Archive for October, 2007
The fault, dear brutus, is not in our stars…
October 31, 2007 11:42 pmBy Oceanboy
When you get a player saying its either “Willie Mason or Malcolm Noad” then that says it all.
Mason you’re wanker.
Mason wants to fight in a professional bout early next season. He’s asked the club for time off next season in order to prepare for the fight. Willie says it’s a charity thing but this is bullshit its also a professional fight he stands to make significant money.
The last time I checked the guy is a professional footy player earning $450,000 a year with the Bulldogs. His obligations are with them not take time off work in order to do other work while still contracted to the Bulldogs.
Mason’s an employee of the Bulldogs therefore his first obligation is with Canterbury. He misses functions which are included as part of contract then screams when the club discusses a fine for not attending, that says it all. Its not $50,000 like he claims, a figure hasn’t even been mooted.
It’s not the first time Mason has missed club events so if it was $50,000 then it’s really not so hard to appreciate why. He didn’t even bother to ring the club to inform them that he would be missing the Grand Final lunch. Sponsors and paying attendees (mostly supporters) assumed he would be there because the club promoted it as such, what an embarrassing position for the club. Canterbury relied on him being there, this is partly why the club pays him so much money.
Canterbury Bankstown is not about you Mason. You wont be there in 10 years so threatening people with how the place should be run and who should be in control by saying its either my way or the highway…. well that’s an act of bastardary.
My hope is that they can sort this out. Mason’s a great player but if the guy doesn’t grow up and play fair then piss him off. Let him go to the Roosters or Newcastle, as I heard him say a few years ago if things didn’t work out at the Bulldogs then he’d like to finish his career at the Newcastle Knights anyway.
Personally, every player should look after themselves, I certainly do not have a problem with this, but Mason epitomises selfishness. He’s on a 450 thousand dollar contract excluding the added extras through sponsors and wants to treat his primary employers as a secondary consideration. It’s not like they haven’t done much to accommodate his needs and covered up pretty shoddy off field behaviour. They even allowed him to trail with the New York NFL team.
First meet your primary obligations with the Bulldogs. If you want to work at a second job do it around them if you can’t then bad luck!
It’s a simple case of respect. A concept I believe this wanker doesn’t understands.
Sports Video Of The Week
October 30, 2007 12:45 amFrom TheGrandstand
The “Fall Classic” is underway, so I thought a baseball video was in order.
Not too sure when this one is from, though it’s been a while since Jose Canseco played right field, infact since he has played at all.
A very unusual home run!
Enjoy 
The Times They Are a Changing
October 28, 2007 7:35 pmBy Punter
There is no doubt that our best players must go to England, Italy, Spain, Holland etc to learn the trade & it was these players that did so well in Germany last year. However, as Guus himself alluded to, after the first 13-14 players in the Socceroos squad, the standard fell away dramatically. As you know to win big tournaments you need good depth to cover injuries & suspensions etc.
This is what the A-League can provide, players that can step up if require onto the big stage.
The salary cap is an interesting proposition, with the A-League being in it’s infancy, the FFA had to tread carefully. Australia soccer as it was known, has a history failed clubs, failed competitions, riots & bad publicity.
The salary cap was there to keep an even balance competition, it would be hard to promote the game in the smaller cities & regional areas (remember it’s still in it’s infancy) if Sydney & Melbourne kept running away with the competition every year.
The another thing the cap is there is for the FFA to keep an eye on the clubs so they don’t overspend (ala SFC) & go bust in the formative years of this competition. The A-League are trying to sell the product to the sponsors & having NZ Knights fall down last year was not a good thing for the A-League.
The things to improve football in this country is long & time consuming & it will take time maybe even a generation.
BUT & a big BUT, 4 years ago a change in coaching position in a Australian club side (even the biggest club) would not have attracted more than 2 lines in the written media on the 8th page of the sports section.
The times they are a changing.
Is the Howard Government a Demetriou Hater?
October 27, 2007 6:55 amBy The Park
It seems that the Government is gunning for the AFL over it’s three strikes drug policy in the lead up to the election.
THE Federal Government plans to shame the AFL into abandoning its controversial three-strikes-you’re-out drugs policy, and has accused the league of undermining its tough anti-drugs campaign.
Federal Sports Minister George Brandis yesterday warned that community expectations and peer group pressure would see the AFL embrace the Government’s new drugs policy and impose immediate sanctions on players caught using illegal drugs.
But it has been suggested that this is part of an ongoing campaign against the AFL and its CEO, Vlad the Impaler, sorry, Andrew Demetriou, for a speech he gave on Australia Day in 2005.
