For as long as I can remember my various footy coaches have gone ballistic if anyone broke the golden “No U-turns!” rule… All this time I’d always thought they were talking about on-field ‘U-turns’.. It’s only taken forty odd years but Riggas has finally set us all straight.. The rule is “No ‘U-turns’ on the way to the game… when you’re in a bus… with a trailer… at a bus stop (Riggas, you’re doing it wrong..)… with twenty blokes who’ve been drinking beer and butternut schnapps.. “

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, last Friday night was our annual road trip to Kambalda to line up against the Kambalda Veterans. ‘Captain Third Gear’ was a scratching this year so Riggas grabbed the tiller and as a consequence, we kept off the ripple strips and the engine’s red-line for the entire journey. Special conditioning coach Steven ‘The Weapon’ Shaw used Butternut Schnapps to mask the taste of our peptides (Why do you think Hirdy has been frowning for the last 18 months? Those things taste disgusting!) and a couple of team players took the top layer off the esky to ensure the lid would close properly… Selfless play fellas; well done. With such a single minded approach to our match preparation I believe we can be forgiven for thinking Riggas would get us to the ground without incident but upon entering the unfamiliar snarl that is downtown Kambalda West on a Friday night, Riggas did the ‘Nick Missed-the-Chernoff” and nearly had us going around the block; luckily he spotted a bus stop and, turning from the middle of the road, attempted a three point turn… harder than you think when the bus has the turning circle of the ‘Indian Pacific’, the windscreen is hard up against said bus stop and the trailer you’d forgotten you were towing is jackknifed. Fortunately he had twenty blokes to advise him on how best to extract himself from the predicament, by which time the second layer of the esky had also taken a hit..

Once at the ground we were joined by a further half dozen players who’d made their own way to the ground… 26 players is a good turnout in anyone’s books!
In the pre-game I was relieved to see Stan dressed in white and carrying a whistle. For those of you who don’t know Stan, he has trimmed down a bit but when I last played on him if he’d been a bit taller he would have been perfectly round. He only has one good leg but he doesn’t bring it to footy because he doesn’t want it finishing up like his bad leg. On the day in question he got ‘best on’.. Getting my arse kicked by a one-legged man is not something I needed appearing on my highlights reel again.

During the pre-game address Jim (the other umpire) explained the rules as there were a few blokes playing their first game for us and Kambalda always have a couple of ring-ins (although in the past the ring-ins have always been human, as opposed to humanoid… trust me, there is a difference!). Toxic is the current holder of the ‘Kalgoorlie Masters Shit-Stirrer’s Award’, so when he requested a ruling on the legitimacy of Kambalda playing a Sasquatch most blokes thought he was ‘taking the piss’.. in hindsight, it was a pretty fair question! Seven foot tall, beady eyes peering from a hair covered face and knuckles dragging on the ground?! Not out of the question.. We were in Kambalda after all..

Kambalda had the bare eighteen (Seventeen plus the Sasquatch) so the call went up for volunteers to even the numbers and with a speed that belies his 88 (or is it 98?) years, Cobber had jumped ship and was in a Kambalda Guernsey before we’d finished saying the words.

Right from the ‘get go’ it was obvious that we had done very we’ll in the preseason draft. Corey Jones had tested the free agent waters after last year’s KCGM game and in his debut game in Master’s colours had an absolute cracker.

Pete Hicks (I hope that’s the correct spelling; Bully handled the team sheet and made sure it was forwarded to the association on time so I didn’t get to check the spelling) is also no stranger to a footy field and it showed as he racked up quality possessions between the arcs all night.

Everyone was getting plenty of the footy and we had great numbers around the ball. Paddo made the comment that he’d been doing the five-star handball drill at training for the last five years but he’d never seen it done during a game before.. it was a pretty fair observation but there was plenty of pressure on the ball carrier and while it may have looked like we were overusing the ball for the most part we maintained possession and were able to get it into our forward line… at which point the Sasquatch would pluck it out of the air and send it back to us. As the game wore on our superior numbers and running took its toll on the Kambalda boys and when the final siren rang out they were pretty keen to get off the ground but I reckon our blokes could have easily gone for another quarter.

Are you comfortable? If not, get yourself a beer (coffee if you’re reading this at work) and get comfortable because for the past three years the most helpful thing I’ve done in the cause of Master’s football is to leave the field of play (many will be quick to point out that this quite often happens rather early in the game..) All this changed on Friday night when I tackled my St George Cricket Club teammate ‘Macca’! Yep, it’s taken a while but I’m not missing this opportunity to pump my own tyres up! It was in the third quarter out on our fifty metre arc when Macca grabbed a loose ball, gave the fend off as he wheeled around me (just like all the other times..) and headed for the Kambalda goals.. I threw out a despairing arm (deja vu for me here too!), but this time two fingers caught in the sleeve of his jumper. Macca’s legs continued to head, at pace, toward the Kambalda goals but his upper body was checked somewhat.. Equally, my legs were heading toward our goals at a pace inconsistent with that of my torso with the result being that both of us left the ground and began to rotate (quite quickly as I recall..) .. After a few of these rotations; (I lost count at three) we descended once more to terra firma, at which point Macca said “Aww F#@k!” and Jim said “Holding the ball!”
I dished off the hands to Chappy but he ballsed it up so a minute or so later I grabbed a loose ball and tried to wheel around, guess who? Once more Macca and I went into the dance but this time I managed to get a boot on the ball and pump it deep into the fifty, once more we crashed to earth but this time Jim said “Nah mate, you slung him… it’s your kick Kanga!” Gold Jim, absolute Gold!

While on the performance of the umpires, I thought Jim and Stan did a cracking job! They were absolutely red hot on the ‘second tackle’ rule right from the start but they were also absolutely consistent throughout. All power to you if you can break a tackle, but do it twice? Well, that’s just being a smartarse! And Shawry… out on the far flank with the pill and a couple of Kambalda players.. he baulked this way, shimmied that way, wrong footed a shadow (his own I think?), turned a Kadaitcha man inside, made Brucie Champion dizzy and exhausted all Jim’s patience.. the Kambalda blokes were having none of it either; one had his arms crossed, another had his hands on his hips and the third one was picking his nose. Jim stopped the rot when he awarded the first ever free kick against a player for “Lairising”. Has to be one of my favourite umpiring decisions; right up there with Al Pendal’s “Your free kick Bully; I played footy with your Dad and he was a good bloke!” from last year.

Best players were the usual suspects; big Zane Paddo took the chocolates but he was ably supported by Aids, Toxic, Joey Jet-Li, Brodie, Weeds, Rosco (although he did take on Brucie Champion once and we all know there’s no future in that..) and the new fellas in Corey and Hicksie. Chappy got frustrated a lot and Pavy had one of his ‘other’ nights.. you know when he has those nights when he single grabs everything, drills sixty metre passes and just seems to pull one out of his hat? Well this wasn’t one of those.. New blokes Michael and Dylan haven’t played a heap of AFL but they got in and had a crack and were not disgraced (Dylan has his flour-bag kicks down pat but a flour bag through the big sticks is still worth six points!) It seemed that everybody got plenty of the ball, shared it around and had a good time. Well done also to Riggas for ringing the changes and for making sure everyone got a heap of game time. And well done to the St George Cricket Club blokes (Macca included) who turned up for a busy bee at Mick Dillon’s place; a heap of work got done and all while carrying Toxic who was ordinary…

Kanga