AFL Grand Final 2009: Scream, Weep, Handle It!
‘The Moment Of The Great Confrontation Is Drawing Near’……..Channel 10.
And it is!
Have a wonderful AFL Final Day – ALL of you – particularly privileged desperados who have a team running round.
* I’ve been told there’s many new people in here (yippee!) so I’m putting a piece up from last September – when this thingo was brand new. AND to tell you the truth, I’m too worked up to do anything else……
……….. On the other hand, the memories of another Grand Final day in 1963, threaten to overwhelm me………
Before 1963 grand final credit: Sister72, Flickr The Ross family (five lovely girls and Hec and Gwennie) lived, ate and dry-retched footy…
Hec was the President of The Leeton Redlegs, the Mighty Demons Australian Rules Football Club. And In 1963, the Mighty Demons had risen above a record-breaking caseload of shockingly dehabilitating groin injuries to scrape into the Grand Final.
Gwennie was always very creative. But, in the week leading up to the Grand Final, this mid-career cake decorating artist, suddenly switched mediums! Our carport resembled the Sydney Mardi Gras’ float storage warehouse. I’m going to do the car, Gwennie said. And, at 6am on Grand Final morning, it was indeed very clear that, yes, Gwennie had done the car.
The car – EK Holden registration number CLU295 – was rendered a forward attack vehicle.
Massive cardboard demons with pitchforks festooned every inch of it. Their grotesque faces had words coming from their mouths: Bulldogs Desexed Today!, Watch The Bulldogs Dribble!, Bulldogs Put Down!….
The meanest Mighty Demon posed huge logistical problems. He came in at just under five-metres and was somehow attached to CLU295’s roof. There was even very intense talk among neighbours that an articulated vehicle from a local haulage company may have be brought in to transport our car to grand final headquarters, the magnificent sports ground at Narrandera.
Hec would have none of it! If a man can’t drive his family to the footy, that man is a dill. Get in!
Now, Narrandera is 25kms from Leeton. Hec’s game plan was to stay on the gravel and take it easy.
To say that Gwennie’s work immediately struck a chord deep within people, would be an understatement.
As Hec battled to keep CLU295 on the gravel, hundreds of Mighty Demons’ supporters roared past, blowing horns and yelling: You Bloody Beauty!
After 1963 grand final On the other hand, It is said that within cars transporting Grand Final players, silence fell. It was just too dangerous to get worked up. Because of that shocking litany of groin injuries, many of players were up to their eyeballs in Bex powders. Club strappers had also been hard at work overnight. Trusted insiders reported that their phenomenal ‘groin bandage work’ in combo with the application of handfuls of Deep Heat cream was extraordinarily painful to watch, but necessary.
Meanwhile at the Narrandera sports ground, word had spread that something colossal was on its way. I know nothing of the negotiations that took place but when we did arrive, a parking man in a white coat said:
You have permission to do a lap around the ground. Just stay outside that bloody boundary line, hear me!
And so, we did that lap. To a mixed reaction. While the Mighty Demon’s camp made the rapture witnessed at charismatic churches look lame, ugly Bulldogs’ supporters willingly participated in the greatest mass demonstration of five fingered gestures and fifthy language, ever recorded anywhere in the world.
On Grand Final Day, 1963, The Mighty Demons got flogged.
Under Gwennie’s instructions, we’d started dismantling CLU295 mid-way through the second quarter. But, it was slow going. Because of the amount of adhesive material used in the installation, it was intricate work.
Hec eventually came back to the car. So mad with grief, he didn’t know what he was doing. Enough to say that we got next to nought for CLU295 at trade-in time because of the state of the ducco.
After that day, Gwennie became very quiet. Neighbours, who always described her as a very deep thinker, said she was going into herself. We all worried. That was until mid-December when Gwennie announced plans for her massive cardboard backyard nativity scene.
With a big sign right on top of it saying: Good One Joseph!
******ALL correspondents just take a deep breath and go for it!!
Just click on the ‘comment’ thingo and follow the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo – just ignore it.
Comment of the Week
September 26th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
The Chief Monk – Help!
HALF TIME!!!!!
Please keep spinnin’ and whirlin’ for me….
ST KILDA, ST KILDA……
September 26th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Why is everything so bloody poised?
Dear The Dude…….’cause it’s a ripper, a RIPPER! KJ.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:20 am
We are on high alert…..
We have NOT heard from St Kilda Desperado Megsy since half-time yesterday.
Megsy:
Are you still alive?
Are you thinking straight?
Is there anything anyone can do to help?
Please report in – I am sick with worry. KJ.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Via (firstly) my work and then via where I reside and the types of people I’m generally thrown together with on a day-to-day basis, I’ve formed a view on St Kilda supporters (or at least on a certain type of St Kilda supprter).
That view is – they don’t really want to win.
Deep in the places they don’t talk about at parties (to quote Col. Jessup from A Few Good Men), they know that they support the Saints because they lose, and if the Saints suddenly became a successful club, it would tear their souls apart.
I’m not talking here about the salt-of-the-earth Seaford-and-Moorabbin dyed-in-the-wool 4th-generation mob.
I saw some of then cry true tears of rage and bewilderment in 1997.
I’m talking about the inner-city-living, bohemian, rock-and-rolling, Nick-Cave-worshipping, unshaven, scruffy-looking, trilby-sporting, Rockwiz-viewing types whose entire existence is dedicated to living down their private school educations and their comfortable eastern suburbs childhoods, and who consitute the St Kilda fan base within about an 8 kilometre radius of the Melbourne GPO.
