Things i’ve grown to dislike…

Every year I go through a process of working out the best albums of the year. Obviously this process is fairly subjective but as I’ve spent many years trying to broaden my horizons in the search of the best albums, I think I am well placed to make some sort of judgement on the topic.

2006: Last year I came to the conclusion that the best album was “Moo you bloody choir” by Augie March.

2005: I couldn’t split my decision between Lemon Jelly’s “64-95″ and Kings of Leon’s “Aha Shake Heartbreak”.

So what of this year so far?

Well a few albums have caught my eye:

Razorlight - Razorlight
The Futureheads - The Futureheads
The Chemical Brothers - We are the night
Peter, Bjorn and John - Writers Bloc
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
The Flaming Lips - At war with the mystics
Guillemots - Through the window pane (could be last year)
Midnight Juggernauts - Secrets of the Universe

In what’s becoming a twice yearly ritual, I attended a Roos match at Subiaco oval, accompanying Richard in what can only be described as a bizarre combination of pride and self loathing.

I’ve not seen such mixed emotions in support of a team since… well since the Dockers and Connolly.

Roos fans are understandably enamoured by the success of their club. Once a proud and successful club that overshadowed the Eagles with their success in the 90s to be the ‘Club of the 90s’ they have since seen scandal rock the club and then a slow decline to the bottom half of the table.

Laidley then took over the reigns and proved to only consolidate what most people thought, that he was a limited coach who would never bring success to the club. That was until this season where the Roos have been largely successful and sit 3rd on the ladder (one win off second).

There have even been claims in papers as reputable as the West Australian that Laidley is in contention for the Freo job vacated only yesterday.

I however think that would be folly for the Fremantle club.

Connolly was tactically and techincally inept and I distinctly remember saying that they should get rid of him only a week before going on a 9 game unbeaten run to make the finals of 2006. Because of that everyone was a fan of Connolly again, but not me.

He had no game plan, instead he played to his opponents each week. That is NOT the sign of a strong leader and a strong team. His claims that he had a team full of players who were desperate for success and worked hard for it just begs the question about his coaching. Motivating players to want to win is half the battle, so if as he claims, the players were motivated, does not the blame lie with the coach? To take it one step further, after losing by 4 points to the Roos in what was a rather bland game lacking any real spark from either side, he laid the blame on poor skills and decision making… yet these are the things that are well within his control.

However, to suggest that Laidley be a candidate to replace him are laughable. Laidleys career has resembled that of Connolly, tactically inept, his team has succeeded only because they move the ball quickly and kick long to counter the trend by other teams to play posession football, inevitably this means you will only win against inaccurate teams and will lead to wins by small margins which has been a trademark of the Roos season. To suddenly laud Laidley as a brilliant coach is faintly ridiculous. If he stays on at the roos they will be back down the bottom of the ladder next season.

So you can see why some Roos fans love winning but hate Laidley.

It begs the question about why so many people fall for the hype, and not just in this instance. The call for Michael Voss and Nathan Buckley to take up coaching without any prior coaching experience is another issue that has been doing the rounds of late.

I can only surmise that it comes down to few people knowing anything about coaching tactics and technical skills and what it entails to be a coach.

Football (Soccer) fans are often heard quoting that a team should go to another formation, always formations, it’s like the Football fans favourite keyword. But anyone with an ounce of coaching knowledge knows that formation is nothing without the right personel and without the right instructions for each of your players within that formation. A simple change in formation is no guarantee for a team that is playing poor football to suddenly play good football. The best teams play numerous formations but they have an innate knowledge of their roles in the team and have spent a long time developing their technical and tactical abilities.

Footy is no different and I would suggest that, being such a fan based sport with a large minority having not ever competitively played the game as opposed to other sports, that they know even less about the subtleties of coaching and thus will fall for the latest successful coach.

You need look no further than the Eagles who have planned their rise to the top on excellent recruitment of young backmen and midfield players,often to the detriment of depth in forwards and ruckmen. However it fits in with their well developed game plan that has made it hard for teams to beat them when they are at full or even 3/4 strength. Woosha is a tactically astute coach and has obviously spent long hours coaching his players to get numbers in and around the balls and how to win the ball from stoppages better than any other team. It’s also enabled them to sustain their form without key players in the team because everyone knows their roles inside out.

The same cannot be said for Freo who are a different proposition from week to week. The claim is often laid on freo that they are weak. I don’t think thats fair, trying harder doesn’t guarantee success. To me, when they get beaten its because their game plan doesn’t work and the players don’t know what to do so they stop trying. Pavlich for example, looked poor on the weekend but he was being double teamed most of the time and the delivery to him was poor, if he is told to continue to play the same way when getting so obviously beaten, how is he to feel.

People need to stop and analyse what it is these coaches are actually doing before they heap praise on them.

