Going Scarlett with Rage

I can’t take it anymore. This has been bubbling inside me for a number of years. The tipping point almost came a few weeks back, and the breaking point has now been reached. I’ve heard one too many comments regarding one full back, and way too many of another. In differing ways On the first day [Read more]

Scarf

I went to my second Super Rugby fixture last Friday night, and I wouldn’t be lying if I said I enjoyed it more than my first. There were plenty of tries, there was skill shown by both large and small, and the kicking for goal (I’m pretty sure that’s not the correct turn of phrase) [Read more]

Pre-Season Promise

Start Level 1……..BEEP…. Don’t exert too much. Just get to the line. It’s almost a walk at the start It’s probably not a ‘beep’, to be fair. It isn’t high-pitched enough to warrant an ‘ee’. More like a ‘duuurrrrt’. It is the calling of the legendary ‘beep test’ and it is but one facet of [Read more]

Who Do You Think You Are?

As I jumped on the tram immediately after work on Friday, the familiar thrill of Friday Night Football was back. The worries of the five previous working days were swiped away with my Myki as I shook off the dust of the CBD and crawled towards Brunswick St. The clear air of the weekend descended [Read more]

When the Band Stopped

After a week-long build up focusing on match ups, previous finals clashes, a 100 year long rivalry, finals ticketing dramas and the usual injury concerns, 90,000 people arrived at the MCG ready for action. You would think that such an attendance would be a glowing endorsement of the appeal of the indigenous code. With an [Read more]

Celtic memories

  by Andrew Else “You can feel the hatred in the air”   I can’t say I had ever previously (or ever since) heard this phrase used as a selling point to a sporting event. Clearly I was venturing into unchartered territory.   The year was 2004 and I had just commenced the customary post-uni, [Read more]

Apprentices Roll the Foremen

What is the opposite of a ‘spring in your step’? Whatever it is, that is what I had last Saturday night at about 6pm. It was about that time that I was dashing across South rd to hop on the train leaving Brighton Beach station. My side had just lost to a fellow finals contender by [Read more]

Else lifts; Spud flops.

Friday night games don’t thrill me the way they should. It’s a rush to get there, if your team loses then your weekend is doomed, the game is delayed on the box, and, as a park footballer in my twilight years, attending a match is probably not the ideal preparation. Especially a match like this [Read more]

Bombers feast on Suns

by Andrew Else “Och that’s a sin. They’re gunna thrash them” Trust my Mum to start feeling sorry for a team with a borrowed, un-original name that wears a glorified training jumper. How a person raised on the streets of Glasgow could have sympathy to such a conglomerate baffles me. “C’mon Mum, just think of all [Read more]

Round Three Double

Pubs, clubs and hubs across the city have been brimming with chatter about what the sub rule has brought to season 2011. So far it seems that games will often come down to the kind of last-man-standing contest, where kicks ‘down the line’ to the players who ‘don’t get any shorter’ which cause folk to [Read more]

Ball bounces and pea blows for Sydney in a tight one

Michael Symonds never gave me much reason to leap out of my seat. That’s not a knock on the West Aussie half-forward flanker, but with contemporaries like Hird, Lloyd, Long, Bewick et al, there were others that we could rely upon for the spectacular. But when his banana/checkside/boomerang goal at the Bradman Stand end sailed [Read more]

I Don’t Care

By Andrew Else A text message from a friend before the game read: “Today is the first day of our new football lives”. I’d heard them all throughout the off-season: Bomber did the dirty; Hirdy is just the coffee boy; Goodwin is your best midfielder; David’s Dad wouldn’t have done such a thing; My response is simple: [Read more]