Scenes from a footy game (a girl in need of a torniquet)

So I won't probably bore you with the sad and depressing demise of the Devils - if it was a break up today it certainly wasn't the romantic embrace as a couple are seperated by war or terminal illness, but rather, the kind of break up when you turn to a girl and say "Do you want to go out again" and she says "Nup". I was really upset that they didn't do a farewell lap though - I was hoping for some free merch handed over the fence as well. However, I would like to give out a big shout out to the girl in the Merc Kick final, Janelle - I didn't catch the school she was representing in the long kicking competition, or the colour of her armband, but I must admit, I have had a thing for girls who can kick a football - I think when I was growing up in Penguin, it was in the dying days of those kind of comedy events where you would get girls playing football in the mud in short shorts and tight tops and they'd throw the male referee in the mud at the end and everyone would say "cor" and call the girls darling and there would be a couple of seriously butch girls at either end that everyone would compare to whoever the fattest footballer of the day was...but there was one girl, at the only time I attended one of these hilarious events (and really, they were knee slapping comedy, the number one way I learned a number of offensive terms for breasts), who was sensational, really attractive, and could kick a football 60m, and she stayed in my head to this day, because she was so confident, refusing to be stereotyped and standing up for herself. It's hard to quantify peoples confidence - I myself am only confident as a front - but this was the real deal, without an ego. She just stood out, and I never found out her name, but I know that the only other time I saw her in my life, she was in the pub, downtrodden and awkward while her boyfriend was having this massive go at her in front of everyone. I didn't know what had happened in the intervening years, but it's probably one of the few people I've genuinely wanted to save. Or at least, recruit her for Collingwood, she had better footskills than Shane O'Bree...

So while I don't make the same assumptions that the 39m kicking ability of Janelle equates to any kind of self confident expression, she was at least out there having a bash. My own life currently amounts to little dreams and goals, rather than a particular big ambition, and my own self confidence has always been in question. My current ambition forged today is now to join the local football committee of Kermandie, my local football team (who uniquely come from a place that apparently doesn't exist) and do it within two years. My best friend kinda sorta bigs up her involvement at Penguin football club a little, at one point claiming she picked the side, but she does at least know a lot about politics within a local football club. She told me today that the big social circle to crack into at a local football club is the little circle that prepares the lunches. She said that the major issue she saw at Penguin was that everyone would battle for the job of mashing the potatoes. The reason for this was that the main potato masher was the presidents wife, who would spend her time with her fellow mashees discussing all of the problems within the town, never mind the football club, and she had the power to make or break the career of a would be footy club socialite. This has greatly worried me because my own cooking career isn't the stuff of Ramsay - never mind mashing potatoes, at home economics once, me and my mate forgot to turn the oven on when we tried to bake scones, and then had to try and pass off the resulting mess as some kind of doughy soup. It failed miserably. And you should have seen my attempts to make happy pants. Actually, in home economics, my happy pants remained distinctly unmade - we spent most of our time playing that game where you tell someone a coin is stuck to their head and make them smack it off...and bagging out 1927 I think. If I have to crack a circle in which I have to mash some spuds, I think I could be in trouble. But at least, it's an ambition...

I don't know if I have to take today as a sign that I have to save myself before I can save other people, if that makes sense, but that I perhaps have to take a greater interest in my own post 30 life. I've felt quite dislocated for quite some time, as if perhaps if I stepped up and showed ambition I'd only fail and retreat. I'm not sure where this dislocation has come from, but when I was out in the middle of Bellerive today, I did think of the old days in Penguin when I was lot more open minded and happy and would quite often hold up football games by wandering around the goal square long after the second siren. However, I do feel very positive about my life right now, dispite the dislocation - in fact, there's no way I would want to be 16 again. I was queuing for a Time Out bar today when I saw a girl of medium build in a black and white furry jacket, black jeans, try hard boots, about 16, who was telling her girlfriend about this boy she liked - she said she'd pretty much tried everything to get him to like her - she'd sent him a message on Facebook, she'd sent him a text, she'd even gone round to his house and offered to, well, let's say when a mummy and daddy love each other very much...she munched thoughtfully on her lukewarm saveloy, annoying the large woman in the pink shirt behind the counter because she was holding up the queue, stared into the cold middle distance and put her hands on her hips. Her friend, a glamazon in giant sunglasses, simply shook her head and looked her friend dead in the eyes (I presume, she was wearing sunglasses, and my attention was distracted by Garbage on the IPOD). "You," she said, mustering every single dreg of humanity and empathy from the pit of her Jetty Surf bought soul, "simply have to root his brains out until he comes around." When I grow up, I'll turn the tables indeed...