The Saints are their team of choice because the Saints specialise in ramshackle administrations and gifted-but-flawed cult heroes and wooden spoons and ‘not quites’ and heartbreaking honourable losses.
The poor dears would have been in psychic agony for the last 6 months, but their Saints haven’t let them down because they’ve done the right thing by their supporters’ hard-won self-image and fallen at the last hurdle.
Dear Roma Street,
Wow! An extraordinarily complex (and controversial) class and psychosexual analysis of a club’s fan base.
If I was sports editor at ‘The Age’ I’d run this – and then get outta town!
Meanwhile, what a game of Grand Final football!!!
When it gets like that, I CANNOT stand it. I swear to God my telly was throwing off dangerous radiation.
Then, I CANNOT watch. I turn the sound down and go wandering around the house in a delusional state – running into the telly from time to time for a quick look at the scores.
This morning?…….cakes of soap in the freezer, frozen king prawn cutlets in the bath, wrinkle cream in the crisper……
NO WONDER Grand Final Day for me is a solitary pursuit.
KJ.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Dear KJ,
Yesterday, I decorated the verandah.
Cars stopped.
Photographs were taken.
The balloons hung on for dear life.
St Kilda did not.
Today I’m seeing red, white and black balloons and streamers stuck in trees in the school grounds.
Scurrying in to get the paper this morning, the lovely local copper said: You must be feeling terrible.
Yes.
I’m now on sick leave for 12 months……..
Dear, Dear Megsy,
Thank God you’re alive!
I don’t know what to do EXCEPT pass on how Hec reacted to significant Redlegs losses.
He’d:
*Go off his tucker but not his beer.
* Drive like a man who had nothing to lose.
* Sit in Mass looking vacant – a sure sign of a crisis of Faith.
THEN suddenly (always about three weeks later) he’d get up and yell:
Will someone tell a man what’s been going on around the joint?
Recovery underway.
*FINAL THING0 – Please DO NOT read Roma Street’s thesis. Could prove VERY dangerous in your state. KJ
September 27th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Tobar Childa or sunt kelda,
Is a well of sweet water.
Not the name of a saint,
That is not until Anno Domini 2009.
For now that well is filled,
Brimming with our tears……
Of gratitude for our heroes.
Beaten?
They aint.
At Ainslie Footy Club,
That also wears the red, white and blue.
They tell the tale of ‘58
When the Saints went down to them,
And Barry Browning kicked a goal……..
Like in Munster when they beat
The All Blacks.
That Day Standeth Alone.
On Saturday night the beacon
On Mount Ainslie ………
Went out.
Extinguished by the weeping
Of mountainy men.
To whom the beauty of footy
And Vanished Youth
Had rendered them sad.
So they ordered a beer
And their old girls a gin,
But soon their voices were raised:
When the Saints go Marchin’ in.
(*Thanks to Wikipedia)
No saint is known by the name of Kilda, and various theories have been proposed for the word’s origin, which dates from the late 16th century.
Haswell-Smith (2004) notes that the full name St Kilda first appears on a Dutch map dated 1666, and that it may have been derived from Norse sunt kelda (’sweet wellwater’) or from a mistaken Dutch assumption that the spring Tobar Childa was dedicated to a saint. (Tobar Childa is a tautological place name, consisting of the Gaelic and Norse words for well, ie: ‘well well’).
Martin Martin, who visited in 1697, believed that the name ‘is taken from one Kilder, who lived here; and from him the large well Toubir-Kilda has also its name….’
Maclean (1972) similarly suggests it may come from a corruption of the Old Norse name for the spring on Hirta, Childa, and states that a 1588 map identifies the archipelago as Kilda. He also speculates that it may refer to the Culdees, anchorites who may have brought Christianity to the island, or be a corruption of the Gaelic name for the main island of the group, since the islanders tended to pronounce ‘r’ as ‘l’, and thus habitually referred to the island as Hilta.
Steel (1988) adds weight to the idea, noting that the islanders pronounced the ‘H’ with a ’somewhat guttural quality’, making the sound they used for Hirta ‘almost’ Kilta.
September 27th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
KJ – some game. Even though it was played between one team that I deplore and one that I’m indifferent to, I was nevertheless climbing the walls in the fourth quarter.
As for that theory I outlined – some non-Saints people that I’ve run it by have said they reckon I might be onto something. Most Saints people that I’ve put it to have said Right back at ya, slick, because if there is one team whose supporter base is open to an accusation of secretly enjoying losing even more than the Saints barrackers, it is my own.
I’m a Demon.
Hello again Roma Street,
It is only right and good that an Ex-Leeton girl be a Demon. The Leeton Reddies were – of course – ALSO known as the Mighty Demons…..
Next year, next year…..KJ.
September 27th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
For 43 years, I have been looking for a decent employer.
If I do, I’ll give them a Flag.
September 27th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Dear Big L – would you be kind enough to roneo off umpteen copies of your last post, and distribute it to the football media of Melbourne, who give the screaming fantods to all right-thinking persons by constantly referring to the joint as SAINT KILDA?
Chief offenders – N. Buckley, G.Lyon.
September 27th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Why don’t young people go to Mass nowadays? asked Father.
Write to the Pope, I said.
For what?
For a Solemn High Pontifical Mass in St Peter’s Basilica for Next Grand Final Day to coincide with a Mass at the Sacred Heart Mission church at St Kilda. There’ll be memorabilia of Phar Lap, Les Darcy and Gallipoli.
It’ll make World Youth Day look like a fete.
There were Twelve Apostles, Father. And there were Twelve Lousy Points!
September 27th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Dear Roma Street,
Roneo, Roneo, Roneo……
Wherefore art thou, Roneo?