Been a whiiiiiile…. But I’m BACK.

I’m really sorry to all of you who’ve missed my weekly footy tips, but the job that pays me has to get done before the job that doesnt pay.

So I can’t write up my tips at work, and for the past few weeks lovely and I have been attending Thursday night Macrame Your Dream Home classes, so unfortunately for Sportsbet my Weekly Tips have gone the way of Mark Latham: pushed aside for a while, but bound to turn up like skidmarks on your lucky jocks anytime soon.

So, I’m back, and I want to think about sport, but there’s been so much important political wonking (that’s wonking with an “o”) to do that I hardly even know who’s on top of the ladder.

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Okay, sorry for the break, just had to go for a @wendy4senate. Give the latrine a wide berth for a good twenty minutes. Where was I? Fuck knows.

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I could give you a thousand words on Le Tour, but I do that every year, and while I know you just love it, it was a month ago now, and, well, Cadel didn’t make a dick of himself, Lance was unlucky to crash so often, and we all knew that Schleck fella would be awesome, but not quite awesome enough to beat that bastard Contador. So, no Tour for YOU!!

Continuing on my “not gonna shout about dat, neither” line, I have nothing to say about the surface at Docklands, or Andrew Lovett, or anything Jeff Kennett’s had to say about anything at all, and I am quite happy here in my parallel universe where Collingwood are most definitely not on top of the ladder, and are actually on the drip-feed of funds from the AFL due to their parlous financial state and nobody’s heard of Eddie. The AFL CEO is quite a reasonable and intelligent woman, too.

I am disappointed in the World Cup final, because Spain won. You all know my feelings about the Latin style of football: bunch of peacocks and cheats. I hate them.

You also know lovely co-editor’s feelings about sport of all kinds, ie nil. It was refreshing to discover that, despite being not at all confident about what game they were playing (“that’s a form of, um, football, right?”), what feelings she has about The World Game (yeah, fuck you, SBS, I’ll use it if I want) resonate with mine.

Once I’d told her that The Netherlands were playing Spain, she worked out that the blonde ones in orange were the Dutch, therefore the other ones must be the Spanish. The Dutch players look like they want to kill somebody on their way to kicking the living shit out of the ball, she said, which I guess is useful when men play these silly games; why do the Spanish ones all look like they’re about to burst into tears?

Reason four hundred million and something why I married her. Oh by the way, she wants me to point out that there is no way on God’s Earth that she would have allowed me to drag her out of bed to sit on the couch with me to watch the final at that, or indeed any hour; we were at the gym.

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There being an election campaign on, I must admit that I’m vomiting in my mouth a little less than usual regarding politicians showing up uninvited to footy matches. Gillard is a life-long Footscray girl (having escaped both Wales and South Australia, Altona must have seemed like Shangri La), and she showed actual human footy-fan joy at meeting the players after the Doggies’ win the other week. So much less diahorrea-inducing than Howard and Rudd’s lame attempts to fend off nausea while they tried to look semi-human.

You may have noticed that the rest of this Tribune is rather earnestly trying to impart some information to you regarding the election, and bemoaning the horse-race style of coverage it’s getting elsewhere. Well, bollocks to all that. I really do care about politics, but I have to concede that most people don’t. If we covered politics the way we cover sport, though, I think The People would be a lot more engaged. Here goes:

The ALP took a huge risk promoting Gillard to the captaincy, but Rudd just had to go; he always played like Bradman, for mine, bringing to mind the old joke “How many runs did The Don score for Australia? Sixty-eight, the rest he scored for himself.”

Gilly has more of a team approach, dragging up the bottom six or so to a level where they can really have an impact, except for the tragically out-of-form Garrett of course, and dragging just a few more games from the much-loved but soon-to-retire workhorse John Faulkner.

Penny Wong’s been quiet of late, but her effort, as a lesbian, in coming out against gay marriage threw the Opposition, the twitterati, and most everyone who’s ever heard of homosexuality into such a spin that she got away with a quick three goals before anyone knew which way was up and who was paying. It’s a shame she’s about to be de-registered for being a performance-enhanced robot. I like robots.

Stephen Smith and his amazing hair have been quiet during the campaign, but he’s the Foreign Minister and, well, we’d rather not remind the voters about foreigners right now, so he’s been benched for a while, and is going overseas to draft a few more Islanders for the Front Row.

The best tagger in the ALP line-up has to be Stephen Conroy, although his chief tactic, of calling everyone who disagrees with him a fan of child p_rn is starting to wear a little bit thin. Wayne Swan’s been doing a decent job at picking on the fat kid, but Hockey seems to brush it off quite well, which is to be expected from the guy who had to try to sell Workchoices.

Speaking of the Opposition, I’d love to give you a definitive form guide of their front bench, but their fucking website’s down, which The Australian will no doubt blame on the ABC, so I’m going from memory here.

The Art Of War says many extremely clever things about how to win, chief among them being confusing your enemy; Abbott’s certainly been doing that, however it’s kind of important not to confuse the fuck out of your own side as well. Luckily he’s got stable and able deputies like Julie Bishop.. oh, wait, sorry, like, um, Barnaby Joyce? Hang on, Bronwyn Bishop, no, Christopher Pyne, yes, Chris Pyne!!! Yay squeal clap clap clap, Chris Pyne is there to keep things normal!

Sloppy Joe Hockey’s been doing a more than adequate job, lumbering around the back line, brawling his way into the hard-ball-gets, but always ready to go forward and play blocking manoeuvres on opponents who look, on paper at least, a lot more nimble. But if he says “pay back the debt” or “reckless spending” one more time I think I’ll have to gut him like a fish.

My tip for the Final? This is going to be a tough one to call. The self-appointed umpires at The Australian would have us believe that every Gillard manoeuvre is offside and are pissed that the rest of us have any say in who forms a government, they think they should be installing Abbott in a brand new John Howard-shaped Parliament House without have to put up with any schtick from the great unwashed. But ever since he picked up an electric guitar I tend not to listen to Piers Ackerman.

The supposedly independent ABC commentary team are doing us all a disservice; terrified as they are of accusations of bias, they can’t and won’t analyse a single word said by anyone, so just present us with to-the-second “balanced” coverage of both sides. Lucky you’ve got us, hey?

Loath as I am to tip anything (remember my footy tips, folks), I have to say, without much confidence, that it’s gonna be Gilly and Swannie. Crazy Tone and Death-Stare Jules were looking dangerous for a while, but their constant change of jumper and a different game plan every three hours are going to mean that they’re bound to make an interchange blunder at a crucial point in the game. This combined with Gilly’s Plan B (not Moving Forward every fucking three seconds, just moving the ball and playing in position), will see the ALP scrape over by about nine seats.

But, anything can happen in this game. You kick the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get Steven Fielding.

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