Hmm, Melbourne, April, cold, um, sport…

Yup, AFL. So we’re eight rounds in as I write this, and every howler monkey with a sports column or 5 minutes on 3AW is making predictions. I don’t yet have a spot on radio, but, well, looky here! I’ve got a sports column, I’m kinda furry, and I have been known to fling pooh at people! Here goes

“Is Gary Ablett Jr already better than his dad ever was previously at the same age before?” will be a keyboard shortcut for half the sports writers at the Sun. Geelong will not lose a game this season, indeed, they will not win by less than ten goals over the next six months, and everyone else should just wait for September to see the Cats humiliate the second place-getter.

Melbourne, on the other hand, are about to collapse, merge, relocate, have a ritual burning of their tartan rugs and their fan is going to spend the entire season at Buller. The recent retirement of David Neitz means the Dees will kick two goals (both from 50-metre penalties) between now and August.

St Kilda will enjoy a few early rounds of success, then injuries, complacency, and Grant Thomas’ Jedi mind tricks will take their rightful place at the helm. Robert Harvey will hang on for one more year, putting those of us in our late thirties through more shame as we watch him run, and run, and run, and run, and run. And Run. The younger Saints will fulfil their responsibilities as a glamour side by standing around out the front of the Star Bar at 3am, grinning stupidly, waiting for something to fall into their laps, which is pretty much how they behave around stoppages and any kind of contested ball.

North Melbourne will not show up for round fifteen, after Demetriou secretly declares Kangaroos players, members and administration non-persons; and then eradicates all mention of them from the archives. Somehow the non-existence of North will not stop every man who played for North in the past fifteen years from writing exclusively about The King And I. Andrew Denton will be appointed as motivational speaker, delivering lectures such as “Denial and outright lies - I copped it from Carey, make it work for you.” Dean Laidley will punch a journalist in the moosh.

Now that Sheeds has shuffled off to the Mother Ship, Terry Wallace will gladly step into the role of I Wear a Colander On My Head, So Listen To Me, Here’s This Week’s BIG IDEA. At some stage, Terry will remember that he has a team to coach, but will perform the role from his tanning bed, while on the phone to Rex Hunt, explaining that the Five Year Plan that’s just been completed was really only a precursor to the next Five Year Plan, and in about fifteen years, they plan to play football.

In round nine, Richo will either kick twelve goals, or knife a teammate.

Mick Malthouse will try to compete with Wallace for a while, then resume his Zen training, which will finally allow him to levitate during press conferences, and disable journalists with his laser vision.

No doubt some Collingwood players will be found drunk and violent in the vicinity of one of the fifteen nightclubs owned by the club, but who cares.

The entire Olympic Park precinct will be taken over for the Pies to train and park their Lexuses, and East Melbourne will be renamed Emiratesville.

Hawthorn will continue to be very good, but no one will really notice until Alistair Clarkson sheds his human skin and disappears to the Twelfth Dimension with Caro. Shane Crawford will then claim that he had sex in the other eleven dimensions before Al even got there. Did I ever tell you that I rooted a girl who rooted a guy who rooted a girl who…..?

Jason Akermanis will reveal that he invented Footscray, fire, the wheel and Esperanto, and that the AFL was actually his idea. He will further explain General and Special Relativity as they relate to, and in fact unify, the hands in the back rule. After revealing the marital, sexual, substance abuse and gambling problems of at least two dozen former and current teammates and opponents, he will vanish in a cloud of smoke.

Footscray players will, by round ten, be running so fast that they travel backwards in time and are able to win games before arriving at the ground.

Carlton and Essendon will launch legal proceedings against the AFL for discrimination. Their argument will be that they are both so big and have been so successful in the past that they deserve automatic entry into the second week of the finals, and priority draft picks. A statue of Kevin Sheedy will replace Dustin Fletcher at full back, and a statue of John Elliot will follow the Blues around as a mascot and somewhere safe for the players to urinate.

The statue of Mike Sheehan will maintain its place, slack-jawed and wobbling at one end of The Couch

West Coast will spend the entire season slightly miffed that Wayne Carey jokes have taken over from Ben Cousins jokes, and bored office workers are now photo-shopping the Duck into those naff “motivational” piss-take emails. The Gypsy Jokers will take over West Coast’s football department, resulting in a somewhat creative approach to tackling, and “in and under” work.

Fremantle players will take to wearing fright wigs on the field, to match their hideous jumpers, and start playing their club song backwards in an effort to summon a Golem as a mid-field enforcer.

Sydney will receive a ransom letter from Andrew Demetriou, in which he will demand that the Swans repay all the subsidies given to them over the past twenty years unless they get rid of Paul Roos. The reasons for this are Demetriou’s alone, but rumours will abound that it has something to do with a spilt drink at a function fifteen years ago, and someone looking sideways at someone else’s sister-in-law.

Leigh Matthews has a lot to say, and by round eleven he will have said it all.

Brisbane will embark on a new training regime, which will consist of sitting in a circle, trying to think up things for Leigh to hate, so he’ll bother to get out of bed each day and run training.

The hoped-for meteor strike at the South Australian derby will not occur this year, as it hasn’t for the past few years, but the rest of the country will survive the season just by clinging to that beautiful dream.

Choco Williams will somehow manage to alienate his entire board and all Port sponsors except Ringo’s Tooth-Straightening Emporium.

I will go deaf and insane thanks to the constant, ear-splitting inanity of the advertisements on the screens at Sponsor Dome and the ‘G. I will eventually realise that it is just plain stupid to walk for half a mile simply to have a smoke at half-time and will instead line up for twenty minutes or so, so I can pay six dollars for a plastic cup of watered-down Carlton “Mid Strength”, which apparently is beer.

Eventually someone will explain to me using actual numbers, and not just the principles of Daylight Robbery As Applied To A Captive Audience, how two cents worth of potatoes becomes Five Dollars Fifty worth of chips.

Andrew Demetriou will announce another spectacular AFL Taking On The World venture, by staging an exhibition match (between traditional rivals Fremantle and Richmond) in an underground carpark in Goosefart, Indiana, with a bussed-in crowd of Zimbabwean dignitaries.

He will further announce that Rugby League doesn’t exist, the World Game is just a passing fad, and there have always been six AFL teams in Western Sydney.

And there we have it folks, all of the above will happen so don’t bother tuning in.

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