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March 2006 | |
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Interview: Organising In Cyberspace Industrial: How Low Is Low Industrial: Cloak and Dagger Unions: Bad Medicine History: Right Turn, Clyde Economics: Long Division International: Union Proud Politics: Howard�s Sick Joke Indigenous: The year of living dangerously Review: Lights, Camera, Strike! Culture: News Front
The Soapbox Parliament The Locker Room
Home Truths
 Howard, My Part In His Downfall
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The Locker Room The Heart Of The Matter
"Sports tell the truth about human life. They are the heart of the matter." Michael Novak, sports psychologist. It gladdens the heart of an old Royboy to see the Carlton Football Club choking on its own vomit. I don't care if you're not interested in Australian Football, I know already that you love to hate. A lot of sport is about hating. It's one of the wholesome things about sport. Hate is an emotion you can trust. Carlton: the suburb so synonymous with Melbourne they put a bloody great cemetery in the middle of it as some giant metaphor for the spirit that made Australia what it is today. Carlton: the club of Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser, or John Elliott, that annoying little fat kid from Hey Dad, the ancient junkies in the Summerworld Hotel in Coburg, of long dead communists who stood outside Brunswick hotels, broke, cursing three generations of Victorian High society. Carlton: Australia's Ellis Island. A home to poor huddled masses ever since someone found gold in the Victorian highlands. The centre of all that was exotic, even the Irish were strange, beautiful and terrible in Carlton. Carlton, with its mansions and boot factories and slums and working class jews and every other race, colour and shape under the sun. Carlton: overrun by pot smoking hippies in the seventies spawning a million bad songs, thousands of bad books, hundreds of bad plays and a score of equally worse films. Carlton. It grew too big for itself and became something else. A brash, individualistic ideal. Fitzroy, that mad-aunt of a football club, appeared realistic at least. Carlton was flares and wide lapels, black desert boots and long hair while Fitzroy was still long necks of beer and short back and sides. Carlton would chat up your girlfriend while you were in the dunny. The Carlton Football Club was a bloody great bully. The sort of rugged individualists that thought they should be taken seriously. Purists, with a proud pedigree. The sort of people that make train spotters scary. Every Carlton supporter can be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome - a form of autism. Now its in serious strife, with figures with a lot of zeros after them appearing on the balance sheet in red ink. Tough. I hope they rot and die, and find out how we felt on the other side of Nicholson Street when they did the Wolf Creek to us in 1996 and took the blood spattered remains up to Brisbane like the savages they are. Exterminate the brutes! It's hardly surprising that the Australian cricket team has done a Kerry Packer and died in the arse. Dick Ponting is obviously grief stricken at the death of his old meal ticket. The hard heads from finance down at ACP are unlikely to tolerated the sort of largesse that gave us the AFL rights bidding war. If this keeps up Michael Clarke may have to get a real job. I'd like to say that cricket is the real winner, but unfortunately it's South Africa. But grief is a normal human emotion, which is why it is so surprising when you find it expressed by a member of the Australian Cricket team. No doubt the boys will snap out of it, life goes on. That is, unless you're Kerry Packer. Phil Doyle - going for the half ball shot on the brown into the middle pocket
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