Touch of the Fumbles
Touch Of The Fumbles: Schadenfreude
First of all, I would like to issue a sincere apology to the Port Adelaide Football Club.
Touch of the Fumbles
First of all, I would like to issue a sincere apology to the Port Adelaide Football Club.
Touch of the Fumbles
While the Crows mop up after another inauspicious season, the Power are on the charge. Our Fumbles correspondent is still looking for a bright side – but he’s running out of ideas.
There was something quite symbolic about the final game of the final round of the AFL season, in which the Adelaide Football Club farewelled the past and ushered in the future in a spectacle that was sometimes dazzling, sometimes frustrating and at all times of precisely zero interest or relevance to almost everyone else.
It hasn’t been a good year: the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and the Crows are once again down the bottom of the ladder – albeit not quite bad enough to snare the best young SA talent of his generation. All this, though, our Fumbles correspondent can handle – but there’s one looming prospect he can’t abide.
It’s been a bruising few days that have prompted many to question their relationship with the Adelaide Football Club. As the song almost said: let’s talk about Tex.
As the broader AFL season explodes in off-field politics and COVID mayhem, the Adelaide Football Club appears doomed to see out the remaining rounds in a tedious spiral of inexorable mediocrity. Just in time for our second annual grudge match with the most annoying team in the world.
At long last, the Crows got a win. And in true Adelaide style, it was a victory that could yet do more harm than good.
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
I’ve never quite hated West Coast as much as I should.
Ok, before we get too caught up about who won the Showdown, remember that the important thing is that all the players had a fun time.
Touch of the Fumbles
It’s a bad week to be a Crows supporter, but fortunately our crosstown rivals are doing their utmost to cheer us up. At least, for now…
Touch of the Fumbles
It was a loss that captured the best and – typically – the worst of the Adelaide Football Club Experience, but our Fumbles correspondent is uncommonly upbeat. For he has seen The Future on a breezy field in Tasmania – and its name is Riley Thilthorpe.
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
The Crows were robbed, then capitulated – while Port gears up for a crack at a premiership that absolutely, positively, definitely won’t count. The AFL ladder proves it: 2020 really is the End Of Days.
Touch of the Fumbles
So, it turns out we’re not the worst team in 56 years after all.
Touch of the Fumbles
A one-off edition, for our one-off win – as the Crows finally sang the song for the first time this decade. Sometimes it’s the little things.
A few days ago a daily newspaper published its own open letter to AFL boss Gillon McLachlan to put the case for Adelaide Oval to host the 2020 AFL Grand Final. Well, allow our Fumbles correspondent to retort.
Touch of the Fumbles
After due consideration, I’m giving yesterday’s loss to Geelong – Adelaide’s 13th consecutive defeat for the year and 16th in succession – the highest compliment I can bestow on anything in 2020: it could have been worse.
Touch of the Fumbles
There was good news and bad news this week: as usual, the bad news centred on the perpetually-frustrating Crows, who excelled themselves with two losses in five days. But the good news? Welcome back, Port Adelaide circa 2019!
Touch of the Fumbles
Onfield malaise and off-field chaos: it’s fair to say 2019 didn’t quite pan out as our Fumbles correspondent had hoped, as we say a not-so-fond farewell to another wasted season.
So this is the way the season ends – not with a bang… but an utterly shiteful embarrassment of a home-ground capitulation, made only slightly less apocalyptic by Port Adelaide’s own subsequent annihilation. Good times.
Touch of the Fumbles
Editor’s note: Due to a technical breakdown, a significant portion of Adelaide Football Club senior coach Don Pyke’s post-match press conference after the Crows’ loss to West Coast last night never went to air. Here is a transcript of the lost broadcast.
Touch of the Fumbles
You can just see where this is heading, can’t you?
Let’s be honest, if you could distil the essence of a good weekend of AFL football in 2019, it would contain three basic ingredients: Adelaide winning, Port losing and Carlton consolidating their tenure at the bottom of the ladder.
So… who do we like in the draft at number two?
