n September last year, the mayor of Perth floated the idea of a minute’s ovation for those penned in their houses on the other side of the country. It was a nice enough thought, but it went down like a lead balloon. Melburnians, in particular, were in no mood for stunts like that. The city was at breaking point. At the Shrine of Remembrance, protesters pelted police with golf balls. A few hundred metres from the MCG, newspaper photographers were capsicum sprayed. A magnitude 5.
Only former champions and border hoppers got to see it in the flesh. It cost Garry Lyon two weeks of hard quarantine. It cost the other two blokes their liberty. They could count themselves a little stiff. The selfies didn’t help. The judge was pitiless. But sympathy for the pair was scant. They presented as two men who’d been handed some pretty good cards in life, apart from a competent football team. They were gifted half an hour of almost perfect football, and a summer in the slammer.
Last year, life could flip in half an hour. You were one interstate furniture removalist away from crowd-less games, from closed borders and from curfews. Suddenly your team was on the tarmac, and you were on Twitter bickering with 13-year-old Tories and retired social studies teachers. This year, theis pushing the “business as usual” angle. But there’s still an underlying anxiety. Covid has decimated the AFLW season. Most of the clubs are still living on a thin line.
It’s nearly 30 years since Warne played his first Test at the MCG. At the toss, the West Indian captain looked up at the new Great Southern Stand and marvelled that the ground held more people than the population of his country. At the time, I thought Keith Arthurton was the coolest man on the planet. He swaggered to the crease like Dermott Brereton walking into a nightclub. In the first innings, he clobbered Warne from one corner of the MCG to the other.
here are my naked photos