Category Archives: Sport-general

Playing the bankruptcy game

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Swimmer Simon Cowley

There’s been lots of media coverage of the washup of swimmer Nick D’Arcy’s bashing of fellow swimmer Simon Cowley in a bar some 4 years ago.  Understandably the victim is not willing to allow the perpetrator to escape scot-free by declaring himself bankrupt to avoid paying more than $370,000 in damages and costs awarded in the NSW District Court last year.

Moreover, D’Arcy is off to the London Olympics despite Cowley’s equally understandable view that he should never have been selected and that a secret deal was done, probably due to D’Arcy’s threats of legal action against Swimming Australia and AOC if his earlier banning was renewed on the basis that his cunning bankruptcy move rendered him in breach of SA’s code of conduct.  Cowley is in no doubt that D’Arcy is in breach and unfit to represent Australia:

Under Swimming Australia’s behavioural guidelines, competitors are required to be ”ethical, considerate, fair and honest”; refrain from any form of abuse, harassment or victimisation of others; and ”be a positive role model”.

Cowley said the organisation appeared to have overlooked those requirements when it recommended to the Australian Olympic Committee that D’Arcy be included in the Australian team for London.

However it appears that the AOC’s legal advice was rather different:

Continue reading →

Clairvoyance in the commentary box: a vignette from the psychopathology of modern life

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I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd.  I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes – celebrities on their special day. Sure enough, back in the day, the camera was at the service of life life or was most of the time, not vice versa.

Today I’ve noticed a similar, subtle but profound difference in the zeitgeist. Listening to the Australian Open commentary it’s extraordinary how much psychologising goes on. Now filling in all those hours with chat is probably quite difficult, but the current formula (or perhaps it’s just a formula built around Jim Courier’s style) is endless speculation on what the players are thinking/feeling.

“Take us inside Novak’s mind Leyton” says Jim, and sure enough Leyton does his best in the role play. Roger Rasheed is on hand in hushed tones in the stands telling us what it’s like. He’s right there you see. Well so are Jim and Leyton, but he’s so close he has to speak quietly – and of course that means he can get even further inside the players minds. (Quiet – Roger is trying to hear the players thinking.)

And it turns out that whoever is asked to take us inside a player’s mind really can!  They just say what they reckon the player is thinking – though it seems pretty likely they have no more idea than anyone else. Bruce McAvaney is into this schtick like a rat up a drainpipe of course and is endlessly asking Jim “So what would he be thinking as they change ends”.  Continue reading →

Great betrayals of history

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One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday’s parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell’s sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor:

Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor “the greatest sell-out since Judas Iscariot” yesterday after the Government’s carbon tax bills were passed by the Senate.

Mr Windsor has told ABC Radio’s AM that he is not worried by the jibe.

“I don’t give a grain of salt [to] anything he’s said,” he said.

“He’s been a lap dog for the Liberals for many years. He just plays short-term politics. I take absolutely no notice of anything Ron Boswell says, and wish him well in retirement.”

It isn’t immediately obvious to me who Boswell reckons Windsor is betraying or why we should see it as having biblical proportions, but leaving that aside … I can immediately summon up several manifestly bigger betrayals:

  1. Sonny Bill selling out the Canterbury Bulldogs helped by that self-important wanker Anthony Mundine;
  2. Mark Thompson selling out the Cats for the Bombers.  Mind you he was a Bomber originally, but spending the entire season hypocritically trying to convince Gary Ablett that he’d be a traitorous dog if he took Gold Coast’s money and decamped northwards makes it a Big League Betrayal;
  3. Ross Lyon stabbing St Kilda, his own management and Mark Harvey simultaneously by suddenly shifting to Freo;
  4. Des Hasler’s selling out Manly, moving to the Bulldogs from 2013 but trying to stay on at the Sea Eagles for long enough to rape and pillage their playing list.  I’ve always been a bit mystified about how a sanctimonious tosser like Thomas Keneally, almost certainly Australia’s second most overrated author of all time and pipped at the post only by Patrick White, could have engaged with a good bloke like Hasler for long enough to write his biography.  I was beginning to think I might have misjudged old Tom, but it looks like I misjudged Des instead.  I don’t object to his doing the best for himself financially, especially if there was strife on the Sea Eagles Board, but there are ethical and unethical ways of going about it, as Chad Bennett says:

If Hasler had been significantly affected by the fractured board at Manly to the point he could no longer continue at the club, then so be it. Walk away.

