Sparkling alternative to entertainment

IN THE end, Powderfinger got the job done, aided in no small part by amplification suited to a rock band performance — i.e., it could have been heard with the naked ear from Mars.

They did the loud song everybody knows, interpolated it with the national anthem — i.e., AC/DC's Long Way to the Top — and then went back to playing the former song alongside the bagpipe riff from the latter.

People seemed to know the material, enjoy it, and it was energetic. Considering the AFL's track record, one presumes this was all an accident.

This was a good time to get to the ground, since it meant you'd missed the singular spectacle of one of Australia's greatest guitar players, Ian Moss, apparently channelling surf-guitar king Dick Dale for the occasion, which would have been fine had he been playing the Pulp Fiction/Black-Eyed Peas riffs Dale is best known for, rather than Up There, Cazaly accompanied by a vocal ensemble of nasal check-out chicks that someone had understandably glued to the roof of a scoreboard.

Mike Brady scores by ambush. There's no stopping that man. Unfortunately, the AFL's idea of unmitigated spectacle didn't stop there. After some weighty verbal palaver and generic Star Wars type music, the premiership cup had all possible dignity comprehensively stripped from it, by being forced to abseil down a guy-wire from the Great Southern Stand roof to the turf in a plastic box, with a number of attached sparklers absent-mindedly farting away behind it.

This had "primary school presentation day" stamped all over it. As the final twist of the knife, two ladies from a production whose name failed to survive transmission via the stadium PA system then sang the national anthem straight through their noses, leaving no nostril hair undisturbed, and clearing sinuses all the way over to Abbotsford.

By then, the crowd was ready for football. Or a root canal, or a fire drill, or in fact anything other than more entertainment.

And, following a surprise and unrequited guest appearance by the riff from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir — and some howler-monkey belching the most patently unnecessary "scene-setting" verbal confetti in major event history into a vastly over-amplified microphone apparently located so far down his throat that it was being held in place by the waistband of his underwear — we actually got some football, after a fashion.

Please don't paint the grandad

WHEN it comes to the wearing of elaborate and inherently idiotic face paint, Geelong apparently has the oldest supporters with the highest shame threshold of any club. As a rule of thumb, you know you're probably too old to be indulging in club-colour face paint, down to whiskers and cats' ears etc, when you've reached the age when you've lost height owing to decalcification. Some of these people would have easily been drawing a pension when Geelong played Hawthorn in the 1989 grand final, and almost certainly paid adult ticket prices in 1963.

You had to not be there

AFTER speaking to people who watched the game on television, one can only underscore the apparently vast difference in watching it live. Reportedly, on TV, or even from radio commentary vantage points, it was some sort of epic battle for the ages, a monument to how our game is played today, and a gladiatorial spectacle of the highest order — a veritable "title bout" as some overheated broadcasters put it. Whereas, from at least one section of the ground, it looked like a peak-period John McEnroe had been time-shifted to meet a top-form Pete Sampras in a meeting of all-time greats, only they'd both happened to have a shocker on the same day, and we had to sit around watching them foot-fault and make unforced errors for an entire afternoon. To the not-particularly-educated, although certainly time-jaundiced, eye, Hawthorn extended the traditional opening five minutes of grand final jitters until at least half-time, and neither Geelong nor the umpires were content to stop there, ploughing on with their five-minute jitters right until the end of the game. Geelong unquestionably played better football in 23 other matches this year, and, when the saliva and hubbub dies down, it may be admitted that Hawthorn's figure in that category might number into the high teens as well. No doubt the knee-jerk response to this will be "Intense pressure", and, in a grand final, that's undoubtedly true. But it still doesn't turn JitterFest 2008 into Ali v Frazier III. Some of us hadn't seen this much ball-slaughter since the inter-species soccer game in Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

The new, full-service idiocy

THE Melbourne Cricket Club, having access to two video scoreboards and Satan's own public address system, apparently mistook itself for a television station. Rather than the grand final atmosphere being allowed to build by itself, as has been the case since Federation, crowd members were relentlessly pummelled by unnecessary preamble, interviews and the reading aloud of stats already posted on the scoreboard, via the endless yodelling of obscure sport broadcasting figures, superannuated DJs and the completely unknown, all apparently intent on making any non-football "dead time" even deader. Not only did this aural mugging take place right from the conclusion of the entertainment proper up until game-time, but also throughout all breaks. The crowd members never had time to breathe, chat, listen to the radio or quietly soak it all in. When one of the Hawthorn guernsey-draped young teen glee club sitting behind your correspondent mused out loud, sometime in the second quarter, that "It just doesn't FEEL like a grand final", she manifested more wisdom than her 14 or so years on the planet might have reasonably led one to expect. Everything possible had been done to ensure it didn't feel like a grand final. In showbiz terms, this is what they call "SLAUGHTERING the atmosphere." Put simply, the ever-present danger of having a live microphone around is that some numbat might actually use it.