LOST (in the great soup bowl, again)

My fellow Big Leaguers,

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Yes, it’s been a long time between drinks, but my absence was necessary. You see, it was all part of an experiment into, among other things, the AFL and its changing media landscape, the possession of inanimate objects (beanies) by long-dead strangers, the effects of a diet consisting solely of Cooper’s pale ale and a variety of deli meats and a crazy island in the middle of nowhere with time travel and polar bears and smoke monsters and immortality and a really, really unsatisfactory cop-out ending that… Wait, what was I saying?

After 4 weeks in a sensory deprivation tank, Mrs Watson saw the writing on the wall, and with a gentle swing of a correctly weighted, measured and fitted fairway driver, he broke the glass labelled, “Break in case of Absurdity”. He began frantically filling me in on all that had been happening: the sex scandals, the drug scandals, the cross-code scandals… but I had to stop him. With a smug, Desmond-like smile a reassured him that, yes, brother, I know.

You see, the tank I was in, much like the island in “Lost”, was no ordinary saltwater stink pool. No, I was able to flash forward, backward, sideways and even into a realm where Richmond won a game… Wait, that actually happened?

Regardless, I have come back with a clear vision of the future and can now reveal to you what this scandalous period of AFL all means and how it all eventually unfolds. (And if doesn’t work out the way I say it does, then YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD AND THIS IS PURGATORY!!!)

Stay-in-the-closet-gate:
When Jason Akermanis used his barely read, or readable, Herald-Sun column to say that, guess what, the enlightened men of the AFL may not like having gay teammates, he was not doing this to “get the subject out in the open”, or to “start a dialogue between idealogically opposed sides” nor even to “lube up the backdoor of communication”. No, he was merely, as always, and metaphorically speaking you filthy queers, taking one for the team. With the Bulldogs’ on-field stink pouring right in through the premiership window, this was a clever diversion orchestrated right out of Whitten Oval to take the heat off the team: Rocket Eade didn’t give this article the green light, he wrote it himself! How Machiavellian of him! Keep your friends close and your enemies closer… Unless they happen to be gay… Then write a national newspaper column about how you wouldn’t want them on your team.

Pregnant-underage-girl-gate:
On the surface, this appeared to be pretty shifty; a couple of Saints players conduct a school football clinic, meet some underage chicks and faster than you can say “statutory rape”, a 17 year-old girl is pregnant and amazingly Stephen Milne is not involved.

That’s what it looks like.

And that looks pretty shifty.

But that’s only what it looks like, on the surface. What will eventually be revealed is a plot so sinister and deeply involved that it will make the Kennedy assassination look as complex as an episode of Scooby-fucking-do. Those girls were not chosen at random, or because they were the only schoolgirls in the area happy to play piggy-in-the-middle with the Saints half-back line, no, this is about systematic list building through future father-son draft selections: These weren’t auskick clinics, they were physical trials! In my day, footy clinics were about a bit of a run around, a bit of a laugh and the end they maybe gave you a free footy. Now, if you have no congenital defects and can run the 400 in under a minute you get inseminated! I know what you’re saying, ‘That’s all well and good, Captain, you magnificently handsome bastard, but how did they get the girls to go along with this?’ Well, I can answer that in two words; subliminal messaging. Did you know that if you play that atrocious “Saints Footy!” ad backwards it actually says, ‘youth stay pure, sleep with Sam Gilbert’? The Nazi’s used propaganda, the St Kilda FC uses cheap, off-peak television advertising. And I don’t want to blow any more minds here, but Nick Riewoldt looks awfully Aryan, doesn’t he?

Mick-Malthouse-calls-Stephen-Milne-a-fucking-rapist-gate:
Nothing to report there, it’s what we were all thinking.

Coke-gate:
Ok, so it was recently “revealed” that Michael Johnson was caught by police using cocaine… Wrong again! The Dockers, after years and years of futility, made a significant change to their management model this off-season by hiring Geelong’s leadership trainers, “Leading Teams”. And as part of their recommendations, and following in the Cats hard stance on Matthew Stokes, Fremantle and the WA police staged this entire incident purely to build team discipline and morale. It’s genius! It sends a strong message to the other players (who weren’t in on it), it galvanizes the team in the short-term without Johnson and it gives them a huge emotional lift when he eventually returns. Think about it, it has to be a plan. I mean, otherwise it just means that a massive amount of AFL players, including ones you would never suspect, are doing cocaine… Now who sounds crazy?

Over-the-hill-VFL-chump-becomes-star-gate:
Admit it; you thought the P.O.D. would be handy to have during Ottens’ annual injury holiday and Mooney’s suspensions… But none of you thought that he would actually turn out to be a Frankenstein-type monster brought to life in a lab buried in the bowels of Kardinia Park to roam the Cats forward line using the DNA of Kane Tenance, did you?