Of course, the composition of thoughts running through my brain today (and typed here with little pausing) couldn't distract from a miserable day on the field. Players were going through the motions, standing around, waiting for the end. It was cold, it was final, it was the day after the break up already. I did at least get some sense of finality from my team playing their last game, even without the lap of honour - I remember when I left my soccer team, St Mirren, behind, in 1992, when we moved back to Burnie from Scotland. They had been a massive part of my weekly ritual in Scotland, and then, suddenly, they were gone, as swiftly and silently as the day Kenickie stopped making albums. They didn't go out of business, but it was a depressing day, they were relegated, and every step, every minute of the last game we went to, I felt like something significant was ending. We stood sadly at Paisley Gilmour St station, saying goodbye to the neds and the petty criminals, the loose women and the slightly drunk at 11 in the morning "jakies" - it was a touching and significant farewell. Of course, we lost, 1-0 to Dundee United. We took a look around the ground as it emptied, me and my Dad, while behind me, a Dundee United fan with a son of his own, a son my age, was also taking a look around, and offered me a unique farewell to fours years of ups and downs supporting my Saints - he piped up in addressing his son with "St Mirren? Worst fucking team at the worst fucking ground with the worst fucking pies, the worst fucking juice, the worst fucking strip and the worst fucking grass - thank fuck I'll no be fucking back!" - I don't think the collected works of Antonella Gambotto could provide greater insight into humanity, nor could I be provided with a better send off.

Farewell Devils, goodbye troubled lustful teens, goodbye Janelle, goodbye kid who was doing impressions of the final siren to entertain his friends and goodbye local community football...I'll see you again someday...

The Death Of The Devils Part 1

SuzyQ
Originally uploaded by JungsPN

So it was a bad night for one of my favourites, Suzy Batkovic, she of the hypnotically bouncing bosom, as apparently she was single handedly responsible for our flogging at the basketball (according to Fox). Pretty rough I'd have thought, I blame Lauren Jackson personally, I've never liked her at all. Worringly, I got the picture from a website which seemed fetishly obsessed with tall women, but what the hell, a pics a pic isn't it, although I'm suddenly thinking what happened to my fetishes? Should I have one? Everyone else seems to. I missed the Pies In The Sky as well, because I was drinking at, you guessed it, Syrup. I watched the replay this morning, lying on the floor eating a pancake and hurting a little bit, but it was good to see the boys having a crack. I didn't get a punch in the mouth this time, which is good. I don't know whether it was me, but I had quite a poetic drunken ennui to the whole Syrup scene - it seemed amazingly dead last night, not even Dave Dobbyn got a spin. I was a little drunk, and I'm probably over that a bit, I should drink a bit less and go home a bit earlier. I'm nearly 30 and a bit over stumbling home and watching episodes of the Simpsons on the floor. It's all getting a bit shambolic. Although, brilliantly, it wasn't my fault for once that we didn't get into places - Temuera Morrison on the door at the Telegraph said it was someone elses fault we couldn't get in, then we couldn't get into somewhere else because Jay La'gaia said no. We ended up in Liberal party stronghold Bar-Cel-ona talking to someone about Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Naturally, being Bar-Cel-Ona, we were thrown into a holding cell and re-educated until we only talked about John McCain...the Andrew Bolt wing I think it's called.

It might seem harsh to segue talking about shambles to talking about The Devils, our dying on the vine VFL football team, but I did at least go and see them (and kudos to the bewildered bloke in the Collingwood hat who found it funny I couldn't find Bellerive Oval) have a dip in their second last ever game (if you missed it, the Devils are being disbanded so Tassie can have a statewide league, which is just the stupidest idea - although I say bring back East Launceston!) before being robbed by the umpires. There was no one there, I guess we're down to the diehards, some little kids calling North Ballarat shitheads, someone making a Roosters/Cocks joke (OK that was me), some girls trying to pick up, and people having a lovely chat in that 1992 St Mirren we've been relegated and we're losing again so we might as well have a chat because there's nothing else to do and the game is awful kind of way. What I hadn't heard was our incredibly god awful theme song. I think when you set up a football team, the song (a staple of Aussie Rules clubs is the club song the players sing after they win, if you didn't know) is more important than the name, the jumper or recruiting. In our case at Collingwood, saying the Premierships a cakewalk when you've lost 26 Grand Finals is pushing it, but the Tassie theme song is so bad, I think Scott Wade wrote it himself just to make us fail to be inspired. It's an adaptation of the Richmond song, We're From Tigerland, the best AFL song of all time, but it's watered down, stripped of all passion, and sounds like an N-Trance remix. The best bit of the Richmond version is the bit that goes We're from Tiger (YELLOW AND BLACK!), we're from Tigerland, but in our case, it goes, We're from Tas-man-green yellow and black-tas-man-ia, and it just makes everyone feel embarrassed. Tasmanians might remember a few years ago our cricket team had a crack at a we're from Tigerland ad campaign, given they are the Tigers, which involved all round colourful character (ie. tool) Mark Ridgeway playing some air guitar with a cricket stump. Not since David Boon drove around Kate Langbroek in that Trust Bank ad has a cricketer so embarrassed themselves in a Tasmanian advert...no wonder we keep losing, with such an uninspiring song. Even if we'd run on to Powderfinger we'd have been more pumped...

