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And so to Brookvale Oval on a chilly Thursday evening, the prince of evenings.
Just what you want to do on a Thursday evening is sit on Brookie Hill with a plastic cup of over-priced pale ale while your team, denuded of its two best players by the great State of Origin succubus, takes on North Queensland Cowboys, a team that draws fewer people than the horrible racist hottie who’s coming to Australia though the Poms wouldn’t let her in.
And… breathe.
And to coin a phrase from Matthew Johns whom I clocked near dinner time in Allambie Heights charcoal chicken shop, it was a bludger of an evening.
And my heart was truly out for those poor saps who actually attended the fixture, unlike myself who sat on a couch in my jimmy-jams and ate half a pack of Chocolate Montes, as the good Lord Mr Lillee intended.
Yes! Brookie, and the Manly-Cowboys game, and there was just something… how’s that saying go? Something mmm-yeah about it.
It was a very ‘Origin round’ fixture. It was cold. It was beige. It was a match more forgettable than a dud Joe Root.
Though it was sexy in parts.
Jorge Taufua ripped off one of those hits you’d see in the streets of Pamplona during ‘The Running of the Bulls’ when some poor skinny Norwegian backpacker is pole-axed by a couple tonne of confused and angry bovine hit-beast.
That Justin O’Neill was able to hop straight up like a startled cat is a tribute to… something, I don’t know. Something.
But up O’Neill hopped and scurried away as Taufua went for a head inspection he would fail.
Fifteen minutes in and the No.15, Jack Gosiewski, the one-time Mullumbimby Giant, threw himself at Johnathan Thurston and belted the champion flush in the back.
It was late, it was a shoulder charge, and Thurston fell immediately down is if harpooned.
North Queensland won the penalty and took the two points. But it was a bludger of a hit.
Braith Anasta said he didn’t like it, yet didn’t think old mate should get minutes in the Sin Bin because rugby league’s “gone crazy” on the Sin Bin.
Maybe he’s right.
The Cowboys’ JT. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)
Perhaps Thurston needed to be badly injured for bin action. Perhaps his whiplashed head needed to rattle his brain, and for him to go off on the Whatsit Cab.
Regardless our Jack of Mullumbimby is looking at a week or two, probably two, for the cheap, late and ordinary action he laid upon the ornament.
Raiders big wig Rodney Soliola ripped one off on Billy Slater last year, which was late and high and people wondered aloud what a man had to do to be sent off. Answer: punch someone, as Curtis Scott showed the other week.
Yet shoulder-charging someone while they’re not looking is bad. And, it seems, earns a man a penalty and a report and time on the telly, and you’d suggest two to three weeks not playing for Blacktown Workers.
Worker-bee second-rower Shaun Lane bopped about off several Cowboys who looked to lock him up rather than, you know, tackle him, with Shaun Fensom – who would make 439,000 tackles each season and miss perhaps three – missed Lane, as the rangy second-row scored his softest try since dominating for the South Eastern Seagulls.
The Cows came back through rampaging thunder man Jason Taumalolo who caught a ricocheting pinball and stepped through untouched. Soon enough Thurston bombed, Matt Wright bombed the catch, and the Cows bombed in. Taumalolo thundered, drew them in. He would make 237m, a motherlode.
From the play-the-ball, super footy – Thurston, great hands, a run-around, Coote, quick hands and Antonio Winterstein was in the corner.
Commentators debated semantics before we went to the board and had a decision – Try. They’ve called it back for worse. Probably should’ve, according to the, you know, consistent application of the rules.
And the small crowd… didn’t appear to care, their season cooked like cold squib soup, whatever a squib is, the internet says… well there you go: “A small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding” or “a short piece of satirical writing”.
Top stuff.
Back into the footy and great behemoth hob-goblin that is State of Origin continued to rumble like a brewing Hawaii volcano about to shoot forth lava bombs, a thing.
Origin was like the sub-text to the entire evening of entertainment – yes, this is NRL footy. But it’s lesser. For Origin’s coming. And it’s a mighty beast.
The Cows came again, with guns. Te Maire Martin sluiced through, drew the fullback and was hit, stopped, his pass to Thurston floating forward because the optics were an illusion.
And you wanted to grab Ben Cummins and explain the fable about throwing an apple out backwards from the window of a car speeding along the Nullarbor, and instantly stopping, and watching the apple rolling past you.
The apple has not gone forward. But there it is, rolling by, forwards.
Same with Martin’s pass. And Cummins should know that. Indeed he does know that. But like many if not all the refs he’s gun-shy about being criticised and will err on the side of defence, which is consistent, and which is more important in rugby league than the game being refereed to the rules.
Fact.
Manly? Daly Cherry-Evans is being paid a rather large, if not unhealthy, million dollar chunk of Manly’s annual salary cap and doesn’t appear to have the popularity – nor be that good a player – for his peers to think, well, he’s worth it.
Daly Cherry-Evans (AAP Image/Julian Smith)
Cherry-Evans brought little. His kicks were safe without threatening. They were percentage plays when behind on points. He barely ran. He didn’t force a drop-out all game.
Granted you can’t make a critical assessment sitting on the couch in Allambie Heights scoffing Chocolate Montes, and gloating that you’re not among the poor mugs freezing their bollocks off on Brookie Hill.
But you can.
And you talk to enough locals, blokes at golf who know blokes, who know blokes, and clock the players’ body language week after week after wretched freakin’ week, and it’s clear – this is not a happy team at Hawthorn.
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They’re trying. They’re pro footy players.
But it doesn’t look like they’re really into each other.
Could be wrong. Maybe they’re tighter than the victorious Bad News Bears, coached by Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), a former minor-league baseball player and an alcoholic who cleans swimming pools for a living.
But it doesn’t look like they are.
And it’s not stretching a mighty articulated bow to breaking point that there might be a little bitterness among the troops that they’re all losing together but one guy’s getting most of the coin, and not doing much to earn it.
And the Cowboys won 26-12.
Pass the Montes.