Daniher spent years yo-yoing up and down the ladder, Laidley has been largely poor in winning and losing, Connolly whilst taking the Dockers to a level where they weren’t such an embarrassment has been unable to gather any form of consistency in 6 years at the helm. Robert Walls has shown that he is just mad and knows nothing about footy.

The good coaches are easy to spot because their teams are consistently good and play good football. Woosha, Neil Craig, Paul Roos, Leigh Mathews and dare I say it Mark Williams.

Working at a new and significantly busier job has precluded me from entering any new blog entries of late.

Additionally with the advent of this bizarre push for web ownership by the computer illiterate masses in the form of Facebook, Bebo, My Space and the many other incarnations of what are effectively are personal home pages for dummies, I’ve not really had time to concentrate on my blog at all.

It’s slightly galling for me that it’s now so easy to make your own web space, admittedly restricted by whatever system you use but nonetheless, there used to be a day where putting together a personal web page was a skill, and developing one that looked good and had good content was an art form.

With the advent of all these user friendly tools, any man and his dog can put together a space and decorate it with any number of ridiculous applications and skinning engines, often with no thought to design or style.

Frankly I’m appalled by the look of some spaces and it seems that we’re undergoing the same issues that we had with the advent of web development at the end of the 90s which for the uninitiated consisted of a multitude of excessively long web pages covered in animated gif’s and midi music.

So why do I use it, well partly to stop the incessant mail from Bebo or Facebook asking me to join. what I failed to realise however, was that I was merely exchanging those emails for a whole new set of emails informing me of the latest actions of my increasingly large Facebook friends list.

I do not however subscribe to the adding of friends whom I do not know. Online friendships don’t sit well with me. To me it seems like a society with increasing issues of identity and self esteem looking for ways to connect without the feeling of insecurity of the real world. I point to World of Warcraft as a prime example.

Are people too scared to be themselves in real life for fear of persecution thus forcing them to turn to an online identity to express themselves?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this but I’ve spent alot of time trying to overcome my own insecurities and I think that you’ve got to get out there and meet people in real life. The fact that people have enough time to update their online profiles makes me wonder if people shouldn’t go and find other things to do.

On the other hand maybe I spend too much time playing and coaching Soccer… but then at least I’m getting out there and meeting people.

It seems to me that these online profile applications merely package up existing functionality in bright new funky packaging.

To give you an example, all these funky new phones that keep coming out with new features that you’ll supposedly want. I’ve lost count of the amount of people who will trade in a perfectly good relatively new phone for a brand new one with all the latest gadgets. At the end of the day a phone is a phone, you use it to call people (with the exception of the iPhone on which you can listen to music), I wont be trading my phone in for a while yet, it’s got an FM radio which is enough to keep me entertained on my walks to work.

Its the same with Facebook, Bebo etc.

I get comments, personal messages and a multitude of other messages that could just as easily be sent in an email, I do after all have access to my email for the large majority of every day.

Richard pointed me in the direction of this article: http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2007/03/13/1173722467215.html which references Akermanis urging the AFL into Asia.

Amongst his ramblings are the following points:

- The AFL needs to push into Asia
- An AFL team needs to be based in Asia
- Starting the Singapore Slingers basketball team in the NBL was a “masterstroke”
- Asians are misunderstood and Asia is a large untapped market
- “Japanese people don’t like failure … that’s why anything like basketball or, say, Aussie rules can’t fail,”
- and the last couple of paragraphs

“I think our game has evolved that well and that quickly that let’s look at taking it to the world,” he said. “It’ll come when a lot of sports look at Asia, let’s get over there and properly first.

“In three to four years who knows where it could be and how big it can be. To me Asia is a logical and practical choice.”

Now, starting at the top of his ridiculous diatribe.

- Does the AFL need to push into Asia, would it be of anymore benefit if it did? Apart from the accumulation of more money I doubt it would in any way benefit Aussie Rules. On a player front, Asians are hardly reknowned for being of big builds, so it’s not like there is going to be a huge influx of players. Football was able to be firmly entrenched around the world because of the Europeans and in particular, the English and their empirical ambitions. The Americans are the only country in modern history who have such a far reaching influence over the world and even they have struggled to push Gridiron, Baseball (apart from Japan) and Basketball to great heights outside of their own country.

- The AFL does not need a team in Asia, If a team is based there in the next 50 years I would be more than surprised. Where is this fan base going to come from?

- The Singapore Slingers have an average crowd of 1-2000 people, hardly a masterstroke as he so claims, especially when you consider that the city has a population of 4.5 million people.

