Welcome to the shit fight

I’ve had a lazy day off, and thought I would take a break from Arkham Asylum (the new Batman game I hired from Blockbuster today) to drop into the Shoddy Blog and post some stuff.

Uncle Beef has been negligent of late, but with good reason. The Fuller Brothers and Yatesy descended onto the city like a tropical cyclone, and a battle against sobriety was fought and won. For a few weeks there I was swept up in the madness like a rat in the Hadron Collider, but that is in the past now. It is time to write some shoddy material.

Besides, Arkham Asylum was starting to agitate me. It’s a great game, sure. But Batman has an awesome array of fight moves, and spends the entire game knocking people out. He never actually kills anybody.

So many times I’ll be fighting an inmate on top of a building, and want to throw him off to his doom, only to have old Bats give the guy a concussion and leave him there safe and sound to sleep it off.

The irony is that controlling a character with a no-kill policy, is in fact killing me. I want to snap some necks, I want to be knee deep in blood. I turned on the PlayStation 3 to sate my bloodlust, not dish out justice through a series of inconvenient head aches. Christ, in Grand Theft Auto IV you can’t even drive to the corner store for a carton of milk without running down a dozen innocent people, and hearing the glorious crunch of flesh and bone versus speeding metal. It just doesn’t pay to be a Super Hero these days. Oh well.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the footy since last time we chatted. After spending time and energy creating enormous posts on rounds 19, 20 and 21 of the footy season – I will now attempt to wrap up round 22, the Elimination Finals, the Semi Finals and the Preliminary Finals in a single, compact, Goblin-Fuck update.

The Crows kicked Carlton’s ass in the round 22 match up in one of the best games I have seen them play, winning by a pant destroying 12 goals and securing us in fifth place for a home ground final. The game also featured a great mark by Brett Burton:



The commentator all but fills his pants with cock vomit, loudly declaring it ”ZOMG THE MARK OF THE CENTURY!!!1!” - not only declaring it the best mark of the last nine seasons, but also of the following eighty one years as well. Gotta love Sports Hyperbole.

This match was one of those days were all of the players on the ground were playing at their peak, and I left the game hoping the Crows hadn’t blown all their jizz before the finals got underway.

It turned out my fears were unsubstantiated, as the Crows took on Essendon at AAMI stadium and pretty much date-raped the Bombers for a quarter or two, before burying them up to their necks on the back lawn and running over there pleading heads with a lawnmower. The Crows won by 96 fuck you points.

I was at the game in the third row, part of a birthday weekend that started Friday night with the Crows game, and finished Monday morning at 5:30am at Dr Zhivago’s, with me sitting at a table by myself for an entire hour until I was sober enough to remember my pin number, so that I could get some cash out for a taxi ride home.
Muel (who was in town and staying with me) found me on the couch later that morning, asleep with a bag of groceries resting on my stomach. The shopping consisted of a bag of pop corn, a can of corn, a can of beans, and some potato chips. I have no idea where I picked this stuff up, or what I was planning to do with it for that matter.

I got up off the couch, went to my bedroom, and promptly walked straight past my bed and into the wall. I was obviously still hammered, and memories of the weekend flickered through my mind like Butterflies through a sewer. I almost won $250 grand at the Casino. I watched Robocop on a back-seat screen in the Dickslap-Mobile. I ran into two old work colleagues, three people from Edithburgh, and five from High School. I spent a juvenile amount of time folding Dollar bills into paper planes, and throwing them back and forth with a group of lesbians sitting opposite to us on the Crazy Horse catwalk. Speaking of which, at least two dancers at that establishment knew me by name, leading me to believe I’ve gone there one too many times this year. That might also explain the permanent nipple marks in my forehead.

I made a mental note to give the place a miss for a while, as I climbed into bed to get one more precious hour’s sleep before I had to head off to work.

For some reason I thought turning 32 would be a simple affair, as always, I stand corrected.

The following Saturday had Teoby rouse me from my hungover slumber at about lunch time. I was still hurting from the night before – which consisted of a trip to the Alma Hotel for a few quiet drinks to watch the Bulldogs destroy the Brisbane Lions. Somehow, a few quiet drinks had slowly degraded into me trying to eat a Kebab on Hindley Street at about three in the morning, leaning on a table top that wasn’t actually connected to anything, and landing flat on my back in spectacular fashion, damn near breaking my elbow in the process. It didn’t hurt at the time, but it sure as hell Saturday afternoon as I had my sorry ass dragged out of bed, and on to the Colonist, drinking feminine pink Stoli drinks on the way (seriously, that was the only roadies we could find in my fridge – I still have no idea who put them there. But just quietly, they were curiously refreshing). Our trip to the Colonist involved us playing pokies (winning about $800 too by god), and instructing the barmaid on the importance of getting your “five fruit or veg a day”, as we proceeded to drink our way through five Vodka and Apple juices. This behavior wasted enough of the day to bring the next Football match around, the all important Crows vs Collingwood decider. I headed off to the Alma with Muel to watch the game.

The Alma is part owned by the ex Crows Captain Mark Riccutto, who since retiring from the game now plays in the Prince Alfred College Old Collegians A grade – a team my old London flatmate Jimmy plays for. This is relevant, because the PAC A grade, B grade and C grade all played in the Grand Final earlier that day…and all three teams won. Which, of course, made their team pub (the Alma) a Mecca for three teams worth of drunk celebratory footballers. There was a massive hour long line up to get in the pub, which was kind of lost on Muel and myself when we stumbled through the rear entrance to a birthday dinner party purely by mistake, and made our way to the bar.

There’s nothing like watching a finals game in a packed pub, the atmosphere was amazing for the Crows/Collingwood clash. Sadly, there’s also nothing like losing a finals game by less than a goal to knock the wind out of your sails – Collingwood swapping their one point loss for a five goal win, by kicking a goal in the final minutes. Adding insult to injury, their goal was due to a free kick (or penalty, to you non-convicts), which brought back memories of Australia dropping out of the world cup to Italy due to a last minute penalty. Only this time, the free kick was due to our Full back Rutton impeding the player and was rightfully given, not due to some Italian dick-splash taking a dive in front of goal. I drank and chatted with Jimmy and other assorted felons until about 3am, then stumbled home like a wild bear with ten tranquilizers in his back.

I moped over the Crows loss for a week, before turning my attention to the Preliminary Finals. Thankfully it was a low key affair to watch Saint Kilda beat the Bulldogs by seven points at the Rob Roy – “a few beers while we watch the game”, actually turned into a few beers while we watched the game. Heaven fucking forbid. I was home by 11pm. The Geelong vs Collingwood game was an even lower key affair for me, I watched half the game at home before heading off to work. A workmate gave me the score at the office – Geelong winning by an impressive 77 points.

So there we have it kids, the shit fight is over and we are down to the final two teams. I’m actually happy it was these two teams to come out of the Preliminary Finals, I have close mates who follow both teams (Matt supports Geelong, while Dowling is a Saint Kilda fan), and it will also be the match up of the super teams first predicted back in mid season. I wouldn’t have been as interested in the final if it had been between Collingwood and the Bulldogs. True, they were the form sides going into the finals, but I honestly just don’t give much of a shit about either of those sides.

One game to go kids, Geelong vs Saint Kilda this coming Saturday afternoon. The pressure will be on for Saint Kilda, as they haven’t won a premiership since 1966. To give you a rough idea of how long ago that was, Ned Kelly won the Brownlow that year.