For any tourists out there, a trip to Bellerive wouldn't be complete without a visit to the wonderful clay or bronze or whatever the hell it is statute of Boonie though, sadly which doesn't seem to be a posed tribute to the time he got nine stitches in his chin without anaesthetic, his semi legendary drinking contest with Danny Buckingham, or his Trust Bank ad with Kate Langbroek (on the level...gold). The great thing about the statue of course (and this applies to about 50% of all statues) is it looks nothing like him. When I was growing up, everyone referred to Boonie as "chunky", but his statue gives him the hip and bone structure of Objection (Tango) era Shakira. I would also suggest going to see a game at Bellerive when no one is there, as it's terrific fun - how many security guards can guard 6 people in the Wet Area? Three? Four? Will one of them get really close to belting a kid for kicking the footy in a non designated area? Will you be accosted to buy raffle tickets by a clearly bored model/actress or an enthusiastic 15 year old boy? And who will sell more tickets? What will amuse you more - the wit and wisdom of a drunk bloke in the crowd or the fat kid kicking the footy on the ground? Will we get an aerobics display at half time or someone driving remote control cars around the boundary line? Will you see a Tasmanian identity - maybe Dave Noonan! The glamour! Will you take advantage of Bellerives malfunctioning online betting system? Will someone have got in for free that you know, while you had to pay, and how does that happen? Will the man on the ticket booth be 80 or over? And most importantly - will you get beer? Well, you'll get beer, but will you get full strength or that disgusting horrible light beer they serve at random games? Why can you drink yourself stupid at an international game full of dickhead but only light beer at some VFL games when there's roughly 3 people there? If you are a tourist, and wish to come up with a Lonely Planet style guide to Bellerive, the area and the ground, there's so much material even I don't know where to start...

But back to the Devils - and sadly, I didn't follow through with my threat to heckle Scott Wade or make a "We're Wadeing into mediocrity" banner - and as I sat in my little plastic bucket seat looking at the seat next to me with the big giant crack in it and talked about, well, East Launceston, I couldn't help but think that unless we get an AFL side down here, football down here will die. The number of people who care about their local team falls every single year - the Devils really were our best chance of getting a side up and running that people would care about, and to kill them off to try and get people in Burnie to worry about a game against Lauderdale is just insane. Far more people care about Nick Maxwell than North Hobart, but there was something that Scott Wade said that annoyed me, when he made a sneery comment about "social footy clubs" - the only place left that has football teams people care about are small towns with a hundred years of tradition who put a team out every week even though times are tough, and no one is buying tickets to the meat-tray raffle, and yes, at times they are social footy clubs playing at a pretty scrappy level, but that's not a bad thing is it? I think the biggest problem for The Devils though was that the players never became part of the community, and they never had a social club. Had we seen them more, maybe if they've sold more raffle tickets, maybe had a meat tray sale or too, and yes, been more of a social footy club, we'd have loved them more - but Luke Shackleton is at full forward, and no one knew who he was (except me, cos he was a Collingwood player) and I couldn't help but think of all those local instore promotions Puffing Billy Fielding did in Penguin, and how many times he was in the paper on this tractor, while Luke Shackleton, he's never been in the window of a local Myer and Cameron Thurley has never done a Jordan Lewis style local car ad...but that's probably because they aren't AFL players, can't compete with Russell Robertson and his guitar, and it's a circle we could never complete. However, what is stupid is that players as good as Thurley won't be playing down here anymore (Thurley won't be going to City South), and I guess my long held Tote bet that Brodie Holland would coach us and we'd see Sarite biting someones nipple outside Isobar is lost. Anyway, the game, the club, did matter to someone...I realised after a while the crack in the seat was caused by a footprint, from one disgruntled Devils supporter...

Or maybe he just heard how badly Suzy Batkovic played last night...