- Asians are misunderstood… yes them Asians. I wonder if he refers to the Western countries as those Westerners or by their actual country names. Every Asian is quite unique and would take much offence to being termed Asians. There is a big difference between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese… etc we’d never refer to countries like Sweeden, Germany, England and France as being the same just because on the most part they all look similar. So yes, Asians are misunderstood but by saying so you’ve added nothing to breaking down that misunderstanding. As for being an untapped market, well thats a friggin ridiculous statement, what do you think “Asians” do? Sit around all day picking rice?? You inbred uneducated ignorant dickhead! In case you hadn’t noticed there are an Asian games held every 4 years in a number of sports, Football is by far and away the most popular sport across the whole of Asia including in countries like India where football is considered modern and cricket a sport of an bygone era and of the upper class. They have an asian champions league every year (in which 2 australian teams are competing right now) and an asian cup every 4 years (which we will compete in for the first time this year). That aside countries like Japan have a huge following for baseball and without a doubt, with Yao Ming playing in the NBA, there are quite a few people in China who follow Basketball. Untapped my arse!

- “Japanese dont like failure”.. nice way to stereo type Japanese people and break down those misunderstandings. “that’s why anything like basketball or, say, Aussie rules can’t fail” it appears that Akermanis likes to make a few leaps of logic when he attempts to get that brain thing of his working. Basketball is hardly a success and you’ve linked a stereo typical Japenese trait with your assumed success of Singaporean basketball, i’ll make an analogy so that you’ll understand how stupid it is. Rugby is really popular in New Zealand so Cricket should be popular in the United States!!! WTF!

- The time when you could take the game to the world is long gone, the world has its own game, Football! The sport on its own is as big as the Olympics and depending on which figures you read, has a larger audience. Just as an aside, from its 15 sponsors of the world cup, FIFA raised as much money as the Olympics gets from its 120 sponsors (from Time magazine).

As for getting over there first and properly well yeah, again, that boat has been missed.

- Asia is not logican and neither is it practical

Akermanis, you’re a dickhead. I don’t even hate AFL, its quite a good sport, I just hate this need for them to try and conquer the world with a sport that struggles to win over most Aussies. Despite what the media show you, Rugby Union and Rugby League are still the biggest sports in Queensland and NSW and Soccer is still the most played sport by youngsters in the whole of Australia AND is the biggest growing womens sport in Australia. UNTIL the AFL conquer Australia they shouldn’t even consider trying to Conquer the world let alone Asia. And by that time, it will be too late.

I’m not actively supporting either the Libs or Labor but the current issue in parliament seems rather odd.

Had this been an advertising campaign for Brian Burke then he would be very successful, his name has been thrown about so much so that he’s no longer just a West Australian disgraced icon. Bad publicity is good publicity!

What I find odd is that the Libs are in such uproar about the fact that Rudd met with Brian Burke. Since when did talking to someone disgraced or otherwise bring into question your personal judgement.

He met with Brian Burke and had conversations with him. The conversations could have been anything from the footy score on the weekend to Labor policies. Burke is in no position to be able to use or abuse any information so having a conversation with him seems harmless.

Now if there was evidence of a deal between Rudd and Burke regarding policies or something else then fair enough Rudd should be brought to question HOWEVER Labor are not in power so it’s irrelevant anyway and at the time Rudd wasn’t the Opposition Leader so its doubtful Burke talking to Rudd would have been able to influence much.

In the end it seems like the Libs trying to drag Rudds name through the mud by finding any links with shady characters. It’s sad that the Libs have stopped to this level when it’s evident that their scaremongering and policies are losing public support.

If you break it down to the simplest level the issue becomes that it’s not OK for Politicians to have any sort of contact with disgraced people otherwise it automatically paints you in a bad light and we can assume that you are the same sort of person.

It’s a ridiculous premise and odd given the Governments repeated cultured image of nice church going family men and women who follow christian values. These Chritian values include the oft forgotten “forgive and forget”. Could we not view Rudd as being the more christian then for not turning his back on somoene who has “sinned”?

I’m not supporting Rudd, I just want to see a level playing field and no dirty tricks.

Brian Goorjian is the Boomers coach (Aussie basketball team) and the Sydney Kings coach. After Sydney last night playing in front of only 3500 fans despite the fixture being a sudden-death quarter final, Goorjian has come out to say that Sydney doesn’t care about the Kings.

I’d like to point out that in general, most people only take a passing interest in Basketball, including myself. Admittedly I got caught up in the basketball boom of the 80s and I quite enjoy shooting hoops myself. HOWEVER I turned on the Wildcats match on foxtel by accident as I didnt even realise they were on. I watched it for about 2 minutes before changing the channel. Yeah I realised it was a final but I wasn’t going to sit through 2 hours of coverage just to get to the interesting bit of the game which is usually the last quarter.

I don’t even watch NBA, so it’s not a question of quality, it’s the nature of the game. AFL fans should pay attention to this, constant scoring ISN’T good for a game. Seeing someone hit a three pointer only for the other team to instantly go down the court and score a three renders what was once a difficult task quite simple and devalues making a basket.

