kevin Sheedy.

Used to play for the Tigers – no, not Balmain, the Richmond Tigers, and he coached a bit for a team called Essendon. Apparently he’s quite the deal down there in Melbourne.

Continue reading "Stealth bomber Sheeds the top choice for Sydney’s west" »

Appointing Kevin Sheedy as coach of the AFL’s new Western Sydney team is a terrible idea.

For one simple reason: The game has left the once-great coach behind.

It’s the equivalent of making Bill Collins the face of iTunes.

Continue reading "Counter-punch: old man Sheedy a disaster for Sydney" »

Before Ben Cousins, there was Wayne Carey. The full forward from Wagga became the King of North Melbourne and the greatest train wreck of them all.

His legendary love of a bender – and a life without boundaries - culminated in a famous sex act somewhere between the tooth brush holder and the soap dish with his best mate’s wife.

Carey was the perfect example of a sports star whose self-loathing only increased the more the public fell in love with him. I don’t know if he’s ever met Andrew Johns, but you’d imagine they would have plenty to talk about.

Continue reading "Wayne Carey: Your typical angry white male" »

It would be interesting to know just how much longer our football administrators are prepared to tolerate the oafish behavior of some of the country’s top class players who seem hell bent on turning themselves into low rent non-celebrities.

Several names come to mind but first it might be just as well to take a look at the long term effects their actions might have on the hundreds of young blokes who look up to them as the sporting giants they once were and try to emulate their incredible achievements on the field.

Role modeling is an important part of growing up and it might be interesting to get the take on what’s been happening lately from the dads and mums and older brothers who devote their Saturday mornings taking the very young kids to Auskick.

Continue reading "Footballers don’t need to go public with their ‘problems’" »

UPDATE 4.20pm Wednesday: Carlton has just announced they have dumped Fevola. You can read about at the Herald Sun here. The following was posted by Anthony Sharwood yesterday afternoon:

It’s starting to look likely that Brendan Fevola will be sacked from Carlton after his Brownlow Medal night antics.

At least, that’s what the tssk tssk-ocracy is baying for. If Fev is booted, the Sydney Swans must swoop. As Homer Simpson would say: this must happen, this should happen and this must happen.

Twice, the Swans have poached troubled key forwards from Melbourne and twice it has been a huge success for player, club and city.

Continue reading "If no one else wants Fevola, Sydney should grab him" »

Television ratings from the weekend’s big finals clashes will confirm for most that Australians love nothing more than large chaps smashing each other in pursuit of a football.

(Why would you watch sport when you can watch Antiques Roadshow, this is great)

But there is now evidence that we are not as sports-mad as we might think.

A new survey reveals that the number of TV viewers who think there is too much sport on their regular channels is greater than those who think there is not enough.

Continue reading "Enough with sport, we might not be that keen on it" »

As the AFL basks in the afterglow of another sensational season, capped by a grand final that will stand forever as a contest for the ages, its arch-rivals at the NRL are dealing with a different set of circumstances which every sporting administrator, marketing analyst and media commentator failed to forecast.

And it’s this - league’s not dead after all. Not even close. League’s going gangbusters. Somehow, the year which was hailed as the death-knell for league has somehow turned into one of its best on record. Even the NRL didn’t see it coming.

The resurgence has been led out of its western Sydney powerbase, crowned with a qualifying final last Friday between heartland clubs the Parramatta Eels and the Canterbury Bulldogs, which in terms of crowd attendance, TV ratings, and the intensity and passion with which it was played, was every bit as good as Saturday’s Cats-Saints blockbuster.

Continue reading "The extraordinary NRL final that should rattle the AFL" »

Last week while much of eastern Australia struggled with visibility I had a moment of surprising clarity.

Having ceded control of my diary years ago to my assistant Sav, nowadays I have about three hours visibility in my life. I know what I am doing up till about 10.30am but after midday it starts to get foggy.

And yet for three weeks I was completely aware that I would be in Cairns on Friday, September 25. Even more amazingly I was thinking about what to wear.

Continue reading "I am, you are, we are Geelong" »

Never underestimate the power of camaraderie. It’s the making of a champion team.

Mateship is the very thing that attracts players to sporting teams. The social fabric of a team – and club – is just as powerful as the skill and endeavour of its players.

A champion team will always beat a team of champions. The Cats put this case to rest on Saturday afternoon, after surviving an epic battle against St Kilda in the AFL Grand Final.

