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Another grand final preview piece? Of course it is. What else do you expect this time of the week, this time of year, within these e-pages? Laurie Oakes going the growl? (Click to Tweet)
As we say in this crackerjack country: yeah-nah.
No, for the next couple days all you’ll read and hear and otherwise consume in your preferred sporting media will be variations on “players to watch” and “sets of six” and “top five repeat sets in the bin”, and all that jazz and gibber-jabber we do so enjoy jazzing and gibber-jabbering about.
More we talk about it, more we love it. Like anything. Look at red wine. Look at porn. Yap, yap, yap. And love the game we do. Love it like Paul Vautin loves a Christmas ham.
I write watching The Footy Show’s best tries and biggest hits and funniest bounce off the bonce, and it’s clear people who play rugby league can leap about and run like the buffalo, and do many splendid things.
There are circus performers and man-beasts and warrior princelings and athletic action men of God.
Yes, they do good fun physical stuff in Super Rugby and the NFL and Australian rules football and, who knows, European handball in Helsinki.
But only rugby league declares itself the greatest game of all, and believes it. And if you believe something, that’s your reality. And good luck to you.
And here we are, facing a reality that Cronulla Sharks, premiership-less for 50 years, are on the verge of lifting the Provan-Summons Shield. And that would be splendid.
Because Harold Holt.
Because what a cool and very Australian thing that we’d use the disappearance and presumed drowning of a serving prime minister as a punchline for a footy club’s failure to win a premiership.
Hard to see Americans having a reference to JFK because the Dallas Cowboys hadn’t won the western conference, or whatever they play in. That would probably not happen.
Anyway. Sharks to win! You’d hope. Because of Harold and Jimmy Maloney and a few of them down there in the Shire, not least of which is their very funny fans, who for decades have known a fatalism quite like the Barmy Army’s, the mob of mad Poms who’d follow their rubbish cricket team around the world and sing songs of their shitness.
I was down there at Shark Park once, on the hill, and Ben Pomeroy dropped the ball a couple of times and everyone laughed. No-one even cared. They laughed, like it was their lot. Like Pomeroy was theirs. That they owned his shitness.
They’re still laughing today, Sharks fans, but it’s because their boys can play. And I like plenty of ‘em. Val Holmes, for instance, what a runner. Luke Lewis, the veteran and hard-man – just a footy player.
And Benny Barba can bounce about the field like the demon spawn of Matthew Bowen and Zebedee the spring from the trippy French kid’s show the Magic Roundabout.
But the rest of ‘em… I dunno. I can’t come to the Sharks.
Because Mick Ennis, for one. What a graceless little un-sport. How do you give it to those you’ve just beaten? What does it say about you that you’d celebrate a victory by celebrating the pain of the vanquished?
What’s that about? Your kid did that in the under-7s, you’d give him a clip.
Why would it be the first thing you think about when winning a qualifying final – one of the great wins in your club’s history – by putting it on the opposing fans?
It’s not the worst thing. And maybe people are over-sensitive. But I talked to Matt Scott the other week and he said “I don’t really go for that thing that guys act two different ways, on and off the field. In my opinion, if you’re a grub on the field you’re a grub off the field.”
He didn’t mention Ennis by name. But I’m with the Queensland bushie on that one. And old mate The Menace … y’know. Good luck to him. But he can piss off.
Paul Gallen? I dunno. The spinners and marketeer types wanted NSW fans to “do it for Gal” and turn up to the dead-rubber third Origin game, and 63,000 did turn up. But it wasn’t for Gal. It was for Origin. For mine Blues fans are as well shot of him.
Top player. Massive engine. Hard man. Couple years too long.
Andrew Fifita? The Sharks fan club have a song about the man that goes to the tune of “Tequila” by The Champs. You know the one – barmp-budda-bump-bum-bum-bar, barmp-bumpa-budda-budda-bar – Fifita!
And it’s a crackerjack bit of kit and I’ve sat among the Sharks faithful at sweet home Remondis and belted it out with them as they banged their bongos so hard they pierced the skin and celebrated by drinking beer from the base.
The Sharks fans are the best fun punters in the comp. And they of all people deserve their footy club to win the grand final.
But hard to like Fifita. The Kieran Loveridge thing was one thing. But being banned for a year from a junior footy comp for threatening a referee from the sideline, I mean, please. That’s rank. Yes, he copped a six-week NRL ban and a $30k fine. But it’s inexcusable.
Particularly given the moral and financial sanction dished out to Mitchell Pearce and James Roberts and any other pelican who did dumb shit on the drink. Those blokes harmed only themselves. Fifita threatened a junior referee.
Yet I still hope his team wins the grand final Sunday because Melbourne Storm are to rugby league as Big Blue is to chess: merciless, dead-eyed, stone killers.
Storm brutalise in defence, cynically manipulate referees’ reluctance to repeatedly penalise them, and suck any fun out of footy.
They’re really fit and really good, and only really attack in the other mobs’ 20. They don’t ad lib. They’re automatons. They booted out the Raiders. And they, too, can piss off.
No they can’t. They’re awesome, Storm. Best club in the comp. No argument. They should win.
But I still don’t like ‘em.
Who will win? No-one knows. I don’t know. You don’t know. Even Phil Gould doesn’t know.
And all your statistical dudes (Middo! Timmy Gore!), your ex-players (Wingy!) and your spruikers for the corporate bookmakers (Joel “Sugar” Caine, you are no Tom Waterhouse which is why the people can cop you though you sell the same venal lies), none of these people have any damned clue.
Which is but one reason we’ll watch.
Go the Sharks. Come home, Harold.