AUSTRALIAN RULES GRAND FINAL
– THE WASHUP
On a
typical Melbourne Spring day - with four seasons in one - 100,007 people,
braving the rain and the sun, the cold and the heat, the wind and the calm,
rocked up to the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the AFL Grand Final between the
favourites, Hawthorn, and the in-form challengers from Western Australia,
Fremantle.
It was a tough, dour struggle between two
tough, dour sides – so the spectacle of exciting skills and typical free flowing
Aussie Rules matches was decidedly lacking. Even so, it was an engrossing
battle where either side could have won the match with five minutes to go. When
the final siren went, Hawthorn was the victor by 15 points.
It seemed that the young Freo side suffered
from Grand Final jitters, especially early on in the game when they messed up
relatively easy scoring opportunities. Maybe 2014 will be their year?
So, another season of football draws to an
end and us footy fanatics go into hibernation over the next five months,
occasionally being distracted and entertained by tennis, motor racing, golf, or
if you’re really desperate – cricket. I for one, find the latter as interesting
as watching grass grow – but that’s just me.
It hasn’t been a great year for Australian
Rules Football, with one football club dominating the headlines since February
for all the wrong reasons. Essendon Football club didn’t cover itself in glory
and brought the game into disrepute by, at the very least, showing a total
disregard of its players' welfare by allowing shonky sports scientists and
biochemists to use their players as guinea-pigs in order to maximise
performance through the injections of yet-to-be revealed performance-enhancing substances.
The denials, cover-up and blame-game
perpetrated by the club when things hit the fan left a bad taste in everyone’s
mouths. The AFL Commission, to its credit, came up with a reasonable set of
penalties which were accepted by Essendon only a couple of weeks before the
finals – so the football season ended on a high note.
As for Essendon, it still has to sweat out
the final findings of ASADA, the Australian arm of the World Anti-Doping
Agency. So, there may be more revelations and penalties yet to come.
Apart from this blight on Aussie Rules,
rugby league is also up to its ears in illicit performance drug scandals.
Meanwhile, local soccer has been implicated in an international
match-fixing/betting scandal. As for cricket, it’s already been up to its ears
in match-fixing scandals at World Cup level, resulting in some of the Pakistani
test team serving gaol sentences. And dare I even mention cycling (good one,
Lance!) and some members of the Jamaican athletics team as well as a high
profile USA sprinter?
Is there no such thing as a “clean” sport
anymore, or has professionalism, the dirty dollar and corruption irretrievably
contaminated everything?
Let’s hope not.
Let’s hope the appropriate authorities
within each sport and the law-enforcement bodies quickly get on top of these
situations so that our young athletes are not corrupted and duped into lining
the pockets of the unscrupulous and our sports are untainted by crooks and
win-at-all costs merchants.
Lovers of sport unite! Let’s take a stand
against the cheats, crooks and corruptors. Let’s follow the lead from the late
Peter Finch movie, “Network”, and declare, “We’ve had enough! We’re not going
to take anymore!
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