Continue reading "The Cats: a champion team, a team of mates" »

Football parties can be enormous fun but they can also see people at cross purposes. In my case, I usually head back to Adelaide.

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My brother generously throws open his house offering a fine spread of food and beverages and importantly, two televisions - one inside for the more hard-core among us who want to really watch the match, and the other outside for assorted toddlers and parents, and those suspiciously agnostic types who seem content to talk right through the action.

Perhaps 30 or more people will turn up - an event no doubt replicated a thousand times across the city and anywhere the game is followed.

Continue reading "The art of the AFL Grand Final party" »

Losing is not something we like to talk about much at this time of year.

We’re reminded of the greatest premiership winning teams, the possibility of St. Kilda or Parramatta breaking the drought or Geelong or Melbourne Storm cementing their place as real champion teams.

But given that the team or individual that we follow is more often going to lose the premiership, not win the gold, or fail at the World Cup, our experiences with losing are arguably are more important in defining our support of the team or person than that of winning.

So in the lead up to the two biggest sporting weekends of the year The Punch writers have compiled, in no particular order, the ten teams or people that have let us down or just not performed when it mattered in Australia’s recent sporting history. What are yours?

Continue reading "Our ten biggest sporting losers" »

As an old time supporter of Football (or Soccer, if you feel so inclined – which many Australians do), imbalanced and factually incorrect media reports of riots, violence and hooliganism in my code is nothing new.

The rise of the A-League may have been nothing short of spectacular, but unfortunately the same old boys (usually AFL reporters) that pooh-poohed Soccer in the now defunct NSL era continue to periodically rear their snarling heads and tell us that this foreign sport is full of thugs that are more likely to slit your throat than not.

The formula is just about the same every time, and Tim Hilferty’s Monday article on The Punch ‘The myth that soccer is a family-friendly sport’ was no different.

Continue reading "Bagging out Aussie soccer fans is a hoary old look" »

Kung-Fu master, movie star and all-round whoop ass machine Bruce Lee found it hard to walk down the street in Hong Kong without being challenged to a fight by some bloke who’d watched too many of his films.

Lee would receive letters daily from other Kung Fu academies putting forward their best students for a chance to fight the master. Unsurprisingly Lee was not amused: “I find this sort of thing really annoying, I’m not going to fight with anybody.”

The bashing of AFL superstar Lance “Buddy” Franklin in a Perth nightclub (at least on the facts available) is further evidence of a less sophisticated Australian version of this ego driven phenomena.

Continue reading "You wanna fight? Why footballers get targeted" »

COLLINGWOOD’S stinging loss to Geelong on Saturday night wasn’t a classic case of Colliwobbles.

The Cats were at their destructive best, as they are hell bent on avenging last year’s heartbreaking Grand Final loss to Hawthorn.

When you have as someone as passionate as Gary Ablett driving Geelong’s midfield, it is tough to stop their charter to win the 2009 AFL Grand Final against St Kilda.

Continue reading "Ablett the key to 2009 flag" »

I once met a golfer, a psychiatrist by profession, who felt so dizzy and nauseous by the sight of a left-handed golf swing he had to turn his back whenever the ball was played.

Even high functioning people can become irrational as the vagaries of the brain hold them to ransom.

And there is nothing which prompts quite such an acute dysfunctional mental response as the Geelong Football Club.

Continue reading "Inside the tortured mind of a tragic footy fan" »

IN the dying minutes of the first AFL semi-final, it appeared the Magpies would crash and burn … falling victim to another attack of the Colliwobbles.

But for some fateful reason, Magpie full-forward John Anthony steadied and threaded a major when it counted the most. The Crows must have felt like they were feathered and tarred.

Anthony’s heroics saved the Magpies from an agonising aftermath. It wouldn’t be much fun to cop a deathly stare from coach Mick Malthouse. If anyone has seen Malthouse’s face in the rooms after a loss, you would feel for the players.

Continue reading "Vics breathe easy as interstaters fade in finals" »

SEPTEMBER comes with certain guarantees – birdsong in the early dawn, the smell of jasmine on the warm breeze and the sight of Brendan Fevola wielding a giant dildo.