But don’t try and keep your fingers in two pies at once, Des.

It’s unmanageable, underhanded and most importantly, unprofessional.

Geelong: Easy . . .

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Well my track record isn’t too flash. I predicted a Collingwood win last year for the first final – and they controlled the game and used their control to kick points rather than goals and then let the Sainters back in. Then I predicted a Sainters win in the replay, more out of worry than anything else. Having outlined my thoughts in the post, on re-reading them they seemed to add up to a Collingwood win. Which was what happened.

Anyway this year is different. Somehow it hasn’t felt the same. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have tickets – as I did to both games last year.

Anyway, I’m already in mourning. I can’t see how we are going to win.

If I were to set out the way to win the premiership it would be the way Geelong have managed this season. The basic strategy behind the game changes subtly as sides come up with new approaches.  But it takes the best part of a year at least to catch up with some new strategy. Thus we’ve seen Sydney get a premiership from flooding, and then they were unpicked. Then we saw the Saints doing something similar but somehow better. In each case both Sydney and the Saints didn’t have a very good bunch of players. They had a new strategy and players who were thoroughly drilled in how to make it work and they became almost impossible to beat.

The reason it takes time to peg such a strategy back is that, apart from figuring out exactly what they’re up to, you then have to figure out what to do about it. Collingwood has had its forward press going sufficiently well to win last year, but being the worrier I am I was always worried about Geelong, not just because they’ve got the fastest, most direct attacking game in the business, but because they added defence – copied from us – to that strategy.

They had it well enough worked out by early this year that they stopped us – when we had been pretty much unstoppable. One of their players said before the first of the two encounters something to this effect. “We want to be competitive, because we’ve changed our way of playing and if we lose but are competitive it will show that we’re learning”. And learning they were. So I didn’t want them to crush us in the last round of the home and away games. But they did.

More alarming still is that as I read in an article that someone else may remember and link to (I can’t find it) that Geelong’s stats have changed dramatically in the last five or six games. Their average kick length and kick to handball ratio has gone way up. They’ve basically come up with a way of getting the strengths of their attacking game without the downsides of inattention to defence. And they’re tearing other sides apart.

Whether deliberately or not, this new style hasn’t been really shown to the world for long enough for people to figure out how to unpick it, let alone drill the necessary skills and structures into their players to do so. So I reckon we’re in a lot of trouble. Tehy will pick us apart in just the way Hawthorn picked us apart last week – with lots of pressure against us in defence to stop us getting our run out of defence and with lots of long direct kicking zig-zagging down the centre of the ground and leading out from full forward.

Anyway, Malthouse is quite a smart fellow and so maybe he’ll come up with some response to this new challenge. But I’d feel a lot better if there was six months or so to actually get it right.

Anyway, we’ll see . . . Continue reading →

Manly and Collingwood

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The two finals for the oval ball codes do not just share a weekend this year. Two of the finalists – Collingwood in the AFL and Manly in the NRL – have the undisputed status of being “the team everyone likes to hate” in their respective leagues. Yet they are far from similar clubs and the root of this hate is a striking contrast.

The source of hatred for Manly is easy to understand. Manly are “silvertails”, a moniker popularised by Roy Masters whilst coaching Western Suburbs in the late 1970s. Wests were then based in Lidcombe and Masters developed a mythology of class resentment for his under resourced team of “fibros”. It managed to inspire a brutal theatre for audiences, but ultimately failed on two counts – they didn’t win a premiership and rather than inspiring a siege mentality against all of Wests’ opponents, it instead inspired a league wide hatred of the prosperous, well resourced, player stealing team ensconced on the insular peninsular. The ultimate beneficiary was Newcastle in 1997. This folklore still inspires documentaries today.

