REAL KULTCHA

I was watching a football game last weekend and in the middle of some verbal compost the dribbler was serving up, came this gem:  The More Things Change – The More They Stay The Same!  Eh?  What does that actually mean and how come some ex-Rugby League boofhead – who’s probably suffered far too many concussions – is actually able to think something so cerebral?  Obviously he has corona virus (CV)!

And speaking of CV (as we must) it’s just about wiped everything out to the point that, come the next edition of this newspaper, I could be reduced to reporting on the speed, time and distance taken by grasshoppers to transit my front lawn!  Both the men’s and women’s Oz Rules comps have been hit, the men for a couple of months and the women for the season.

In the latter there will be no more games and so there is no winner.  Given they still seem to held up as a token comp while the men play the pre-season knockout, I guess the AFL thinks that’s fine. I’d think the women are fuming.  First, because they want a longer season anyway and, Second, why couldn’t the final couple of games of their comp be postponed as the men’s has been?  I reckon Gill McLachlan is being burnt in effigy in several locations on a regular rotation.

It was interesting to listen and watch (as the dingbats seem to always get on the TV) some players give their thoughts on the postponement of the AFL men’s season and the fact they might have to take a pay cut!  It’s an extraordinary situation and they’ve obviously been caught off guard by developments.  Some of the comments made clearly showed that many egos were being belted and they couldn’t understand how it came to this. 

I recall reading a book on the Melbourne Olympics and the bid centred of course, on the MCG being the main venue.  That was fine until the VFL (as it was in those days) suddenly realised that their main field was going to be confiscated by the Olympics!  Boy, did they hit the ceiling!  Oz Rules (in Melbourne, of course) IS obviously more important than anything else and the Olympics can just go somewhere else!  Saner heads prevailed (as I recall, it did take an act of the Victorian Parliament to secure the ground) and the Olympics went ahead as scheduled but I think there are some folk down there who have never forgotten or forgiven that slight.

Rugby League is still on (at least when I wrote this, it was) but anything could happen.  The Auckland  Warriors  have set up shop on the Gold Coast because otherwise, they couldn’t travel back and forth across the ditch and nobody could fly over there.

It appears Peter V’landy has decided that teams within the Sydney area can commute to games by bus while a private commuter jet will get teams to away games in Victoria and Queensland.  Of course, there were no spectators allowed at last weekends games and it was interesting to be able to hear the players shouting instructions between each other as the game went on as that talk is usually drowned out by the crowd noise.  It was also interesting to hear one player sledging Cam Smith (“Hey Cam, your boot laces are undone!”) as he lined up a goal kick.

I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better and therein lies the conundrum:  who do you believe?  President Trump (he with the orange possum on his head) has been caught out badly telling fibs (which seems to be his default setting, anyway) and even as he tried to give a reassuring speech to the nation a week or so ago, the bottom fell out of the New York Stock Market as he spoke!!!

The Chinese say no new cases have been reported but as they denied it even existed at the start and hounded the whistle blower who first identified it for “spreading false rumours”, you’ve got to wonder if they’re still telling porkies!  The whistleblower then caught the CV and died.

Italy is in more trouble than Speed Gordon (look it up) and Spain wasn’t far behind.  The secret seems to be isolation and that’s what we as a country are trying to do.  It’s going to take a few months but we need to hang in there and look after each other.

And what about the Tokyo Olympics?  They’ve been cancelled.  Sadly, the Olympic movement has gone berserk and it’s now a matter of pride that each Olympiad is seen as an opportunity by the host to out shine all those who have gone before.  Huge stadia that are destined to be white elephants forever and corruption seem to be the norm in recent stagings.  Tokyo budgeted for a cost of $US7.3 billion but the auditors estimated it would cost at least $US28 billion!  That’s a 400% cost over run!

I can see the Olympics becoming too expensive to run and they could die again as they did in the 4th century AD.  It’s going to take more than a Baron Pierre de Coubertin to rescue The Olympics from the mess they’re now in!

Talk at you next month. Be well!

The Hillside Critic 

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