Demetriou’s world

Despite there being millions of dollars and priority draft picks at stake, there is absolutely no tanking whatsoever, at all, and anyone who says there is is just a big dumbhead.

Our anti-gambling policies work well, just ask the handful of nitwit officials who put on bets no bigger than $20 on their own internet or phone betting accounts and have now all been named and exiled to the far side of the Sun. It is completely un-possible that officials or players who want to have a big bet will use cash, or someone else’s account to hide their activities, and anyone who disagrees is just a big dumbhead. And it’s offensive for all you big dumbheads to suggest that there are different rules for different people, that big important rich club director who had a big bet and got a suspended sentence has really learned his lesson.

Everyone who plays at Etihad and the Gabba says the surfaces are too hard, and may be contributing to injuries, and they’re just big dumbheads, too, what would coaches and players and physiotherapists and doctors know, I mean, for Gawd’s sake, Collo can be trusted when he tells you that Etihad is the best surface in the world anywhere?

The AFL drug policy works really really well, we’ve picked up 14 positive samples and that Freo kid just got arrested, so it’s obvious that our drugs policy is working, because look, we catch them doing it (except for those years that Ben Cousins was off his dial and evading testing), and sometimes so do the police so it’s working, allright, and anyone who says it isn’t and that an effective drug policy would result in no players actually using drugs and especially not getting caught by the police is just a big dumbhead.

Oh, and I’m not quietly shitting myself about the prospect of one or more of our clubs throwing the AFL into a pile of shit bigger than the NRL currently is, not at all, all our clubs are completely honest and trustworthy and responsible.

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I think it’s good, once in a while, to get the Demetriou-bagging out of the way early, so we can discuss (or at least I can yell and you can pay attention) the big issues of the month past and the month to come. You may have heard that the WorldGame-aroos are heading to South Africa in a few weeks’ time. John Coates can go fuck himself with a rusty fork – the World Cup actually is the biggest sporting event in the world, and its participants don’t need to suck millions of dollars out of government to get there.

The next couple of months have pretty much guaranteed Lovelywife the marital bed to herself most nights, as I’ll be up at all sorts of God-awful hours watching every game that I possibly can, keeping the screams of “GOOOOOAAAAALLLLLL” down to a dull roar when possible. And once that’s over, Le Tour starts, and I’m on the couch again.

The common point to these two months of unbridled pleasure for yours truly? SBS. Every. Game. Live. Let me just say that once again, for the cheap seats. SBS. Every. Game. Live. Much as it makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit, I have to give some credit where it’s due, too: Senator Stephen Conroy, he of the Internet filter and general incompetent baboon, intervened to ensure that SBS could Show. Every. Game. Live.

So, Senator, in all other respects I firmly believe that you should be set on fire and dragged backwards through a knife factory, but for this, I and the football-loving public of this wide brown land thank you. Now, get the fuck out of my internets.

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Regular readers will know that I think Jason Akermanis is a bit of a tosser. Over the years, he’s managed to expose the marital, gambling and other problems of other players, and gobbed off about enough teammates and other issues to be hounded out of Brisbane.

Now, he’s gone and gobbed off about gays in the AFL. When I first saw the headline, I thought, like many of my fellow-travellers, that Aker was about to be rude, insensitive and stupid on the issue. The Twitterati were going off like spastic three-armed monkeys, the AFL were ducking for cover, and everyone was yelling about caveman this and homophobe that.

Then I read his article. He admitted that, to his shame, he felt slightly uncomfortable showering with an openly gay team-mate some years ago. He said that he wished the environment within football clubs were accepting of homosexuals. And he said that, by his reckoning, it isn’t.

That’s pretty much it. He said it over a full page of the Herald Sun, so said far too much, and left too many inferences to be drawn, true, but that’s the essence of what he said. And I agree with him.

Anyone who’s ever watched the misogynist, redneck troglodyte-fest that is the Footy Show cannot possibly say with a straight face that an AFL player who came out would be treated with anything but horror. From Eddie McGuire’s pathetic (some of my best friends are gay/I’m not a homophobe but) effort in DNA a couple of months ago, to the rampant poofter hating-and-baiting of people like Sam Newman, can you imagine what would happen?

Said player would appear on the Footy Show, and the troglodytes (with handlers nervously wielding cattle-prods under the desk, just waiting for “poo-pirate” to dribble from Sam’s vile gob) would mouth scripted platitudes, invoke half-hearted rounds of applause from the lumpen-proletariat in the audience, then go back to putting on dresses and doing Mr Humphries impersonations as soon as his back was turned.

It stinks, but it’s the reality. That’s all Aker was trying to say. It took fifty years of “COON” being screamed from the grandstand, and Nicky Winmar’s lump-in-your-throat “I’m black and I’m fucken proud” declaration at Victoria Park all those years ago, and Michael Long’s Herculean efforts at reconciliation and respect, to end the disgusting racist taunts that Aboriginal players put up with every time they hit the field. Now, thankfully, if any fuckhead wants to yell a racial epithet at the footy, everyone around will tell him to shut his filthy hole.

But that took years, and there are dozens of Aboriginal players in the AFL. How many gays are there? Who knows, but the first one to stick his head over the parapet is going to be alone, listening to “faggot” and “poof” and every other term of abuse, every time he goes near the ball or gets a free kick, and he and any others brave enough to come out will put up with it for at least as long as the Krakouers and the Riolis and the Winmars and the Longs and every other Aborigine did. The Footy Show producers have managed to stop Sam Newman putting on blackface, finally; how long will it take to eradicate the poofter jokes, and for reality to match the rhetoric about inclusion?

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Woooo, that was all a bit serious, so here are a few things I’ve found funny lately.

Disgraced Tour De France winner Floyd Landis spent years and a couple of million dollars trying to convince us that he wasn’t a drug cheat. Now he seems to be admitting it, but he wants to blame everyone else, and drag Lance into the muck with him.

Cadel Evans is doing very well in the Giro D’Italia, and now he’s copping shit because it might affect his form for Le Tour.

My thumbnail is 99.9% off now, and I make at least one workmate per day vomit when I show it to them.

Grant Thomas is offering criticism on St Kilda’s game plan under Ross Lyon. Oh, hang on, that’s not funny. That’s just fucking offensive.

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If I didn’t get depressed enough about cheating in cycling, along comes the latest dastardly trick: Moping. I shit you not, they can now make tiny, undetectable electric motors to secrete on the bikes, to push out just that few extra watts up the hills. I got nuthin’.

There are knowns, and unknowns. There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns - the things we know we don’t know, and the things we don’t know we don’t know. Such is footy tipping in the 21st century, thank you very much Fremantle. I would like to blame the ABC’s Gerard Whateley for what has transpired this season, but I’m afraid I can’t; while it was his advice that never tipping the Dockers can help one attain a Zen-like calm, I chose to follow that advice, and I must live with that choice.

And now, Freo are eight and two, sharing top of the ladder with Geelong. I apologise.

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