Touch of the Fumbles
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.
Touch of the Fumbles
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…
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.
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.
You can just see where this is heading, can’t you?
Touch of the Fumbles
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Touch of the Fumbles
An unusual AFL season has thrown up the most unlikely of scenarios: after a Showdown win, another Carlton loss and the Crows’ mad scramble up the ladder, for the first time in a long time our Fumbles correspondent has nothing whatsoever to complain about.
It may not have been pretty… in fact, it was hideously, egregiously ugly. But for the first time this season, the Crows have won in the same round that Port have lost – an event so long coming it’s almost worth raising a glass, if only our Fumbles correspondent could.
Touch of the Fumbles
Between keeping track of the Crows rescuing their season from the brink, Port’s continually-annoying rise, Carlton’s questionable tanking and Paddy Dangerfield’s Brownlow-baiting, our Fumbles correspondent is losing sight of what constitutes ‘normal’ football-watching behaviour.
Touch of the Fumbles
It’s worth remembering that on the original Easter weekend everything seemed to be going pretty shithouse on Friday night, but by Sunday everything had turned out great.
Touch of the Fumbles
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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
Was this the win to put Adelaide’s season back on track, or the Crows’ ‘fake encore’ – a crowd-pleasing rendition of an old favourite before the final curtain? At this point, our Fumbles correspondent doesn’t really care – because it was, at least a win. And it’s been a while.
It’s apt that the Crows have chosen their bye-week to wave ‘bye-bye’ to their increasingly wretched season. Fans want answers, and our Fumbles correspondent has found them – in the form of an incredible, never-before-seen spray from an architect of Adelaide’s premiership double.
Touch of the Fumbles
The Crows are in freefall, as the almost-champs of 2017 risk becoming the chumps of 2018. And, to add insult to considerable injury, Port have knocked off the reigning premiers and are primed for a dream run to September. It’s enough to summon our Fumbles correspondent back from his own mid-season malaise to find some consolation in retail therapy.
Touch of the Fumbles
Two seasons ended this past weekend: Autumn and the troubled 2018 campaign of the Adelaide Crows.
Touch of the Fumbles
When you have started to believe that, as The Killers would put it, destiny is calling you, ‘tis a sad thing indeed to suddenly realise at the end that you have been all along nothing more than a supporting character in someone else’s fairytale.
You’d like to think that we’re better placed than the Tigers to break our drought, but we are, like them, perpetually haunted by history.
Touch of the Fumbles
There are moments that have always stuck in my mind from the Crows’ 2006 preliminary final loss to West Coast, which still ranks as the worst defeat I’ve endured as an Adelaide supporter.
Touch of the Fumbles
When you actually stop and think about it, Port’s heartbreaking exit after an epic draw-into-extra-time elimination final wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t put in such a relatively half-arsed effort against the Eagles in Round 23.
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.
This could have been a Crows supporter’s ultimate football weekend: Adelaide won, Port lost and Richmond obligingly put a two-game break between us and the decreasingly-ominous GWS, while also bundling the Power out of the top four. Only an unexpected bout of appendicitis could stop us now…
The Crows are at the top end of the ladder after a visit to the Top End, but we’re all starting to get that familiar pre-break-up feeling again. But never fear. Our Fumbles correspondent is taking matters into his own hands, and he’s making Lever and McGovern an offer they can’t refuse.
Despite fluctuating form, the Crows are somehow back on top of the ladder and widely expected to stay thereabouts by season’s end. Which, for some reason, has our Fumbles correspondent preoccupied with casual vandalism, late-night tequila binges and trawling through canine faeces, as the ghost of his least favourite season ever returns to haunt him.
As ever in football, it looks good on paper: Adelaide found a way to win, while Port found a way to lose. But it’s neither a win, nor a loss – but a draw – that has our Fumbles correspondent fretting as the Crows enter a tough run home.
Touch of the Fumbles
If you were one of those annoying people who just want to see the South Australian-based teams doing well, you would have been pretty damn happy with the weekend’s football.
It’s a noisy place to belong – on the Crows’ bandwagon, where the revellers sing and the hamstrings ‘ping’. But even more frightening for our Fumbles correspondent than a burgeoning injury list and Rory Atkins’ hair is the ominous prospect that Port Adelaide appear finals-bound…
Touch of the Fumbles
This is going to get fairly tedious fairly quickly if things keep going as they are.
Touch of the Fumbles
There’s plenty of good things our Fumbles correspondent could say about the weekend’s Showdown win, but there’s also plenty of reasons not to say them. After all, we’ve been here before… haven’t we?
Touch of the Fumbles
The Crows beat Brisbane with the highest score of the season, the Lions’ second biggest defeat ever and Adelaide’s equal-second highest winning margin. So here are a few things that annoyed Tom Richardson.
It wasn’t all beer, skittles and premierships in 1997.
Touch of the Fumbles
The Crows’ winning streak is over, cruelled by a lacklustre third term and a sea of Corey Enrights. But Tom Richardson is looking on the bright side. After all, it could be worse. We could be Port Adelaide.
Touch of the Fumbles
Of all the recollections of our enduring 300-game veteran Scott Thompson that suggested themselves this week, the one that reappeared to me from some long-banished recess of my subconscious occurred before he’d even pulled the boots on for Adelaide.
Touch of the Fumbles
Richmond is the South Australian Liberal Party of the AFL. Discuss.
The Crows won, Port lost – and both at the same time. And Paddy Dangerfield’s Cats went cold to boot. Who said a week wasn’t a long time in football? Certainly not Tom Richardson.
Touch of the Fumbles
The Crows lost, Port won and Paddy Dangerfield played a personal best against the reigning premiers. That sounds like a cue for Tom Richardson to return for another season of grumbles – and Fumbles.
Touch of the Fumbles
Our AFL column Touch Of The Fumbles makes a surprise return to say Howdy to Doedee, ponder cardiology and explain the surprisingly simple academy bidding process.
Touch of the Fumbles
