The greatest game in the world returns this weekend for Season 2011, and too much football will never be enough. Season 2010 will be remembered for the most controversial defection since Anakin Skywalker went over to the Dark Side, as Gary Ablett Junior abandoned Geelong to play for the new Gold Coast team. But if you thought Skywalker Senior’s defection had some far-reaching consequences for an entire galaxy, it was nothing compared with the impact of Ablett Junior’s defection on the Geelong universe. For 22 of the past 27 years, Geelong has had a genius named Gary Ablett performing miracles on a regular basis and arousing the passions of fans like no other player in the game. When people think ‘Geelong’ they immediately think the words ‘Gary Ablett’ and vice versa. Two generations of Gary Abletts were the heart, soul and hope of an entire city.
The greatest game in the world returns this weekend for Season 2011, and too much football will never be enough. Season 2010 will be remembered for the most controversial defection since Anakin Skywalker went over to the Dark Side, as Gary Ablett Junior abandoned Geelong to play for the new Gold Coast team. But if you thought Skywalker Senior’s defection had some far-reaching consequences for an entire galaxy, it was nothing compared with the impact of Ablett Junior’s defection on the Geelong universe. For 22 of the past 27 years, Geelong has had a genius named Gary Ablett performing miracles on a regular basis and arousing the passions of fans like no other player in the game. When people think ‘Geelong’ they immediately think the words ‘Gary Ablett’ and vice versa. Two generations of Gary Abletts were the heart, soul and hope of an entire city.
Watching Ablett at his first press conference in a Gold Coast shirt announcing his defection was as painful for a Geelong fan as it was for a Coalition supporter watching Rob Oakeshott pretending to make up his mind at that press conference last year. Each of them has blatantly let down their parochial regional constituency, and each deserves to be targeted for retribution by disillusioned locals. Surprisingly, however, opinion is divided among Geelong fans as to how they should respond when he returns with his new team. Some want to vent their anger, while others suggest they should rise above it and politely applaud, effectively turning the other cheek and saying, ‘thanks for the memories’. I do not subscribe to the second school of thought. By renouncing his club, Junior has also renounced both his community and his family heritage. It now behoves him to do the only honourable thing and also renounce his name. He should change it to something that is not so intrinsically Geelong, something more befitting the future he has chosen for himself. I suggest simply ‘The Deserter’. For too long Cat fans have The Deserter should be as welcome in Geelong this year as Thierry Henry at a St Patrick’s Day party.
In South Australia, the big football issue is whether its two AFL teams will eventually move to a redeveloped Adelaide Oval and abandon the increasingly unpopular and outdated Football Park, a 1970s-era ground located in a far-flung outer suburb.
Footy Park was modelled on the Melbourne equivalent, Waverley Park, which was shut down by the league in 1999 after fans repeatedly voted with their feet. It’s a pity the Croweaters have taken more than a decade to follow suit. Don Dunstan once promoted SA as ‘the progressive state’. These days, however, progress in Adelaide takes about as long as it used to take Dunstan to remove himself from in front of a full-length mirror.
The Adelaide Oval redevelopment is a policy of the state Labor government, which is stumping up $535 million for it. So far, the project has many things in common with other big-spending Labor initiatives: the budget has already blown out, questions are being asked about waste and extravagance, and the body established to run it is not exactly setting records for administrative prowess. All that’s missing is a suitable piece of shameless Labor spin to name the project. ‘Building the Football Revolution’, maybe? The ‘Croweater Irrelevance Reduction Scheme’, perhaps? Or maybe they could borrow from the repertoire of the recently-deposed Victorian ALP government: ‘We’re buggering up a bleeding obvious decision that should have been made years ago. (It’s Part Of The Plan).’
Over in Perth, the West Coast Eagles took out their first wooden spoon last year. It’s been a spectacular fall from grace for the club that won the premiership in 2006. Since then they have had a litany of self-inflicted problems. They sacked Ben Cousins because of his drug addiction, had several other players in trouble for substance related issues, and a former champion player died of an overdose. Then, not surprisingly, their best player Chris Judd decided he’d rather be elsewhere and left for Carlton. Back in their glory days the Eagles were the most arrogant, hedonistic team going around. Their club culture resembled the ‘cocaine and hookers’ lifestyle of the characters in Boogie Nights in the 1970s. As anyone who saw Boogie Nights would know, the moral of the story is that by the mid-Eighties all the stars had paid the price for their excesses by being either dead, in jail, robbing 7-Elevens or pimping themselves out at heavily discounted rates. Talk about life imitating art. The fall of the Eagles is a great modern morality tale in the football world, and a good lesson for all you kiddies watching out there.
During AFL off-seasons the league administration is usually busy preparing for the new season or attending to the various player scandals that tend to arise at that time of year. This year they added something else to the list: a junket to the United Nations in Geneva. Several representatives of the AFL recently jetted off to the UN Human Rights Commission to boast of how the AFL was leading the way in ridding Australian society of racism. Also present on the junket was the Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what a ‘social justice commissioner’ does, but the indigenous people of Switzerland living in socially unjust conditions must have been grateful that he took time out of his busy schedule to drop by and talk football with them. The AFL should think carefully before it immerses itself any further in the UN scene. Getting involved in UN junkets and talkfests has a habit of dangerously distracting people from what should be their core business back home. It also makes them look like out-of-touch, globe-trotting elitists. Just ask Kevin Rudd.
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