Australian Rules Football: A Pom's Idiots Guide to the AFL.

Footy fever takes over the nation

Today is a huge day in Victoria – the AFL Grand Final between Collingwood and St Kilda. This is Aussie Rules, the only bona fide religion in Melbourne. There is nothing that compares to it in the UK or maybe the world, even the Superbowl doesn’t come close.  

And here’s the proof. Ten thousand fans turned up for Collingwood’s pre match training session yesterday. One hundred thousand lined the streets in Melbourne yesterday for the pre match parade. Yes, that’s the pre match parade. Festivals are held in Melbourne to co-incide with it. School Holidays are planned around it. Kids were allowed to wear their footy shirts on the last day of school. The Age - the serious national newspaper - features the Grand final as its front page story (out of respect all other sports have been dumped from today's edition.) There hasn’t been a single conversation over the past week with an Australian that doesn’t start with “so who do you want to win?”

Wherefore art thou, dictionary?

I have only seen five of Shakespeare’s plays in my life so I don’t for one moment claim to be an expert. Far from it. And I am definitely not one of those luvvie types. My dad worked for a living.  

However, I have enough experience of his works now to confirm that I really do enjoy them. Well, four of the five anyway. My Henry V experience in 1998 was a failure of such epic proportions, that I also failed to return after the interval. At first I thought it was the production company’s fault. Then I blamed the Palace Theatre in Manchester. The audiences were obviously a lot smaller when it was built in 1891. There wasn’t even room to swing a Cornetto. It took me fully thirty seconds to unwedge myself to let someone go past.

This Ain't a Love Song, this is Goodbye - Freddie Flintoff Retires too soon.

The right way to remember Freddie.

Alas, It's true. Freddie is gone.

It wasn’t a bad innings was it? The chronic injuries have finally forced Andrew Flintoff to hang up his boots and retire from world cricket. Everybody loved Freddie; everybody will miss him - none so more than me. Yet, I also feel quite let down by him. He messed it all up, and he only has himself to blame. Not so much Yabba-dabba-do, as Yabba-dabba-doh.

The Best Old School Hip Hop of All Time

From someone who has been listening to rap for the past twenty five years, here’s a rundown of my favourite hip hop tracks of all time.

You will probably pick up a couple of things straight away – there’s no Public Enemy, Jay Z, Eric B & Rakim, Nas, or LL Cool J on the list. That’s because all the tracks here are from the early eighties before any of these really got going. And no, this isn’t because I stopped listening to hip hop when the new romantics came along, far from it. It’s just that I prefer my old school to be from the very old school. Let me try to explain why.  

Gerrard 1 Lampard 0.

For some time now England have been able to boast of having not one but two of the most rated central midfield players in the world.

In the red corner presenting Steven Gerrard, captain fantastic of both Liverpool and England, athlete extraordinaire, scorer of sensational goals, and blessed with the ability to drop a pass over 80 yards onto a sixpence. He has also got the knack of scoring spectacular goals when it really matters - including THAT goal against Olympiakos which enabled Liverpool to go on to eventually win the Champions League, and maybe the finest goal ever scored in an FA Cup final which took them to extra time. Since 2000, he has been capped eighty seven times by England and scored nineteen goals.

Then in the blue corner, there’s Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s modern day master of box to box play, goal scorer extraordinaire, and the owner of 3 premier league winners medals, not to mention being a three times runner up. It’s an amazing feat that Lampard scored twenty plus goals and notched twenty plus assists in seven consecutive seasons at Chelsea. He also weighs in with a very impressive eighty three caps for England since his debut in 1999, with twenty goals (twenty one if you include the finest chip never scored in an England shirt.)

So with two world power houses in midfield both pulling on the three lions, surely all is well for Fabio?