Round 10 – The 2016 Michael Landon Cup

Greetings Tipsters

 

What a difference a day makes.  Twenty four hours brought the sun and the flowers, where there used to be rain.

 

Is Brendon “I Was A Teenage Coach” Bolton a Dinah Washington fan?  He oughta be.  We are talking about a few weeks more than a day, but it’s gotta ring true for any fan of the ODNBs.  After four matches Carlton were winless, dead last, 60.6%.  Then they played Freo.  They’ve won five of the six since and the percentage over those six is 97.6.

 

Sure, it aint world beating, Flag Here We Come stuff but from a list rated worse than Essendon pre-season, it’s pretty good and beyond what most all of us would’ve expected.  Graduates of the Clarkson Coaching Academy have their teams at fourth, fifth, sixth, eleventh.

 

Chris Scott wouldn’t be a Dinah Washington fan this week.  Maybe he’s listening to some of that “woe is me” emo crap from a few years ago.  I caught a bit of one of those bands at the Big Day Out, ’04 or ’06, while I was waiting for a good band to start on the adjacent stage.  The singer bleated “Do you know what it’s like to hate the street you grew up on?  I had to live there for six years…” whiney, whiney, whiney, etc.

 

Seriously?  You’re in a touring rock band, girls want to have intimate relations with you, boys want to do drugs with you, you’re living the dream and the best you can come up with is hating a street?!?  Alice Cooper would be disgusted.

 

If you’re not familiar with the work of Alice Cooper (the band), check this vid.  Prescient or what – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i4EnjRKVQw

 

The Scott brothers will be on the fone to each other this week, their blue and white clad teams aint what they oughta be.

 

Chris has something to ponder, Geelong haven’t just blown it in the last two weeks, the signs were there earlier but we didn’t care to look.  Poor conversion, for one, players who are winners when the going’s good but drop off too quickly.  The team is good enough, they’ll likely rebound but what the heck is Tom Hawkins doing?

 

He’s the big forward, he’s supposed to kick goals and make chances for the small forwards.  I dunno what his ‘goal assist’ stat is, but he’s kicked 22 so far this season.  Pretty much level with his career average of two goals per game.  Now, it’d be unfair to compare him to Lance, that wonderful freak of nature, but how about Josh Kennedy, a not dissimilar player.

 

JK’s average since moving to Perth is 2.6 goals a game, he’s kicked 37 so far this season, one and a half more goals per game than the, ahem, ‘Tomahawk.’  Being a professional gardener, I have a tomahawk, somewhere in the van.  I don’t use it much.

 

More to the point, the Pivotonians have conceded 16 goals in the last two matches, against Collingwood and Carlton.  They had a great defence before that.

 

Well, as Longmire said, we’re only one win ahead of seventh.  And one win behind first.

 

I’ve lost the thread.  Talking the last hour with a colleague about a job worth doing, five figures.

 

One win behind first, yes, North don’t look so flash this week.  Brad should’ve dropped Waite, no room in Sydney for three big blokes forward.  Length and width, the SCG is close to the MCG but those shallow pockets catch visitors by surprise.

 

You’d think they’d have learnt by now.  Sydney crowded North, who couldn’t get a clean kick into space, Sydney looked like they wanted to win by not scoring for chunks of the match, dominating pozeeshun w’out scoring.

 

This week, all the folks who thought North pretenders can feel mightily vindicated.  North fans – my grandad Bill, a rover, in the 1920s he’d get the train up to Sydney as soon as the harvest was in and play for East Sydney, was a North fan – can all blame it on the SCG.

 

I don’t rate North as a flag chance, but I don’t rate any other team as a chance this week.  Let’s see how the next few rounds work out.

 

The lower rungs are interesting, like the great contests that happens back in the pack in motorcycle racing.  It aint just Carlton – Collingwood, Richmond, St Kilda are all winding up the spark.  They aint gonna play finals but have a solid chance to ‘shape the eight,’ Richmond play North Frinite, First vs Fourteenth, the odds’ll be narrower than you’d expect.

 

The match I’m really interested in is happening in Subiaco Satnite, The Pharmacist takes the  Bombers up against the team FKA The Funky Purps  There’s a lot riding on that one.

 

Cheers Tipsters

 

PS –  I wrote this Moneve and forgot to post it, but I can now quote Chris Scott’s beautifully mixed metaphor – “a few cogs in the chain that aren’t firing.”  He then went on to say that his team needed to be “firing on all cylinders” which is at least consistent, but which Ford engine was he referring to?  The DOHC 5.4 V8?  Cleveland 351?  Pursuit 170?

 

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