I think we can all accept that Adelaide should have lost on Saturday night.
In a week in which Adelaide’s selection decisions caused as much debate as the Crows’ lacklustre fadeout at home, our Fumbles correspondent wrestles with the prospect that Carlton’s consistent crappiness might be the only thing keeping our season’s prospects alive.
I can kind of empathise with the Labor Party after Saturday.
Touch of the Fumbles
There was much for our Fumbles correspondent to like, but a frenetic weekend of football was also tinged with heartbreak, as the Adelaide Football Club did more than just win a flag – it planted one, seizing the territory upon which a still-fledgling league can grow.
Are we having fun yet? Our Touch Of The Fumbles correspondent certainly isn’t – as he returns for a season he was sure would see the Crows fly and the Power fail… to find that things haven’t quite followed the script.
Touch of the Fumbles
In a final farewell to a less-than-stellar season from our Fumbles correspondent, we reveal exclusive, fly-on-the-wall details from a mid-season Adelaide Football Club crisis meeting.*
Touch of the Fumbles
Disappointingly, the Crows had a win yesterday, potentially derailing their 2018 strategy of chasing high draft picks. But our Fumbles correspondent is mightily consoled by the curious case of Port Adelaide, whose swift fall from flag fancy to flop has quickly become the season’s great feelgood story.
Touch of the Fumbles
It was the greatest finish to a Showdown ever. Except that it hadn’t finished yet. Yes, Robbie Gray, Steven Motlop and Co. combined to ruin what was shaping up to be a super Saturday, and your Fumbles correspondent seems to be taking things very hard.
High-flying marks, strange industrial-grey guernseys and another injury that may or may not rhyme with “jam spring”… As the Showdown looms, our Fumbles correspondent ponders whether the Crows might actually be building to something here – or merely marking time before more September sorrow.
Touch of the Fumbles
There’s something unreasonably satisfying about cultivating a newfound hatred for a team about which you were previously indifferent.
Touch of the Fumbles
Few gave the Crows any chance to win this one, least of all our Fumbles correspondent. But in the end, a narrow against-the-odds win on the road – led by a four-goal captain’s haul – felt like a little bit of history repeating. Much like yet another Port loss to Geelong.
Touch of the Fumbles
Having spent the entire season being despondent despite Adelaide’s sparkling form, our Fumbles correspondent is today perversely upbeat about the weekend’s loss to Sydney. For now, at least.
The Crows have sewn up a top two berth: the fabled Premiership primer of a home final and double chance. Our slightly worse-for-wear Fumbles correspondent would say nothing could go wrong from here… but for the fact that it usually does.
Touch of the Fumbles
It wasn’t altogether easy, but you’ll be pleased to know that I have managed to find the single glaring negative to come out of the Crows’ Showdown mauling of an unaccountably insipid Port Adelaide.
Touch of the Fumbles
So where do we start? Adelaide’s crazy comeback draw? Port’s insane hijack win? The perpetual annoyance that is Paddy Dangerfield? Ahead of a ladder-shaping Showdown, this was a weekend that captured the best and the worst of both the Crows and the Power – which somehow leaves our Fumbles correspondent none the wiser.
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
While the rest of Adelaide may be back on the Crows bandwagon, Tom Richardson still has plenty of concerns. Chief among them, is Kurt Tippett’s absence a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? And is “sudden-death final” an acceptable excuse for missing a pre-planned 40th birthday bash?
The Crows dropped their bundle on Friday, and have now dropped out of the top four on the eve of the finals. That means it’s time for Adelaide supporters to wallow in self-pity, Port fans to become insufferably smug and Tom Richardson to vent.
Touch of the Fumbles
Tom Richardson reflects on Showdown 41. In which Port Adelaide threw a proverbial banana skin and one of its supporters threw a literal banana. Guess which one we’re all talking about today?
Touch of the Fumbles
Port’s season is over, but with the Showdown looming, Tom Richardson is tempering his ebullience. A bit. Although, he argues, a loss for the Crows in the coming fortnight could be a blessing in disguise.