Collingwood - Stereotyped

The hatred of Collingwood is less easily encapsulated. Occasionally someone will suggest it is due to resentment of the team’s early 20th century success, which seems unlikely. Was dislike transmitted by geriatric fans that could actually remember Collingwood success? And why did the same resentment fall on teams like St George or South Sydney whom had similar periods of dominance in league? Over the years I’ve asked people, and searched internet forums and when one got past vague generalisations that could apply to any team, certain imagery made a habit of reappearing . Of “rats”, of “tatts”, of “flanno” and “missing teeth” [fn1] and of “Winnie Reds up sleeves”. Or I could just browse the facebook page devoted to asking “Why are Collingwood supporters roaming the streets? Shouldn’t they be in jail?”, or this one, or this one…. Hmm….

When the Western Suburbs Magpies consciously adopted proletarian semiotics, their Emmanuel Goldstein drew everyone else’s hate. When these semiotics are applied to the Collingwood Magpies, they became Goldstein.

Why this difference? It’s unlikely to be a root difference in the culture of the cities that form the core of each competition given Sydney and Melbourne are as alike as any two large cities in the world (the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding). Topography does make class differences more apparent in Sydney, but how would this explain this observed difference? Continue reading →

The truly national footie code?

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I grew up playing rugby union and rugby league in northern beaches Sydney.  But you couldn’t call rugby (union) Australia’s national game, especially after tonight’s depressing tryless loss by the Wallabies to Ireland.  A top class rugby game exhibits all the skills, as we saw in the last Bledisloe Cup fixture where Australia actually beat the ABs.  But the current rules of rugby mean that the majority of games are boring, grinding affairs fascinating only to boofhead afficionadoes (any suggestion that I’m thinking of Chris Sheil is emphatically if unconvincingly denied).  Moreover, in Australia at least, rugby is an elitist game for private school self-appointed toffs, whose administrators made little or no effort to broaden the game’s appeal in the wake of previous lucrative World Cup successes.

Soccer doesn’t cut the mustard either, despite having far more players at junior level than any other code.  At senior level it still doesn’t seem to have severed the noxious ethnic allegiances that have always blighted the code.  And a sport that thinks it’s a great idea to pin its fortunes to the signing of a geriatric  self-obsessed superstar like Harry Kewell has truly lost its way, even leaving aside the sleaze and dodginess of the Frank Lowy-inspired dual World Cup bid dissected in last week’s Four Corners program.  Moreover, at international level most soccer games exhibit all the excitement, tension and blood and guts of a chess game (no offence Nicholas).  The most exciting thing about most soccer games is judging which player pulled off the most convincing if spurious Dying Swan Act in or near the penalty box.

For Australians at least, the award for most truly national footie code comes down to a contest between rugby league and Australian Rules, and this weekend’s sudden death finals highlight just how close that contest really is.  In rugby league,  last night’s match where the NZ Warriors overhauled Benji Marshall’s Wests Tigers with a fluky try with only a couple of minutes to go, and then tonight’s game where retiring superstar Darren Lockyer won the game for Brisbane against last year’s premiers St George Illawarra with a wobbly field goal in extra time, both showed NRL at its best.

On the other hand, in AFL Sydney Swans left their run too late against Hawthorn last night and then, when it seemed a crippled Adam Goodes might nevertheless conjure a miracle, an equally crippled Buddy Franklin saved the Hawks’ feathers at least for another week.  In a sense, tonight’s sudden death final was almost a carbon copy, with the Weagles looking like relatively comfortable winners for most of the night until a late surge from Carlton got them within three points at the death.

You can make a plausible case that the makeup of the final four makes NRL more truly national (deeming New Zealand to be part of greater Oz – which may be the least depressing way to look at the rugby World Cup after tonight’s game).   The Weagles is the only non-Melbourne club left in the Aussie Rules finals race.  By contrast,  Brisbane, NZ Warriors and Melbourne Storm are all still in the NRL contest with Manly Sea Eagles the sole contender holding up Sydney’s honour as the home of rugby league.  Will the rest of Sydney swing in behind the team once known as the “Silvertails” until they spent all their cash reserves loyally fighting to save rugby league from the Murdoch Anti-Christ?  Don’t count on it.

