I’ve no interest in Melbourne Football Club, other than as the brunt of standard jokes; you know the ones about Range Rovers, thermoses, tartan rugs and missing most games because the ski-fields beckon. Apparently their supporters are all people for whom the seasons are verbs (as in “where will you Summer this year?”).

For all the perceived wealth of their supporters, for all the donations from Diamond Joe and all the Demons bumper stickers on all the $100k cars around town, they have been, for the course of my football-following life, pretty ordinary. They made the GF in 2000, only to be belted by Essendon, but since (and before) they did very little.

They’re a Foundation club, they’ll never be merged or closed down, their links to the MCG and the MCC will keep them afloat, and they will, as a result, always be there, making up the numbers and more often than not being crossed off the other teams’ yearly strategy meetings as practice runs.

So why am I devoting, to this point, a hundred and seventy five words to this badly-performing outfit? Because I can. Because I remember Robbie Flower, who used to have a sports shop at the old Forest Hills Shopping Centre. Because I remember when Jacko played for them, and Grinter, and because Jim Stynes, a gentle giant who held the record for playing the most consecutive games and is the kind of guy we should be holding up as a role model to our youngsters, has cancer.

He appeared at the club Best And Fairest last night, bald and thin thanks to two weeks of radiotherapy, joking about the nude nut and promising that the club had finally bottomed out. Putting aside the hell that he and his family are going through, he concentrated on The Club, calling the night a celebration, in that Melbourne had been refinanced and restructured, and was looking nowhere but forward, much as he is.

Having copped consecutive wooden spoons, the Dees have priority picks coming out of their arse, and are also beneficiaries of some very generous philanthropy (if donating money to a club that is part of a billion dollar enterprise can be called philanthropy), and look set to do some rebuilding. And that’s actual rebuilding: invigorating the football department, injecting fresh young talent in rookies and draft picks, clearing out dead wood on and off the field, and having a three-to-five year plan of making the eight and staying there for a few seasons from 2013 on.

If effort and guts and quality as a human count for anything, Jimmy Stynes will be there to see it. Unfortunately, cancer doesn’t care about any of that shit, so we can only hope.

If there were more Stynes and fewer Fevs out there playing this great game of ours, we truly would own the world. Slaintche, Jimmy.

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Every Cup Carnival I gob off about all the orange schlappers in the celebrity marquees, and the bogans who put on cheap suits or last year’s Brownlow dress knock-offs from Katies then get shitfaced and shag on the public lawn, then vomit on the train home, only to show up at my local, screaming into their mobiles.

This year, The Meeja being our Issue, I want to take a slightly different slant. Of course, it’s related, because the TV coverage of the Carnival encourages all of the above, and I’ve Had Enough. Herewith my letter of complaint:

Dear Channel 18-39 demographic whores,

It may surprise you to know that the Cup Carnival is about Horse Racing. The Melbourne Cup itself is an anachronism within racing, being a two-mile handicap, however this time of year affords us simply the best gallops the country has to offer, hence the Carnival. This is the time of year, and the city, to which the best trainers in the country, and increasingly the world, aim to have their horses set. Untold millions of dollars are spent by owners on horses bred purely for the Melbourne Spring Carnival. The Carnival is not “all about the fashion and the glamour”, it’s about the frakking horses.

You and the racing clubs have made it impossible for a half-way serious punter to actually go to any of the feature days anymore, thanks to the relentless emphasis on partying (ie drinking til you vomit) and fashion, so most of us are restricted to watching your loathsome coverage.

Now I know you have advertising to sell, and that your audience is made of the general public and not the chain-smoking blokes in tracksuits who seem to live at my local TAB. I don’t expect non-stop racing coverage and totes and urgent messages about a rider change on the Gold Coast. But I do expect something more than what you’ve given us for as long as I can remember.

