Nrl

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" »

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" »

APRIL is the cruelest month, old T.S Eliot used to say, but where does that leave October?

No league, no AFL, nothing really to live for. Hell, not even club rugby on the ABC on a Saturday. There’s something called the A-League, but as far as I can make out it’s largely populated by volatile blokes with blonde highlights, either too old or mentally unstable to cut it in Europe.

As the weather warms up and the sport winds down, you begin to rediscover weekends. This is by no means a good thing. Your better half declares Friday and Saturday nights the time for “catching up with people,” time you would happily have spent watching NRL games back-to-back in the winter months.

Continue reading "October, it’s Hell on earth for sports lovers" »

JARRYD Hayne brought two left boots to the Grand Final. Has there ever been a more tragic footy omen?

The kid from Minto, whose whole life had been preparing for this night, chucked his gear in his kitbag, got on the bus and only realised when it was too late that his signature red boots were both the same.

Parra officials ran around looking for spares. The Eels were gone before the band struck up the national anthem.

Continue reading "It had its moments, but the NRL final was a snore" »

When Fuifui Moimoi was penalised for stripping the ball from holding on to Billy Slater in last night’s NRL grand final, it brought a sudden halt to a late surge by the Eels with four minutes to play.

Moments earlier Moimoi had scored in the corner, carrying two Storm players over the line with him on his hulking frame after barging through the defence in a 22m run. It marked the apogee of the Eels’ resurgence against a Melbourne side that was in control for most of the game.

Before the penalty, the Eels needed a converted try tie the game and force extra time. The way they were playing it looked possible. But with ball now in hand, the Storm kicked downfield and calmly positioned themselves for the field goal. Greg Inglis delivered. Job done for the Storm; fairytale over for the Eels.

Continue reading "When does a bad refereeing decision really count?" »

The Eels fought back bravely in the second half, but Melbourne Storm were ultimately too good in a blockbusting NRL Grand Final at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium. There’s a match report here and you can see how our coverage unfolded in the live blog over the jump.

Continue reading "As it happened: the NRL Grand Final" »

Parra can win this. All the predictions of Melbourne’s class overwhelming the baby Eels will count for nought when the smoke from the fireworks clears and the ref looks across to the timekeeper.

Grand Finals are the ultimate leveller and are often won by players you’ve never heard of, who get out in the middle and realise decades of training, injury and going home early comes down to this.

Here’s what I reckon the Eels need to do to take the silverware back to Church Street on Sunday night.

Continue reading "Eight things the Eels should do, to win by 8" »

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" »

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" »

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" »

This Saturday the pride of the League, South Sydney, will play their last game for 2009.

No finals for the men in Cardinal Red & Myrtle Green.

Again.

Continue reading "The eternal hope and despair of a Souths supporter" »

At 3pm on Sunday, Hazem El Masri will run onto the world’s worst footy ground to play his final home game. Sydney’s ANZ Stadium (Or Glebe Morgue, as we call it) is an embarrassing venue for such an occasion, but we’ll defer that argument for the sake of keeping the mood upbeat.

For the blue-and-white army in the distant stands, Hazem’s farewell will be something akin to the retirement of a beloved community leader.

Now in the month of Ramadan, Hazem will take no food or water between dawn and dark on game day.

Continue reading "Man of God whose greatest deeds are done off the pitch" »

Against my better judgment I turned on the rugby union on Saturday night to see the Wallabies vs the All Blacks, traditionally the biggest game on the Australian rah rah calendar.

It was probably at about the time of the fourth penalty for lying on the ball, or wrong side of the ruck or possibly, being rugby, driving the wrong make of luxury 4WD, that the remote finger got awfully itchy.

Soon I was simultaneously keeping up with the cricket, the silly science fiction movie on Channel 10 and Gordon Bray’s running commentary on how that wasn’t really a penalty under law 543, sub section b of the improperly binding to a maul code.

Continue reading "League wins the running battle of the rugby codes" »

WHY is it that we in the media think professional sports people are obliged to speak to us?

We pay our money at the gate, watch them perform masterful feats on the footy field or cricket pitch, then go home elated or mad as hell, depending on the result. Athletes could be forgiven for thinking the transaction ends there, but clearly it doesn’t.

This week we saw the public flaying of Dragons player Darius Boyd, whose 42-second press conference showed that he’s not likely to sit for his bar examinations any time soon.

Continue reading "Speaking up for a sportsman of few words" »

It’s been described as footy’s worst interview. Dragons fullback Darius Boyd managed just 28 words in response to eight questions during a press conference to promote this Friday night’s clash against his old club the Brisbane Broncos. It’s saying something that his notoriously monosyllabic coach Wayne Bennett felt the need to chip him about it.

But since when, particularly footy players, given good interview? Most of them impart about the same amount of information as Boyd managed it just takes longer to get through all the clichés. He needs some intensive media training so that next time his reponses are more like the sort of stuff we expect from the great minds of our sporting elites.

With a little more training, next time it might go something more like this:

Continue reading "Giving 110 per cent to make footy the winner on the day" »

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" »

What the hell are the Australian Rugby Union and Lote Tuqiri’s management trying to hide over the winger’s sacking from the Wallabies?

In another strange turn of events today lawyers for both the ARU and Lote have asked that documents relating to the case be suppressed from the media.

Lawyers acting for the ARU have said it would be “undesirable for any publicity until objective arguments were made by both sides”.

Continue reading "What are the ARU and Lote’s lawyers trying to hide?" »

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" »

All the SoO II action with The Punch team and a few friends we’ve bribed with beer, live right here. Kick off is at 8pm.

Follow our coverage on Twitter here

Continue reading "State of Origin II" »

JUST because she bragged about having sex with a lot of rugby players doesn’t mean, under it all, she wasn’t traumatised.

Sure, it kicks on the story a bit by playing to a view which doubtless many believe - that the woman enjoyed the whole sordid incident.

Nine tracked down someone in New Zealand to have a go at the woman who told her heart-wrenching story to Four Corners. It ran on the 6pm news last night and this morning was the lead story on Australia’s biggest news website, ninemsn.

Continue reading "Make up your mind, Nine: Is she a victim or a tart?" »

UPDATE 1PM: Matthew Johns has been stood down by the Nine Network.

This time last week we were saddling up for NRL sex scandal #847. Commentators were jogging to their designated positions on the pitch, limbering up to churn out the usual for/against Rugby League diatribes, this time about League favourite Matthew Johns, who was about to be outed as a fan of group sex by the ABC.

Then Sarah Ferguson’s incredible report went to air on Four Corners on Monday night and for 36 hours most people were speechless. It was so much worse than anyone could have imagined after Johns’ inadequate explanation on last Thursday’s Footy Show.

I don’t know if it was the vivid way the two young women featured articulated the damage done, the glib comments to Four Corners from the players involved, or the sickening sight of Fatty Vautin slapping Johns on the shoulder after his preemptive strike, but the usual barrage of analysis paused.

Last night Tracy Grimshaw broke the awkward silence.

Continue reading "The bravery of Grimshaw and Wilson over Matthew Johns" »