Gil Jong Un.
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That is such a disgrace - can’t believe this has not made more news than it has
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Yep, disgraceful.
There’s just no need for them to try this one on.
Yes, I was going to comment re that post that “Commotion” Pearson was the one who invented the high mark.
For newcomers, he got that nickname because it was reported that women at the football fainted at seeing him created so much excitement, putting himself at such risk going for the high marks.
For not so newcomers, think what Vanda was like in the '70s. But imagine no-one had ever seen that before!
Latest article (but behind the paywall)
How the AFL has ruined football
Terry Brown, Sunday Herald Sun
6-8 minutes
On a soggy Saturday arvo, three quarters and seven cans in, no place in the world was finer than One Eye Hill at Victoria Park.
Amenities? It lacked the lot, and so what? Who cared?
Rain kept the toxic cloud from the urinals down. VB stayed cold in rigid steel cans that stuck to your flesh, and you can only get so wet, right? More fun than footy now.
If we wanted warm, cosy, or nice even, we would have gone to the Hopetoun Tea Rooms.
Footy is not about niceties, though. It was always about the opposite.
For three hours you could randomly, or pointedly, howl at the players, umps and footy gods, insanely cold until all feeling went, steam coming off your booing. You could bait total strangers too, a personal favourite.
- Semi-final. Collingwood v Carlton. MCG. Police warn Carlton supporters to take their floggers and streamers back inside the fence. Picture: HWT
Every bit of crap your boss and life had thrown at you since the Saturday before flooded down the hill like noisy mustard gas, better out than in.
The best part was the banter. There was an art to it. Bald headed flog and green maggot would not have made it off the bench, such was the quality.
You needed a thick skin to be at the footy anyway, if only because there were no puffy parkas back then. Duck down was a panicked scream as a kick-to-kick Sherrin tried to scalp some child. St John’s must’ve treated more kids than a Nimbin measles ward. Lucky ones would get it in the forehead, laces out, branded clearly for show-and-tell at school.
Duffel jackets, beanies, bonds singlets, long sleeve knitted footy jumpers and the obligatory beer overcoat were in vogue when football was pure. On a wet day you’d go home several kilos heavier and a lot wittier and better looking.
There were no video screens, sushi, armrests, chairs or inflatable advertising clap sticks, but somehow we survived. No multiple roaming flogs wielding microphones like alien probes.
There was no escape from the rain, sure, but no real problem either.
Yeah, footy had it all before the league fixed it up.
- Collingwood v St Kilda. at Victoria Park, with every vantage point packed. Picture: HWT
Back in the day Ross Oakley, the chief, kept a straight face and said they didn’t want to own the game. They were just custodians of the treasure.
The difficulty is that the AFL is that dodgy caretaker who steals your silver bit by bit, sending you broke and wondering if you’re mad? With loud barracking an official caution now, we’re down to the bent fish forks.
It is hard to point to the exact moment the AFL got fair dinkum about despoiling the game. They never ask, of course. Stuff just turns up like something on your sole.
How do people come to be the AFL chief, and who votes for them, and who votes for those people, all the way down the AFL centipede?
I’d bet it’s a long time since any of them got wet at the footy, or sat in Row ZZ bleeding from the ears to Nickelback maybe, or drank water labelled beer out of plastic. Betcha.
- Essendon v Richmond at Windy Hill. Picture: HWT
The rot set in when? The murders of Waverley, the Roys and South? Culling the crepe paper flogger? Branded ovals? Light blue M&M navy blues, Captain Carlton’s hovercraft, the annual joke that is the draw, changing the songs and hoping no one notices, plastic cups of mid-strength fluids best left in Pathology? The list is longer than the MCG goalsquare, er, rectangle.
Maybe it was when the hills and standing room were morphed into individual plastic buckets to keep fans contained. Booked seats stopped you randomly consorting, the ground DJ stopped you talking and, if you were near a speaker, ever hearing again.
Everything the AFL touches, it screws up then presses ahead with unfazed, in the certain knowledge fans got it wrong again.
Every-poll-ever says to leave the big one alone, and every year until Gill gets fireworks the league will cough up the rancid furball of an idea that is a Twilight Grand Final. They already killed the replay without asking, the one that gave two clubs fans a bonus week’s bliss and some hope of going, but plays hell with the fly-ins and corporates. Boo.
1998: Fans surround Tony Lockett after kicking his 100th goal for the season for the Swans. Picture: Herald Sun
Twilight Sunday games, megawalls, exhibition matches, Roaming Brian, Channel 7 in every nook and orifice, the jumping castle they run-through in Perth that looks nothing like an eagle? Who asked for any of it?
AFLX, under any merciful God, would be taken out the back of Etihad/Marvel/Colonial/Docklands Stadium and dropped in the harbour, weighed securely down by chipped-off corporate signage and oversized zooper goalposts.
The sooner Me-Too claims KissCam, the better. You can’t yell flog, but you can still penetrate a stranger with your tongue.
The core problem is the AFL doesn’t much like football, especially its lack of showbiz and its rough ways. Pity the players. Nuns drink more and spend less time around hospitals and schools. The league has cracked down on drugs too, unless they’re sold at Chemist Warehouse, who sponsor the injuries — ghouls.
The league contracted buggering the tickets up to Ticketek, too busy were they watering the beer, scheduling Chinese matches and inventing rules nobody can umpire without looking like a flog.
Now the best available reserved MCG seats come with an unobstructed view of 30,000 better empty ones.
The video review system has great views too and provides exclusive and conclusive content to Channel 7 — but not the umps, whose ■■■■-ups are then replayed from nine angles in slow-mo. No wonder they are grumpy and are taking it out on fans who correctly identify the floggishness of their haphazard ways.
(If they do not like being derided, perhaps don’t dress like leprechauns?)
RELATED: JOFFA BOYCOTTS THE FOOTY
TIGERS CHEER SQUAD WANTS APPROVED COMMENTS LIST
Joffa has had it up to his beanie and he is not alone, but how do you stand up for footy when there’s no standing room?
It is enough to make you scream, except that’s a prohibited weapon now.
No, it’s check your passion at Gate 5, I guess. Bite your tongue or, if KissCam’s on, someone else’s? That’s OK with the AFL.
Flogs.
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Yeah saw those guys everywhere last night, certain I didn’t spot any v Fremantle at Marvel a few weeks ago?
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Yes! It was worth the admission price just for the hilarious comments in the outer. I miss those days.
Yeah this is a bit of a weird one.
Sure, there’s no “evidence” but just because Wills never wrote it down doesn’t mean it wasn’t a thing. And it’s not like nothing else in history has ever been whitewashed y’know.
But the timing and the manner in which this about-face has happening is clearly PR.
Dunno where to go on this.
Terry Brown, that is an 11/10 piece of writing. Poetic and dripping with venom.
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I kind of get where Terry is coming from but there is a lot of people looking back at the past with rose coloured glasses.
You could write the same article in the mid 90s about Friday night games, the AFL draft and interstate teams.
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Gil has to go, seriously thinking he may have lost the plot…hoping we have a ‘standing down because of family commitments’ type thing coming soon
Shouldn’t it be Kim Jong Gil?
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Gil is in a bubble and needs to ■■■■ right off back to polo.
Polo, not the game of the people.
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Yes.
Kim Jon-Gil even.
Kim Dung-Gil for a tad more mirth, … 
Using correct naming conventions, yes. I prefer Gil Jong Un, though. 
