Touch of the Fumbles
Vintage 2020: when your crap football team finally gets a home game fixture with spectators allowed – and it’s scheduled on your wife’s 40th birthday.
Touch of the Fumbles
So life as we know it is over and the long-awaited apocalypse may well be upon us. Yes, Port Adelaide are premiership contenders. But fear not – for, as our Fumbles correspondent explains, things aren’t as bad as they seem.
There would be a poetic aptness to the Shitshow that is 2020 – a year of pandemic peril, civil unrest and lunatic leadership – if it also conspires to end with a Port Adelaide premiership.
The football’s back – and just like that, it’s gone again. Our Fumbles correspondent tries to make sense of a predictable Crows loss – amid the game’s most unpredictable predicament.
A final Fumbles farewell for a year that promised fun and flags, but delivered yet more folly, failure and fetid fallout. Some of the Crows’ biggest names have gone, and a new era awaits – under a former Port mentor, no less. So, an uneventful few weeks then…
Our long-suffering Fumbles correspondent makes what Jimi Hendrix might have called a “slight return”, after Adelaide’s now-traditional off-season chaos culminated in the somewhat battered Pyke Cart trundling off into the western sunset.
Touch of the Fumbles
Touch of the Fumbles
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Touch of the Fumbles
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.
Touch of the Fumbles
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.
Touch of the Fumbles
I can kind of empathise with the Labor Party after Saturday.
Touch of the Fumbles
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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
Sure, Adelaide’s season is so shot that even Don Pyke is finally conceding the finals, but your Fumbles correspondent is unusually upbeat. After all, we can finally talk about ‘that time McGovern kicked a goal against Port to hit the front in the last minute’ – without cringing.
Touch of the Fumbles
It was the perfect Showdown finale: a contentious goal, a Crows win and Port throwing their toys out of the proverbial cot. For our long-suffering Fumbles correspondent, what loomed as a scant consolation for a wasted year has instead become the undisputed highlight of Adelaide’s season – one that could yet have a major bearing on Port’s 2018 fortunes.
The dwindling hopes of Crows supporters have yet again proved vain, and our Fumbles correspondent is back – and searching for consolations. There aren’t many to be had, but that could change this week…
Touch of the Fumbles
The ‘Sloane-spired’ Crows kept their faint finals hopes alive after achieving the unthinkable – re-signing a marquee player. It’s a phenomenon so rare that your Fumbles correspondent was moved to pen an open letter to the great man himself.
Touch of the Fumbles
I’ll be honest, this wasn’t as cathartic as I’d hoped.
Touch of the Fumbles
I’ve never really disliked St Kilda as much as I probably should.
If there’s a single feeling in football sweeter than winning a Grand Final rematch, I can’t think of it.
Touch of the Fumbles
Normal service has been resumed. The AFL is back, and so is our myopic, moping Touch Of The Fumbles correspondent. Port’s new recruits powered them to a big win while the Crows blew a handy lead to give up four points on the road. It could be a long year…
Touch of the Fumbles
Kurt Tippett, the man Crows supporters love to hate, has announced his untimely AFL retirement. To commemorate the auspicious occasion, InDaily returns to a vintage Touch Of The Fumbles – in which correspondent Tom Richardson finally makes peace with Adelaide’s greatest football villain.
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.
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.
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
If anyone’s looking for the archetype of Ambivalence, Thursday night helpfully provided one: when your former best player kicks the winning goal against your least favourite team.
It was as convincing a win as an unconvincing win can be, and our Fumbles correspondent is looking on the bright side. After all, there are worse teams to support than flat track bullies.
Touch of the Fumbles
As Oscar Wilde would have probably written if he’d had the misfortune to be an Adelaide Crows supporter: To lose one game against a middle-rung opponent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Touch of the Fumbles
Normal service was resumed on the weekend, as the Crows reverted to type by failing spectacularly to live up to the hype. Fortunately, so did almost every other contender – including Port. And despite the crushing disappointment, our Fumbles correspondent is, perversely, looking on the bright side.
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.
Touch of the Fumbles
So, it’s all the umpire’s fault, right? Well, not according to Tom Richardson, who says that, like Homer Simpson, the Crows should be strangling themselves – instead of opposition players. And this week there was not even the consolation of a Port loss to fall back on.
Right, the Crows got a win. Now let’s never speak of it again.
Touch of the Fumbles
As the Prime Minister might say, there’s never been a more exciting time to play Fremantle. Yes, despite a heart-stopping loss, Tom Richardson is upbeat this week. But as the Divinyls (and Don Pyke) might say, there’s a fine line between pleasure and pain. Or not such a fine line, if you’re Port Adelaide.
Touch of the Fumbles
We’ve been avoiding it for a couple of weeks now.
Touch of the Fumbles