Despite growing up with the rugby codes, I can’t help concluding after an intensive weekend of footie watching that Aussie Rules is a better game to watch than rugby league, with a wider range of skills regularly on display. Even so, I’ll be watching the remaining finals in both codes with equal fascination, and hoping against hope that the Wallabies stop reading their own publicity and start playing consistently to their potential.  Go Manly! Go Geelong!  Go Wallabies!

Introducing: Raymond Weschler

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Since a recent visit to San Francisco catching up with a cousin of mine I’d last met forty years ago, I’ve been receiving an email once a week.  It is written by Raymond (using a French pronunciation of the word long before Stephen Colbert took to this trick). It is sent to anyone who subscribes. And it organises and, more importantly anatomises a local weekly game of softball in the San Francisco area, though it is read, nay studied, for the perspicacity of its speculations on matters which go beyond softball. Australians haven’t seen this kind of insight since the days of Dave Sorenson.

I’ve gradually grown dependent on this weekly missive. If you want to read a few you can read over ten years worth of these productions here.  In any event, a recent one is below. I’ve been into what is indecorously called the ‘back end’ of Troppo and given Raymond an ID and invited him to post.  He doesn’t want to post weekly but will post when he feels sufficiently inspired. In fact I’ll be in San Francisco next weekend, but I’m kicking myself that I’ll be arriving just after the game finishes.  Next time I’ll make sure I make it in time for the action.

Softball: Couch Potato (A Somewhat Convoluted Foray into the Intangibles)

Dear People,

Alan Brill’s team stunned my own in a spine-tingling athletic paragon of ontological ethics, 15-13. I refer you to the top of the 6th, when Frank’s blistering groundball up the middle was quickly turned into a dazzling force-out at 3rd. It was then and there that my textbook-like defense had every right to pause and savor, but instead, the Frankensteiner apparently fell into an untimely state of groggy pensivitude, and with Stephan’s searing throw to 1st, Frank suddenly found himself as the new and towering poster-child for gratuitous double plays. In all candor, it was the most pathetic post-bat sleepwalking in the history of this league, and yet there he was at game’s end, beaming with pride as part of the Brillopad’s victorious contingent. Really—how in God’s name does this happen?

Of course, the irony grows and the questions only multiply. Just three innings later with bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th, Mary approached the plate with two out and our side down by five, yet also with the raw and unbridled resolve of 1,000 infracaninophiles. That’s a fuckload of resolve, of course, and sure enough, she blasted a staggering three-RBI double into deep center right! It was a gorgeous and transcendent achievement by any standard, but my team still went down—and down hard—in the tragic flames of a follow-up fly out. Does this mean that in pondering the abstract merits of a triumph denied, Frank was somehow more “worthy” than MaryMary (Quite Contrary), or is it, as I suspect, a discomfiting reflection of the fact that true aerobic justice is as randomly scattered as the initial quanta of the universe itself? I think you see where I’m going with this.

The point is that a couple days ago I happened to be watching CNBC as the stock market reacted to news of the S&P downgrade of US Treasury bonds, and as I absorbed the cogent logic of selling off one’s equities in a panicked rush in order to buy into the safety of the very bonds whose downgrading had just caused the panic, it suddenly occurred to me that the ebbs and flows of capital are as inscrutably wacko as the inevitable and unjust placement of meritorious athletes. Indeed, later that night I saw Steven Hawking on the Discovery channel arguing that the physical essence of everything arises directly from “the unconditional probability of existing based on the functional laws of nature.” Yeah, somebody has to say it; What a moron!

In any case, and as best as I can tell from the empirical evidence gleaned by a single night of cable viewing (over a tall, inviting stein of rich, hot cocoa), we don’t really know why the universe just popped into being, or why markets do what they do, or why Frank ended up on the winning team while Mary was stuck on mine, or, for that matter, why, when Tom and Anne finally returned to England after two long years abroad, only a select few British cities decided to greet them with the traditional celebratory riots. No, my friends, we don’t know the answers to any of that and we most likely never will. Yet as a stout and hearty people who are willing to embrace the great aerobic cosmos for the mystery that it is, I think we all accept that the future is not only unwritten, but distressingly likely to baffle, disappoint and utterly annoy. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning…Raymond