Hang in there, Carol Ann.

I’ve previously written of my support for the Collingwood Football Club in the Australian Football League [1, 2]. Especially that I was 11 years old in 1958 when Collingwood won its 13th premiership, and it took 32 years (in which it lost eight Grand Finals) to win its 14th – in 1990 when I was 43 [3]. Last Saturday Collingwood won its 15th premiership [4]. Here are some of my thoughts on this superb effort:

1. Collingwood supporters tend to be pessimists. So after the draw the previous week, I didn’t think Collingwood would win last Saturday.

2. I feel sorry for St Kilda fans. Since it began competing in 1897 St Kilda’s won only one premiership. In 1966. Against Collingwood. So I wouldn’t have minded if it’d won last Saturday. But it was not to be.

3. At the end of last Saturday’s game – which I heard on the radio as we don’t have TV reception here in Mole Creek – I shed a tear. Partly out of happiness, partly due to relief, and partly because I don’t expect another Collingwood premiership in my lifetime.

4. Despite this, Collingwood is the betting favourite to win the 2011 Grand Final [5]. It’ll be played on the first Saturday in October [6], as the 1990 and 2010 ones were, despite traditional Grand Final day being the last Saturday in September. Also Collingwood has a young team – the second youngest average age of any Grand Final winning team – and a playing structure other teams have yet to fathom.

5. So maybe Collingwood will win its 16th flag in 2011. Here’s hoping!

6. In the meantime, I was wrong about it being unlikely the 15th flag would be won in Carol Ann Duffy’s tenure at UK Poet Laureate [7]. And she’s Poet Laureate until May 2019 – when, if I’m alive, I’ll be 71 years old.
Ho hum.

List: 'Australia’s Top 10 Brands'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. Last Saturday in AFL football, (my team) Collingwood thrashed its arch-rival Carlton. Post-match Carlton’s coach said ‘To see players pull out, not go in and miss tackles, it’s damning on our brand’ [1]. When I read that I thought ‘Eh? A football club’s a brand?’ But why not? Of course it is. Bastion Brands is a Melbourne consultancy specialising in creating brands [2]. Its ‘About’ webpage’s loaded with jargon [3]. But one jargon-free sentence is ‘We believe that when a business has the courage to stand for something in the marketplace, it becomes a brand’. Bastion calls its branding methodology BE – because, as it says, ‘We believe the best corporate brands, such as Apple, Google, Virgin and Bunnings are those whose customers feel they can BE a part of’. Using that methodology, Bastion’s compiled a list of ‘Australia’s Top 10 Brands’. Refreshingly, it explains, at least in broad terms, the multi-stage process used to arrive at this list. It says being on the list’s ‘not a measurement of financial success or morality, but rather pure brand power’. And ‘not all of these brands want to sell stuff – but they sure as hell could’. [4] You can see that number 5 is the Collingwood Football Club – about which Bastion says ‘The army of people who belong to arguably Australia’s greatest club continue to grow in belief and passion’. That’s only because Collingwood continues to thrash lesser clubs. Like Carlton.

farmdoc's blog post number 369

I don’t know when AFL (then VFL) football turned from a sport into a business. But I know the prime architect was a certain Mr Samuel (of whom I’ve previously written). As a lad I’d gone to many matches, with my Dad and his brothers. They were Carlton supporters, so we mostly went to Princes Park. Our possie was behind the goalposts at the Royal Parade end. We’d take a wooden fruit-box for me to stand on. And I ritually had a meat pie at half-time. A Collingwood-supporting family friend, Bruce Andrew, pitied me as a Collingwood supporter attending Carlton matches, so he took me to some Collingwood games, at Victoria Park, the holy-of-holies where opposition teams feared to tread. Carton played at Princes Park from 1897 to 2005, and Collingwood at Victoria Park from 1892 to 1999. Over a century of club history and pride, summarily ended by Mr Samuel. Now it’s emerging that the desertion of local club grounds for mega-stadia has been a financial disaster for the clubs. Surprise, surprise. For the very same corporatist, Mr Samuel, was prime mover of the 1996 decision to merge the Victoria State Opera into Opera Australia, which has proved an artistic and financial debacle. Thanks partly to him, I no longer attend the football or the opera. As Pete Seeger sings: ‘When will they ever learn?’ Don’t answer that – it’s a rhetorical question.