It’s November, so time for my annual shout about the races. Membership of the VRC used to be exclusive, almost on a par with MCC membership. There were great advantages to being a member, and not just for the nice stands, better-dressed bookies, and the ability to avoid the oiks in General Admission. A VRC member’s medallion carried a cachet, and allowed one to interact, occasionally, with movers and shakers.

Of course, there were downsides to it. Such as the dress code, which put a serious punter such as I was Back In The Day, at a disadvantage when it came to running between bookies for the best odds. The Young Members, who all looked and acted disturbingly like the spoilt rich kids I went to school with – moleskins, RM Williams and an arrogance that cannot be learned, but only comes from breeding. These disadvantages were well worth the price, however.

Then, a few years ago, the VRC decided to raise cash for some much-needed renovations and new stands, so they opened the membership to almost anyone, particularly young members. It was then that the Spring Carnival stopped being about a great day at the races with more atmosphere and a couple of fashion parades, and became an all-you-can-drink-and-fuck bogan-fest. Being a Young Member was no longer about proudly displaying one’s heritage as part of the Western Districts Squattocracy, it was more about how much Crown Lager and Yellow one could spill over one’s fellow members. Several friends of mine resigned their memberships both in protest and disgust, and I, after one awful Derby Day dodging the terracotta army of scrubbers in $90 Katies polyester sacks and their white-shoed boyfriends with hair set to Full AFL, decided Never Again.

The races, in particular the Spring Carnival, have simply become uninhabitable for anyone without access to a marquee.

And of course there’s the aftermath of each day’s racing, where quiet local pubs are descended upon by the afore-mentioned terracotta army, shoeless, legless, honking into mobile phones, and sadly deluded that we give a flying fuck that they’ve been at the races and their feet hurt and they want more bubbles.

Such a shame that the workload of police, ambos, hospitals and taxi drivers increases so much in early November thanks to the racing industry’s desperate grab for cash at the expense of a bit of class. A once-magnificent carnival has become a sick parody of itself; no, the Spring Carnival was never about the serious punters, but the horses used to at least matter a bit. Now they’re reduced to a bunch of names for a couple of dumb fucks revelling in their two months of “fame” starring on Neighbours or Home and Away or whatever “reality” TV abomination has recently issued forth from Satan’s ring-piece to befoul our lounge rooms, to shout at each other in between rattling off designer labels they’d never heard of before being told they had to wear if they wanted a marquee ticket.

And, breathe.

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In keeping with my theme of annual shouts, I just downloaded the 2011 AFL fixture. If you want a laugh, or to be mildly disgusted, you can download it from the AFL’s website. You can also read the AFL’s not at all biased or self-serving apologies for what a disgrace it is. A disgrace, you ask? Pray tell how, Juzzy…

Pray tell, indeed. First the obvious, and no doubt you’ve already heard: Collingwood only have to travel four times for the whole year, and not at all in the first half. They play eighteen games in Melbourne, the majority at their home ground, the MCG. The AFL puts this down to “a quirk in the draw”. I put it down to, well, you know what I put it down to.

I put it down to the same reasoning that gives North Melbourne a grand total of eight games on free-to-air for the entire season, six of them day games (so on at least an hour delay), and the only one a chance of being shown live their Round 20 clash with Hawthorn in Tasmania. It’s Round 19 before they get a Friday night game on FTA, against Carlton.

It’s the same reasoning that, of course, gives Collingwood sixteen games shown on FTA, 9 of them at night. One of the day games is, of course, the ANZAC day once-was-blockbuster, and I haven’t included Round 24 against Geelong which of course will end up being yet another AFL-hyped bonanza. The result of all the fixturing largesse bestowed upon Collingwood is the same as it is every year: the Collingwood factor increases ratings, which increases income for the networks and therefore the AFL itself. The value of putting your name on the back of a Collingwood jumper increases, due to the extra FTA exposure, so Collingwood are able to ask for more and more money from their sponsors, while clubs like North Melbourne continue to be treated as lepers and outcasts, playing in front of ever-decreasing crowds. Appearing mostly on Sunday afternoons on Fox, and begging for crumbs at the grown-ups’ tables since big companies like Mazda deserted them years ago.

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Happy happy joy joy, ruggers, the Wallabies broke a two-year, ten-game losing streak against the evil stinking arsehole bastard lowlife All Blacks, but thanks to (I can’t be bothered typing out all the evil stinking arsehole etc stuff with an “even more” tacked on the front) Channel 7, the game wasn’t shown until half past three in the fucking morning, which is the best way I’ve seen yet of a network saying “fuck you” to its viewers, and “we don’t give a shit about this sport, we’re just riding the anti-siphoning gravy train and thanks very much dumb fuck Communications Ministers of the past twenty years”.

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You’ve all heard about James Packer buying into Channel Ten, right. Big deal, giant stoopid bloke throws $280 million around, right? Think again. Packer and his buddy Lachlan Murdoch have been offered seats on the Ten board, which could mean some very nasty shit for the long-suffering sports fan who doesn’t have $70 a month to blow on Fox Sports.

You see, Murdoch and Packer own Fox Sports. Channel Ten currently has One HD, which runs sport and nothing but. There are less-kind souls than I out there positing that perhaps this dynamic duo of princelings, once safely installed on the Ten board, will move to stop showing sports altogether on OneHD, in order to starve us all over to Fox. A gamble well worth a lazy couple of hundred mill. Maybe they won’t be able to, you say, because ACMA or someone will stop them? Yeah. Uh-huh. Regulators in Australia and elsewhere have always been able to stop Packer and Murdoch doing exactly whatever the fuck they want….

Lots of people who appear to have a personal interest in not pissing off the Princes are trying to say that, no, Jamie’s just making a smart investment, Ten is very good value at the moment and this has nothing to do with him and Murdoch wanting to create a monopoly what a terrible thing to say about these inspirational young men. I call bullshit.

Anti-siphoning came in in 1994, when pay TV first appeared. It guaranteed Free To Air coverage for AFL, the Ashes, the Australian Open and various other significant sporting events. Of course, TV and media in general has changed a lot in sixteen years, and while only twenty-something percent of us have cable TV, vast numbers of us have digital TVs or at least set-top boxes, indeed the government’s phasing out the analog signal altogether in a few years. So it’s something of an anachronism that Ten is barred from showing any football on OneHD. If they were allowed to, it would give NSW and Queensland viewers the opportunity to see AFL games before midnight, and it’s a good bet that this rule will be relaxed, for exactly that reason.

Of course Packer and Murdoch as Ten board members will be able to both argue against that, and decommission OneHD at the same time, doing everything within their considerable power to reposition themselves and the evil bastard Fox empire as the only option for sports fans.

Let’s hope Communications Minister Stephen Conroy stands up to the Young Princes as strongly as he has in defence of his stupid, pointless internet filter.

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