AGB Footy

SLIGHT OF HAND

Commentators who use gratuitous Americanisms burn me up. My pet hate is "the dish", which derives from a basketball hand-off* and which has no actual parallel in Australian Rules, but there are plenty of others clumsily shoe-horned into the commentary. Most of them, it seems to me, are used primarily to show the listener what a hip and savy pundit the speaker happens to be. Of course, Dwayne "kicking from the paint" Russell is the worst. Russell is one of those commentators who assumes the commentary is all about HIM and his pre-prepared second-hand one-liners, rather than the oh-so-insignificant game. So excuse me for jeering when he uses yet another silly simile and gets it wrong; just as he did in yesterday's Pinks / Dogs game. I paraphrase ...

"It's as if he has full house, and they only have four of a kind.

* "Dish" the ball in Aussie Rules, in other words, just hand it to your team-mate in the same way a waiter places a plate on your table, and the umpire will blow a throw quicker than Andrew Maher can say "Welcome, great man".

THUMPIRE

Ump-Ire? No matter. The point is, there's nowhere near enough of this kind of high class entertainment.

Umpire hits heckler

A VETERAN umpire who sprinted off the ground to hit a heckler is at the centre of an amateur football investigation.

VAFA umpire Anthony Damen was in control of a D2 division game between Old Geelong and Salesian on Saturday when he became enraged by a spectator. The game, at Como Park, South Yarra, was thrown into disarray when he left the field and flattened the person raising his ire.

YELLOW AND CRACK

"Every once in a long while, he actually shuts his cakehole, but basically he is insane," writes Barry Dickens about one of the better Richmond supporters. "I dreamt he was dead."

Collingwood supporters cop the most criticism, and not without reason. I know one Magpie imbecile who has Fish n Chips tattooed on his forehead. But although he's mad, he's harmless, and the whole Collingwood thing overplayed. For me, it's the Richmond supporters that are the worst; the most feral. It's just that they've been rat-shit for 25 years and people have forgotten how bad they were back then. I haven't; it's etched in my synapses. Tiger fans were unbearable then and they will be again this year. Heaven help us if they manage to win a premiership. Christ, what an appalling thought! So here's hoping there's a drug bust at Punt Road, or a sex scandal. Something, ANYTHING, to derail their year - Toey Tigers Tell: "No Means Yes". That's the ticket.

Anyhoo, Dickens doesn't pull any punches. "I hate him, and his sons," he goes on to write. "I loathed him" and "he is worse than cancer."

Barry's on the right track here, but surely he needn't have shown such restraint and should have got properly stuck in. Given it both barrels, as it were.

PS: What is wrong with this paragraph?

"We saw Matthew Richardson take a fantastic mark just before he went to the toilet again, and my son yelled out, though only I could hear his happy cry of joy, "Good on you, Matthew!"

SUFFER IN YOUR DOCKS!

BALLS to Port Adelaide!

Power to keep score of tribunal

Port Adelaide is compiling a dossier of tribunal cases to present as a challenge to the AFL's new tribunal system. The two-match penalty handed out to Melbourne's Brad Miller compared with the six matches incurred by Byron Pickett pre-season will feature prominently in the presentation.

"I wonder how Port Adelaide are feeling," gaawwped Mike Sheehan during On The Couch. What? Can Sheehan really think the Miller/McGregor and Pickett/Begley incidents comparable? The blockhead. And he wasn't the only one. Many of the so-called pundits were even-more-than-usually unable to judge this incident on it's merits. Because Byron Pickett's lining up of James Begley from around 20 metres away was, by a very large margin, a more serious transgression that Brad Miller's clumsy bump on Ken McGregor.

Meet Grave Danger.

LEGAL EAGLES

Me used ... [gulp] ... saarrrrcasm: well that's alright, then. Sor'id.

Drug dealer gives Eagles all clear

WEST Australian underworld figure John Kizon last night declared he was not mates with West Coast leaders Ben Cousins and Michael Gardiner.

"I know both of them, but they never ring me, I don't ring them," Kizon said.