Friggin hell, I hardly know where to start. Fremantle are four and one, Cousins is most likely going bye-bye, Richmond are looking more and more like Fitzroy in the early nineties (although, thankfully, they don’t have a merger-obsessed AFL following them around with an autopsy kit), and there’s a shit-storm in Rugby League. In a surprising turn of events, a senior Indian administrator has been suspended for suspicious dealings – the surprising bit being that he’s suspended, of course, and not running around shrieking “racism” at the accusers.

I still don’t know where to start, so I’ll throw the keyboard up in the air and…. start with something I don’t really know much about: League. Thanks to my grandmother living in Belmore right near the Bulldogs’ old home ground, I used to be a huge fan. Unfortunately the Super League came around about the same time as I discovered Union and reacquainted myself with the Saints, and the love fizzled out, so my memories of League are the Mortimer brothers, small home grounds, Fatty Vautin being a buffoonish player not a yob with a TV show, and Wests and Balmain being separate entities – the new, News Limited razzle dazzle and commercialism is something alien to me.

From an outsider’s view, the Storm always seemed like a construct; despite their premierships and their top players and the respectable crowds they generally drew in Melbourne, everything looked pre-packaged and designed to be marketed, like those faux-grunge bands, products of record company suits, that sprung up in the late nineties and killed the genre entirely. Even the colours and logo looked like they’d been brainstormed and idea-clouded and focus-grouped. The Storm was a product, like the League itself seemed to have become, of Big Business; consumers were to be found and convinced to call themselves fans, and a culture was to be created from branding. It was as if Rugby League was in a computer model and some bored researcher had introduced a Rampant Commercialism subroutine and hit Fast-Forward. Commercialism transfers the savagery of the playing field to the business model, and introduces new reasons, new desperation to win at any price; this has its own price, as the Storm, and the League, have now discovered.

A few things that I’m wondering about this whole affair:

- News Limited own 50% of the NRL and 100% of the Storm. News’ CEO John Hartigan is running for cover in every direction, saying he didn’t know, he couldn’t have known, it’s a big company and there were other people running the Storm and he’s angry that they did the wrong thing. This is the same News Limited that has been savage in its calls for the heads of Christine Nixon and Peter Garrett, and totally dismissive of their attempts to shift responsibility.

- Brian Waldron was, until all this blew up, CEO of the new Super 15s Union side, the Melbourne Rebels. Unless they employ Alan Didak as player behaviour lecturer and Glenn Wheatley’s tax adviser, I can’t imagine a sporting franchise getting off to a worse start in a foreign market.

- Brian Waldron was also running things at St Kilda for a few years. This is fucking terrifying for Saints supporters when you remember that over those few years we had the bizarre nepotism of the Butterss/Thomas regime, and we picked up some of the best players ever (Dal Santo for one) in a couple of drafts and good trades. At least we haven’t won a flag for the AFL to strip from us.

- Speaking of the AFL, Demetriou must be torn between the desire to do victory laps of his office screaming “League is weak, chuck it in the creek, we are strong, like King Kong”, and hiding under the desk awaiting the inevitable leak of bodgy contracts signed by marquee players, and salary cap rorts that make the Carlton offences look like the receptionist skimming change from the morning coffee run.

- Apart from the fans (and who seems to giving more than a passing fuck about them in all this, by the way), the one group that was almost escaping untarnished was the players. They couldn’t have been expected to know the intimate details of their own contracts, let alone have to do the sums or even care about the salary cap implications. Until it came out today that many of the dodgy hidden contracts were signed only days after the lodgment of the official ones. Everybody stinks now, and the brand is irreparably damaged; not just the Storm, but the League itself.

- This is just chickens coming home to roost; sport has become all about capitalism, and capitalism is all about jumping into the big pile of money with your competitors and doing whatever it takes to siphon as much into your own pockets as you can carry. The best way to do this is to bring a knife. If some of the notes are blood-soaked, so be it.

- On that subject, Alan Moran from the Institute of Public Affairs has just posted an imbecilic rant on ABC’s The Drum about how wrong the salary cap is because it restricts players’ earning capacity. If there were no cap in the AFL, rich clubs would buy the best players, win all the time, get all the members and the sponsors, and in five or ten years we would be left with Collingwood, Adelaide, and maybe Essendon or Carlton. What a competition that would be.

The money-driven nature of sport these days costs us all; I’ve ranted time and again about the price of a ticket and a beer, but it’s so much more than that. The AFL sell the TV rights to the highest bidder and are then unable to push, on behalf of the sport and its fans, for a sellout game or an interstate Friday nighter to be played live. Seven have decided that they simply must show Better Homes and Fucking Gardens, and that’s that. The AFL sold the rights, and with them the right to demand, or even ask nicely, that the networks treat us with anything resembling respect.

So the umpire is standing there for longer and longer every game, waiting for the light to flash that tells him the TV station has decided it’s okay for him to start play again, and if you’re watching at home you’ve just given up bitching about all the ads, because there is nothing you can do about it.

The AFL makes about $200 million a year from TV rights; would it be that detrimental to the game to accept, maybe $180 million, and retain a little control over the fixture and the scheduling? Please?

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Geelong lost to Carlton today. That was almost as bizarre as the Saints going down to Port Adelaide. There have been sightings of two-headed horses at the village green, and Jason Akermanis refusing to offer an opinion on something. I have called the Witchsmeller Pursuivant. Normal transmission will resume as soon as possible.

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I subscribe to a daily email from Back Page Lead, a sports news service. If you prefer your sports writing to be less robot-based and you want to hear from people with actual press passes, I recommend it.

This week, Francis Leach wrote an excellent piece on the commercialisation of ANZAC day for sport purposes. I can’t really add to it, except to say Boo-Rah, Leachy! The sickness of invoking “ANZAC spirit” and “mateship” and all the rest for any game cannot be over-estimated. It gets worse when Collingwood sell memberships by having Nathan Buckley spout all that crap while The Last Post plays in the background, and everyone with half a brain knows that the ANZAC Day Collingwood vs Essendon game is now just a money-spinner for both clubs, jealously guarded for its earning potential, and one of the games around which TV rights and the rest of the season is moulded.

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I’ve been writing this column for a couple of years now, and I’m man enough to admit when I’ve been wrong. I still have no idea how they’re doing it, but good on Freo for winning a few. Of course, as soon as I start tipping them (Round 5 doesn’t count, they played Richmond, and even that guy at my local who calls me Bill and occasionally soils himself at the bar won’t pick Richmond this year), they’ll revert to type and play god-awful fumbleball again. So I would appreciate newspaper footy writers apologising profusely in a few weeks, after all the “Freo playing like Geelong” blather that’s been sprayed all over the back pages this past month.

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