When I’m watching a day of racing, I want to know about the horses. I want to hear from the bookies, and the trainers, and the owners, and the serious punters, and the experts. I don’t want to hear some orange-skinned, fluorescent-toothed 19 year old starlet from Neighbours squawking about her shoes. I don’t want to see endless montages of celebrity parasites roaming around the top-line marquees drinking for free and air-kissing. I don’t give a fuck what Carson Kressley or whatever other B-list septic you’ve flown over has to say about what Sandra Sully’s wearing this year.

I Want. To Watch. The Races.

Can I say it again, from the cheap seats: The Spring Carnival is not All About The Glamour. It is not all about cross-promotion, it is not all about clothes. The Spring Carnival is about horse racing, and watching Lillian Frank toddle about wearing everything she owns all at once.

Yours,

Grumpy Fucker,

East St Kilda.

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So Cricket Australia held its AGM last week, and oh goody fucking gumdrops, Andrew Hilditch got another two years as Chairman of Selectors. Yep, the bloke who bears as much, if not more of the blame for The Ashes loss than Punter, is there for another two years of misreading pitches, making excuses, and treating spin bowlers like shit.

One other thing to come out of the AGM was research into the appalling state of slow bowling in this country. Before Warnie we didn’t have much, but since, well shit, we’ve had even less. Stu MacGill was good on his day, despite his tendency to spend half the day bowling gimmes, but he retired in June last year, and what have the selectors and CA done?

They had a revolving door policy of FIVE spinners after he retired, giving them one game then moving on to the next. How is any cricketer, batsman or bowler, supposed to show what he’s got in one match? It’s no wonder slow bowlers aren’t getting much of a run at Test level when you remember that First Class is so bereft of spinners that Nathan Hauritz was plucked from Grade cricket to play in Adelaide last year.

There are good spin bowlers out there, and it’s an indictment on Hilditch and CA that none of them are allowed the time to settle in and prove themselves. It’s apparently only just become evident to them that giving a bloke one game on a bad pitch, then dropping him for another spinner, then another, then another, is unsettling to the individuals concerned and the team.

When you consider how many times they picked Symonds, allowing him time to bat himself him and build a bit of form? Are they fuckwits or what?

* *

A few quick thoughts:

What news from our bid to host the World Cup? Anyone? Bueller? Oh, this just in, thanks Tony: billionaire flies all over the world at taxpayers’ expense to funnel taxpayers’ cash into the pockets of venal and smirking FIFA delegates, while convincing Federal and State governments to build more stadia with taxpayers’ money to support the growth of his league.

* *

A couple of interesting moves at Draft Week a while back. North pronounced Gibson persona non grata after he failed to exhibit the necessary Shinboner spirit and desperate desire to be a part of the club. Makes me wonder what’s going to happen with Luke Ball – he wanted to go to Collingwood but the deal fell through; does he begrudgingly stay, put himself in the pre-season, or will he be bagged and tagged, Gibson style?

* *

Despite my yell TV racing coverage above, I just can’t help myself when it comes to handing out advice every Spring Carnival. Here are a few do’s and don’ts, well, mostly don’ts, for the young ladies.

That dress Rebecca Twigley wore to the Brownlow a few years back? The copies of it you get from your local polyester knock-off emporium at Northland would not look any good on The Twig herself, and please keep in mind that she is an unnaturally thin and (despite this) beautiful woman. You are not. Wear something that shows off whatever assets you have, not something that accentuates your vapidity (and your gut).

Vomiting in your hat on the train is not nice.

If, through the drunken haze, you meet a guy you like the look of, fucking him on the public lawn at Flemington or Caulfield while people spill beer on you and film it with their mobile phones is not nice either.

WEAR your fucking shoes, don’t carry them over your shoulder like a brace of hare.

Once you leave the races, Do not tumble, with all your shrieking girlfriends, into a quiet pub somewhere along the way screaming into your mobile and knocking everybody else’s drinks over and poking innocent bystanders in the eye with your fucking fascinator. SHUT THE FUCK UP. GO THE FUCK HOME.

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