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.
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.
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.
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!
Winless for a full 12 months, the Crows have evidently embraced the ‘end of the world as we know it’ aesthetic of 2020 – leaving our Fumbles correspondent to reflect on happier times, when his team was merely endearingly frustrating.
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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?
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I can kind of empathise with the Labor Party after Saturday.
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.
Touch of the Fumbles
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.
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
Sure, the Crows look a shadow of their former selves and played so poorly we can’t even really revel much in Port’s shock loss or Carlton’s last-gasp bid to give us pick one in the draft… but our Fumbles correspondent is still scratching for positives.
Touch of the Fumbles
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.
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
I’m not angry, just disappointed. Oh, and also angry.
Port bombing out to the Bombers and a Jake Lever shocker slightly redeemed the weekend, but there’s no papering over how poor the Crows were on Friday night. Our Fumbles correspondent ponders curfews, baby blues and the end of the premiership dream.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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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
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…
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?
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Amid all the April Fools Day tomfoolery, a casual observer could have been forgiven for laughing off a match report of the Crows’ drought-breaking win over Hawthorn as yet another piece of fake news.
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It wasn’t all beer, skittles and premierships in 1997.
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.
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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.
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This was quite possibly the worst week ever.
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