The Howard Government does not like the AFL. It does not like its chief executive Andrew Demetriou. If Demetriou ever had friends on the conservative side of politics they disappeared two years ago in the wake of his Australia Day speech in which he raised the hot-button issues of Tampa, reconciliation and immigration in unflattering terms.
Demetriou has met federal ministers since and held amicable discussions. He has sat next to the prime minister at grand finals and six weeks ago flew to Canberra to chat to the treasurer Peter Costello, one of the principal critics of the AFL illicit drug policy this week. But following the Australia Day speech, political retribution was swift.
In mid-2004, John Howard announced a $116million initiative to tackle childhood obesity and publicly credited the AFL for its involvement in establishing after-school sports schemes. Shortly after Demetriou’s Australia Day address, the government excluded the AFL from the programs and decided to run a parallel initiative through the Australian Sports Commission.
It seems widely reported that the Christopher Pyne backs the NRL policy while not being radically different; one less strike, not the zero tolerance they are advocating. Is this just cheap political point scoring or do the government have a point regarding the many drug controversies that have surrounded the AFL over the last couple of years?
I find it astonishing the Federal Ministers would hold grudges like that against an organisation because of the views of its CEO. Will wedging the AFL in the lead up to an election make them look tough on drugs?
Political opportunism or bastardry? My guess is that Demetriou just made it easier for the AFL to be a target by outing himself as an unbeliever.
Something fishy about F1
October 23, 2007 5:46 amI don’t normally give a fig for Formula 1 or any motorsport for that matter but it’s not difficult to detect, even from my perch way out on the periphery of interest in the story that has unfolded over the last few months, that something very odd is going on here.
That McLaren morally deserve nothing from the season is clear given their disgusting deeds of espionage. But have they agreed to throw the driver’s title too, possibly in exchange for a lesser fine? With the myriad computer systems on board these cars-come-missiles, it strikes me as very strange that a team with info coming out of its ears could make such a profoundly basic error like letting their driver career on for 2 or 3 laps longer than was necessary with totally unsuitable tyres, as happened in China. That would be bad enough an error from such a ‘professional’ team.
But suspicions are further compounded with the events of yesterday. The mysterious loss and then re-engagement of a gear box for a spookily convenient thirty seconds that pushed Hamilton to the back of the field, but not out of things altogether. And then when he starts to look like getting back on terms, the inexplicable third pit-stop that baffled all the commentators, just took him that bit further back away from contention. One of these things would be a bad enough mistake to cause a serious inquest at McLaren. But when these things start to mount up to three or four, then you’ve got to start to wonder. They weren’t happening earlier in the season, they didn’t happen to Alonso, who guess what, also finished a tantalising one point off top spot.
We then get the whole business with the fuel. Either teams have cheated and are disqualified or they haven’t and they’re not. Yet the sport’s fans are now expected to swallow that they have but no they won’t be. The latest is that Hamilton has also now said that he would not accept winning the title through the disqualification of others. Why not, if he’s been denied points by other teams cheating? Where has the ruthless determination, the drive to be the youngest ever world champion disappeared to all of a sudden? This does make the sport look suddenly very noble again though.
Very little of this whirl of cock-ups and strange decisions look right to me. McLaren obviously has a lot to make up for and deserves nothing from the season. Hamilton may not have been complicit and it’s doubtful whether we’ll ever find out the truth of his possible involvement or otherwise in the whole tawdry spying affair. So it’s hard to be too sympathetic to him, hard also not to be. He obviously stood to make at least a potential gain from whatever information was pilfered from Ferrari (he may still do next season, of course), but then again there’s nothing to say that it hasn’t got him anywhere either.
The question arises as to whether F1 has realised that its very integrity had been shaken and come up with a sequence of events designed to keep it top of the sporting agenda, but which involves McLaren taking a dive, effectively in exchange for cash, so that the morally correct result for the season is arrived at.
It might surprise you after all this for me to claim that I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories and this is fanciful in the extreme, I realise. I am aware that I might be becoming more susceptible to them though. But you wouldn’t have bet much money on this absurd sequence of events unfolding as it has a couple of months ago. However, there can be no doubt that a very large amount of people will have bet on Hamilton in the interim and it might be an awful long time before they make their interest in F1 financial again. Given all the above, it would be difficult to blame them.
On the other hand, I could be talking bollocks (it has, let’s face it, been known) and the ICC merely has a new rival for mass incompetence and skullduggery.