You’re snapped with one enormous sex toy and suddenly it’s news, eh? Damn vultures. The publican at Naughton’s in Carlton reckons the whole thing was a stitch-up anyway, that the offending phallus belonged to a fan who handed it to Fev just so he could take a photo on his phone and leak it straight to the tabloids.

People can be cruel. And on behalf of tabloids everywhere, I’d like to thank them for their excellent news sense.

Continue reading "The real awards for sporting achievement in 2009" »

THE race is on to win a coveted berth in the AFL Grand Final. It’s always tough road to the “Granny” on that last Saturday in September. You need some luck on your side – injury-wise – and a hell of a lot more spirit.

When you look at the engine rooms in the six remaining clubs, a pattern emerges.

All AFL coaches served under some of the game’s greatest coaches – mostly disciplinarians who expected more than you could ever imagine.

Continue reading "And then there were six: An AFL coaches form guide" »

BEN Cousins still drinks. I discovered this in Fred Pawle’s excellent piece on the AFL’s favourite recreational drug user in this month’s GQ magazine. I also learned that the Louis Vuitton drawstring (tracksuit) pants he wore in the photo shoot cost $1460, but I won’t get into that except to say footballers have changed.

It would not be such a revelation that Cousins still enjoys the odd beer had he not spent the slabs of his career heading out for a quiet drink after the game, only to emerge four days later on the front of The West Australian in the same jeans, white thongs and Elwood t-shirt. In his final season at West Coast, he was spending more time with bikies than at training.

We’ve been led to believe Cousins’ transformation from druggie to role model is complete, but Pawle’s article proves he has a long way to go. When asked if he still has a drink, Cousins’ reply was sheepish. “Yeah…I have to be careful with that sort of stuff,” he said.

Continue reading "Ben Cousins needs a friend" »

THE classic bump has been knocked out of AFL footy.

The bump is the very thing that characterises Aussie rules, with all its gladiatorial stunts and aerial magic.

Hawk Lance “Buddy” Franklin’s “legitimate bump” on Tiger Ben Cousins was a split-second reaction. And it only takes a split second to swing fortunes in footy.

Continue reading "The night the AFL killed the hip-and-shoulder bump" »

If anyone else had said it they would have been laughed off the stage – but if you’re Australian football’s philosopher king, you can get away with a bit of bombastic overstatement.

So it was that Kevin Sheedy, coach of the Essendon Football Club for a record 635 games over 27 consecutive years, declared that the AFL’s proposed creation of a new western Sydney team by 2012 was the sporting equivalent of the construction of the Sydney Opera House.

“When you look at the Sydney Opera House people said it would never happen,” Sheedy said. “What we’re about to do out here may come to be regarded in the same way as the Sydney Opera House now is.”

Continue reading "Who needs Joern Utzon when you’ve got the AFL" »

Today I am a pleased lil’ constituent. ACT Minister for Sport Andrew Barr is standing firm as negotiations with the Australian Football League, for the right to host AFL games at Manuka Oval, become crotchety.

Until recently the negotiations had been unfolding akin to a Beckett script – the AFL thrust into the superior ‘Godot’ role while the Minister slipped obediently into a plausible translation of the masters of mundane, Vladimir and Estragon.

The AFL’s asking price, a hefty $800,000 for the right to host two top flight fixtures, is a $436,000 increase on the current two-year deal which expires this year. The AFL is justifying the cash grab by suggesting that two pre-season and two competition games held in 2008 generated $1.13 million into the ACT economy.

Continue reading "Canberra’s standing up to the AFL cash grab" »

AFL players kick with both feet – that’s a fact, not a metaphor – so it’s difficult to believe that a full-scale poaching war will follow the Karmichael Hunt defection.

In a typical game of league, only two or three players put boot to ball and the rest couldn’t hit a barn door with a Sherrin. This is clearly a problem for the AFL.

There are other problems, like the fact that league players are built for speed and power, not endurance.

Continue reading "An NRL team that would run rings around the Cats" »

As a long-time member of the Sydney Swans Football Club I have been seated in the outer at the SCG or whatever Stadium Australia is called this year for pretty much every game Barry Hall has played in the Harbour City.  He was a popular replacement for the retiring Tony Lockett and his move north seemed quite appropriate, considering that he had followed a very similar path as Plugger - a talented forward who had his troubles with discipline.  They even played at the same club prior to moving to Sydney. 

Hall quickly became popular with the fans.  Those of us who went to supporters days always found him kind, generous with his time and happy to chat to us. 