In Football, you don’t know when a team is going to score so you stay watching. In AFL whilst they score alot more, a 3 or 4 goal lead is sometimes impossible to overcom HOWEVER at least there is a huge requirement for build up play leading to a goal. In basketball, one guy can dribble down the court and shoot a three and score.

The once popular wildcats now only fill out a 2000-3000 seat stadium and a sad indictment on the popularity of Basketball is that the only time I wanted to go to a game this season was when there was a legends game as a curtain raiser to a wildcats game.

Alot of the media seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon of writing off our World Cup chances. This, only a month or so after we were lauded for smashing England in the Ashes.

Whats changed since then? We’ve lost Martyn, Warne and McGrath has announced his retirement. But that was no change to our one day attack, apart from that, Symonds has been injured and Lee limped out of training with an Injury. We’ve lost to England in the finals of our one day series after dominating the qualifiers, dropped the number 1 one day cricket position to South Africa who have pantsed Pakistan and we’ve lost the Hadlee-Lillee series to New Zealand.

Should it really be a case of red alert or is everyone just over reacting.

Personally I think that there is nothing we can really do other than ride this out. I don’t think we are any less talented a side than when we beat England in the Ashes. Martyn and Warne don’t play in the one day side, McGrath is still playing and Lee was always expensive. Our best bowler in our previous one day series in South Africa was Stuart Clark and we didn’t have Mcgrath then either. Sure there has been a change over of bowlers recently as we try and find a new lineup but still.

Firstly I think our ashes campaign took alot out of the team. It was always going to be hard to follow up a full summer of trying to smash the poms and qualify for the finals. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a demanding line up of events before. We relaxed after qualifying and thats the most dangerous thing when you’ve kept up the intensity for such a long time. I coach football and I know that once you step down in intensity after long periods it’s hard to pick it back up and sometimes you have to work harder and other times its impossible without burning out. Regardless of our skill I think we will have to wait and hope that they can pick it up their play, they need a rest but aren’t going to get it so hopefully someone can pull out something special.

Secondly we’ve seen Australia play on many a batting wicket in recent weeks. The Australian grounds have been rubbish for bowling this season, they’ve over compensated for many matches that have finished prematurely due to our dominating performances and decided to at least give other teams a chance with batting wickets. Our problem is that whilst our bowlers are good at getting wickets on a bowling wicket, we’ve always been poor on batting wickets. Very few of our bowlers know how to bowl to contain a team (McGrath and Clark aside), in fact I would suggset that we have never been of the attitude that we should contain. We’ve always been of the atitude that we should destroy other teams, which is fair enough but we don’t usually play on flat batting wickets. Having said that, I think the wickets in the West Indies will suit us more than most other teams.

Finally to say our bowlers let the side down in this last loss to NZ as some articles suggest, is ridiculous. We took more wickets than New Zealand did, we just didn’t contain them enough.

I’m gonna call the DVD Format war early!

I pronounce Blu-Ray as the winner. Reports are already coming out that it is outselling HD DVD.

Sony Pictures, Columbia, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Lions gate are signed up to Blu-Ray

only Universal and Weinstein are with HD DVD

and

Paramount and Warner support both.

The X-Box 360 only comes with the player as an add-on, no one buys add-ons.

THe Playstation 3 comes with it standard.

There are no HD DVD players available in Australia except in Toshiba laptops (Toshiba developed the HD DVD).

Georgie Parker is to star in another Aussie Drama set in the Blue Mountains.

ENOUGH ALREADY, Aussie dramas are bad enough as it is, but ones set in the country just shit me off. Are we city folk somehow supposed to be in awe of the country are relate to country people as being the epitome of all that is aussie.

Remember that movie Danny Deckchair, if you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. It had a big budget for an Aussie movie, famous actors in Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings) and Rhys Ifans (Twin Town, Notting Hill, The Replacements) and yet they had a stupid plot that ended up with him being out in the country for the whole movie. It sucked!

Make more inner city movies and tv shows.

Some Qantas flight attendant was sacked for allegedly having sex with Ralph Feinnes (which she denies) in a plane toilet during a flight and now she is going to sell her story for $400,000.

WHAT STORY IS THERE TO TELL?

The sad thing is that people are going to tune into the news to listen to this! And what for? To hear her deny it? What sort of story is that, it’s a waste of half an hour of your life. Even if she did, who cares, good on her! He’s ONLY a celebrity, that doesn’t make him any better a person than anyone else.

Somehow an industry has grown up around celebrities and celebrity gossip. I suspect that people who have nothing better to do with their lives want to live their lives vicariously through famous people and also want to see those famous people they don’t like, fail. Which is amusing to say the least because their judgements on who they like and don’t like is based on what they read in the papers and see on tv. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that these people are no different to you and me, except they have alot more money probably.