In honour of Fremantle’s first win of the season (and costing me a perfect 8 in the footy tipping) here’s the 2o10 Revelation Gems cards for Stephen Hill and Hayden Ballantyne. They actually played really well, which is surprising and promising. Rookie Michael Barlow had a good game, with plenty of possessions and a couple goals. At this rate, he’ll be a shoe-in for the 2010 series 2 Fremantle Rookie Signature card.
This is the 2010 version of the Tazo. The cards themselves aren’t bad: nice and heavy with good shots front and back. There’s some kind of funky game coming out at their web site. Seems they have the same thing for the NRL. The AFL set has 5 per team with three players plus a team logo and gold mascot for a total of 80 for a complete set.
I picked these up last week for Jett’s collection. Same kind of arrangement as previous years: common set with stats and a Die Cut jersey set. Also features “Force 5 Signature” set of 5 per club, 2 green “Revelations” per team, a “Gem Diamond”, a “Mascot Gem” which is as silly as previous Mascots and a Rookie card.
I guess these are replacing their stickers. Shiny, heavy card, not bad. They come five to a pack along with a chain you’d find on a keychain. There’s also 2 Gold tags per team, randomly found in 1 in 4 packs. They’re cheap, so I bought a set. Not too sure that Stephen Hill deserves the “Excitement Machine” tag, though.
So we had a drive down the new freeway past Bunbury to Dunsborough over the weekend to visit my parents. Not a bad trip, and it was a little quicker than usual. We saved half an hour on the freeway, and managed to not stop on the way at MacDonalds which also saved time. We had planned on leaving on Friday around lunch time, but a spur of the moment thing after dinner saw us leave that night. I am normally a little apprehensive about driving down there at night, but the new road is a lot safer.
We did a few tourist things, and also watched Geelong win the Grand Final. I was backing St Kilda. It was so close for the whole game but Geelong managed to win by two goals. One came after the siren, and one goal they allowed was clearly hit the goal post and should have been a point. A bit of a heartbreak for St Kilda, but they’re well positioned for next year.
We also sold our house last week. Or rather we got an offer for the price we wanted so we accepted it. There’s a small chance it’ll fall through, but not likely. We’ll count our chickens when they hatch. We are looking to move to a suburb called South Yunderup which is near Mandurah, near where Pinjarra Road intersects the new freeway. Rentals down there are cheaper than up here, and now that the train and freeway extend down there it’s not like it’s too far out of town. I do still need to get to work after all.
So on our way back from Dunsborough, we stopped off at the sales office to see what’s left. There’s some decent blocks, and the display homes look nice and affordable too.
Stay tuned for more developments. Something else might come up. <le sigh>
So, Gary Ablett finally won the Brownlow. For my international friends who are not familiar with footy, the Brownlow Medal is the Australian Football League’s highest individual honour, given to the “Fairest and Best” player in the AFL each year. “Fairest and Best? Is it like an MVP?” I hear some of you ask. What it boils down to is the player who receives the most votes for being the Fairest and Best player in games during the Home and Away season wins. Pre-season and finals performances do not count. Any player who receives a suspension for misconduct or for breaking the rules is excluded. This has actually happened twice. In the late nineties, Corey McKernan poled the same number of votes as co-winners James Hird and Michael Voss but didn’t get a medal because of a suspension. The next year, the Bulldog’s Chris Grant was the outright winner but because of a one week suspension lost out to St Kilda’s Robert Harvey.
“Who votes on this?” you ask. Would you believe it’s the game umpires? Yes, those who officiate the game will, at the end of the game, get together and decide who they give 1, 2 or 3 votes to. Add these up over the Home and Away season and you get the Brownlow winner.
It’s these two factors which mean that it’s not necessarily the best or most valuable player who wins the Brownlow. Which is a shame, really, and sometimes there’s some real surprises. There’s different systems to determine which player is best in a given league. For example, the coaches in the National Basketball League cast votes for the best players in each game to determine the NBL MVP. As far as I understand, this is still the case. In the NBA, the award is decided by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada some of whom belong to cities with teams, and some without teams. I tend to think that this is a better method to find an MVP, really. The large group of sports writers are as close as you’ll come to a non-biased collection of objective experts. No, I don’t think Umpires are objective in determining performance, nor are they experts. Their job is to blow whistles. Coaches win games. A fan based system is just a popularity contest. No, sports writers are paid to analyse and report on games so I think they are best qualified.
But then again, the Brownlow isn’t the MVP. <shrug>
The Brownlow Medal presentation has to be the single most boring television broadcast ever. Some dude calls out the three votes from every game of every round. That’s more than 500 names and numbers. Riveting stuff. In recent years there’s been more and more emphasis on what the players and their wives and/or girlfriends wear to the ceremony. In 2004 Chris Judd’s girlfriend became a legend by wearing a revealing, but tasteful, red dress. Others have tried and failed since.
Village idiot Barry Hall finally realises that the football field is not the place for him and gracefully retires before he manages to somehow get himself a lifetime ban. How many times can one be banned for striking and not get a harsher penalty? He says his inability to prevent himself snapping on-field prompted his retirement from the Sydney Swans yesterday. Is he a child?
By the end of his 250-odd game career, Hall has been charged 15 times and has spent 24 games on the bench. That is 10% of your career watching your team mates try to pick up your slack because you’re an imature idiot. The latest incident, during his 250th career game in round 13, cost him a two-match ban for punching Adelaide’s Ben Rutten. But this is probably the highest profile incident in recent years which scored him a seven match ban.
So instead of being remembered as a fair to mediocre full forward, he’s going to be remembered as the psychopathic time bomb who could snap at any time. Good riddance. The game will be better off without your random assaults, Barry Hall.
And to be fair, that’s just what his fights are. They are assaults which would get anyone else landed in front of a jury. If I went and randomly belted someone in the street I’d get hauled off in the police wagon. Barry does it in front of 40 thousand witnesses, in front of the TV commentators, in front of the TV cameras and his employers give him a couple weeks off work.