I take my son to the kids clinic every season and Hall was always out on the field with the other players coaching the kids.  When it came to autograph time, he was the one they all flocked to.  He patiently signed every one and never appeared to be anything other than genuine in his desire to be there.

Continue reading "A fan’s take on a fallen hero" »

It might sound a bit odd given that he was reported 15 times - and spent more than a full year of his playing life out of the game - but Barry Hall has probably done more than any other individual over the past 10 years to help expand the national code.

If you take your kids along to Auskick in Sydney, or talk to any Swans fans, the one constant which drives their love of the game, the person they associate most readily and passionately with the club, is not Brett Kirk or Leo Barry or Adam Goodes or Paul Roos, but the phenomenal, flawed, big, bad, bustling Barry Hall.
Now that he has quit Aussie Rules, the greatest hits packages will tonight run for several minutes as his contribution to the game is seen first and, sadly, foremost, through his many high-impact brain snaps, such as this textbook left-hook on West Coast’s Brent Staker which cost him seven weeks.

Continue reading "Barry Hall was a marketing knock-out for Aussie Rules" »

WHEN John Elliott was invited to appear of the panel on the ABC’s Q and A program a few months back it was surprising to see him re-emerge into the national spotlight.
It was surprising that host Tony Jones would agree to have him on a serious, credible program.

Yet Elliott appeared almost respectable, almost genial, flashing displays of past wit and supposed wisdom you might expect from a figure imitating a respected elder statesman of business, politics - and , of course, sport.

But it didn’t take long for the real John Elliott to re-emerge, the boorish, arrogant, drink-sodden shell of a once brilliant business brain, seemingly destined for the Lodge but who almost wound up doing a stretch in Melbourne’s old Pentridge Prison.

Continue reading "How a megalomaniac almost destroyed my footy club" »

AIN’T rape a hoot?

It seems like the good old boys at Carlton Football Club just can’t stop laughing about former president John Elliott’s claim that at least four women were paid not to pursue rape allegations against players in the 80s and 90s.

``We just sort of said, `Righto, here’s five grand, off you go’ and they’d leave,’’ Elliott told a charity event in Hobart last week. ``There’s some very ordinary people out there.’‘

Onya, Johnno.

Continue reading "Carlton legend John Elliott’s after-dinner rape gags" »

THIS is the story of two games of football, the first of which proves that the AFL is an absolute powerhouse which is rightly the envy of sports administrators the world over, the second of which casts doubt on its ability to extend beyond its tribal powerbase in the civilised AFL states.

Carlton-St Kilda at Etihad and Sydney-Collingwood at Stadium Australia.

I was lucky enough to be at the first match. It stands as one of the greatest games of footy I have ever seen. And like many people in Sydney I could have got tickets to the second match but piked due to the drizzle, the fact that it was televised, and also because I (rightly) suspected the Swans would lose.

Continue reading "Sydney’s fair-weather fans no match for Melbourne passion" »

We live in troubled times. The economy is scrambled eggs. The atmosphere is as full of hot air as the Rudd government. Chk Chk boom chick Clare Weberloff’s 15 minutes of fame is extending disturbingly beyond the 15 day mark.

What a relief, then, to wake after this weekend and discover that a familiar order has returned to the sporting universe.
Tiger Woods won his 67th golf tourney. Federer won his 14th Major. England lost the unlosable cricket game. And Barry Hall lost the plot.

Continue reading "Give Barry a break or his career will be cactus" »

The recent fiasco of Lou Richards rejecting an AFL lifetime achievement is evidence of a deeper cultural malaise.

The AFL is awards happy.

No major sporting competition in the world doles out more medals, trophies, plaques and back-slaps on a weekly, monthly, annual and perpetual basis.

Continue reading "It’s the YAY-FL, where every player wins a prize" »

At last, a breath of fresh air from a footballer - and Ben Cousins, of all people.

He flashed his middle finger to a dressing-room camera before the Richmond-Fremantle game in Perth at the weekend (video below). The Tigers won by three points. Cousins went on to issue a pro-forma apology at the urging of his club, saying he didn’t “mean to offend anyone and I apologise if my actions have caused offence”.

The tone in there is like a po-faced seven-year-old apologising under pain of not getting any more lollies at a party. Today, in this piece, we meet the man:

Continue reading "And now, a trick I learned from my grandmother" »