We met Belter Brogan in 2012 when he delivered the Inaugural Wacko Jacko Oration on the State of the Game. A recap: In 20 years of suburban footy, he racked up 97 games and over 250 weeks of enforced holidays before Acquired Knuckle Injury forced him to retire. The tribunal legend remains a consulting ideas man for the AFL, despite restraining orders. The Sanatorium for the Confounded has since become a high-security twilight home, but Belter was able to deliver his second oration from the Sportsman’s Wing on his special heavily-padded, rivet-secured computer via skype. Though it ended abruptly, Robert Drane managed to record the entire speech.

G’day. Years ago I was honoured to deliver the Inaugural Wacko Jacko Oration. Anyone here recollect it? Me neither. A transcript would’ve been bloody handy, as I was asked not to give a repeat performance. Not that repetition’s my style – unless it’s involuntary. I take a pill before meals.

Today I address a serious subject. To paraphrase JFK, we are faced with a monstrous conspiracy. The very word “soccer” is repugnant in a free and open society. No matter how advanced we become as a species, a bloke should be allowed freedom of speech, choice of torture techniques when he can’t pay for utilities, and the right to refuse sitting through soccer games!

Take it from me, the world outside this wide brown land is lousy with foreigners! Most of these unenlightened souls want wogball as the World Game. I’m here to warn you. Australian Rules football, a last bastion against this nefarious New World Order, is under threat!

Every four years, this “world game” confers its biggest prize, called a “world cup”. Now the game itself is harmless – its players are such lightweights they could tap-dance on a pavlova – but its propaganda machine targets over-protective mums obviously ignorant of its complete lack of meaningful violence.

Every four years the paranoid AFL does its best to disguise itself as a look-mummy-no-hands game of chasey and stops just short of introducing the spherical Sherrin. But it’ll happen. I bet there are high-security warehouses full of the bloody things in outback Australia, near Pine Gap, just waiting for the day. Goggle it!

Mate, no-one micturates in my moccasins and tells me it’s raining! A recent Nic Naitanui incident saw the Hegelian dialectic in action! Goes like this: you want a certain solution – say, “turn Australian Rules into soccer”. You create a problem: Naitanui, big man, lays hard but fair tackle on decidedly diminutive bloke. Doesn’t pin his arms or sling him or anything, but the midget goes over and drives his nut into the turf like a nail. No malice aforethought. Gone are the days when you’d have a few seconds to line up a bloke before you bumped him into next week, and enough time to ask him to bring back next Saturday’s Tattslotto numbers.

The dwarf in question, Karl Amon, gets delayed concussion. With delayed panic they’re judging the bump’s intent by its effect, contradicting the notion of malicious forethought. Gives ‘em carte blanche to impose any old sentence on a bloke just for doing what he’s trained to do! Just as well Amon pulled up sweet.

In the split second it takes a journo to swallow his morning Krispy Kreme, a player’s supposed to do the work of a flamin’ calculator, crystal ball, Newton metre, not to mention Kung Fu Sifu, and apply exactly the appropriate force with supernatural foresight – or else! ¬- while review panels and pudgy journos judge it with their usual supernatural hindsight! So with all the time in the world and slo-mo replays, Match Review Officer Michael Christian reckons Naitanui also had all the time in the world to go in easy. “High contact, medium impact” comes the poetic pronouncement. Paid Monday morning quarterbacks (that’s a reference to an obscure game that gets stopped more often than a Latino driver in South Dakota. Not worth looking up).

What follows are silly circular discussions with no resolution coz it’s like trying to agree on whether the bloke who comes second in a two-man contest to decide the world’s biggest loser is, in fact, the winner.

The mooncalves in AFL House are more muddled than Masher was when the coach told him at training to walk the chalk boundary till he found where it ended (we waited till dark before calling him in for a beer. To this day he swears he was getting warm!).

Anyway, there follows the reaction to the manufactured problem, a cacophony of PC squeals: “This is really dangerous. Big men have to look after little men.” How did that suddenly become an issue? Enter Duty of bloody Care! That Trojan Horse for the nanny state, or soccer.

Someone’s even proposed separate competitions based on size! Brilliant opportunity for a midget sideshow! I thought we’d progressed since dwarf-tossing was a family attraction, but no. So why don’t we just make the oval a Star Wars set, stick onesies on them and call them Ewoks? Or institute a buddy system, maybe have the big blokes carry ‘em around under one arm and give ‘em the same number. You can have no.5 and Mini-Me no.5. Might play havoc with game structure but hey, fans will crawl over broken glass to witness Duty of Care in all its glory!

See the end game here? In Aussie Rules, you pick the ball up! Blokes go hard at it. Solution: leave it on the ground and make it round. Then kick it. Now lower the goals, get rid of points, stick an onion bag at the back and a crossbar on top. Presto! Aussie Rules is the World Game! Now, let’s call it soccer!

It’s time Aussies woke up! Most of the world is downright un-Australian and the only reason soccer’s played all over the globe is because the rest of the globe is full of non-Aussies. And we pander to them, which is like selling the car for a jerry can of petrol.

I mean stone the crows and stiffen the maggots! Every four years we pay homage to their little show. Isn’t that little cultural cringe sufficient? Do we also turn our game into poofball to show we’ve progressed? Haven’t we ticked enough cultural boxes? We’ve got levels of road rage, public drunkenness, under-age drug-taking and random violence to rival the world’s most broadminded cultures. We’ve got a world-class education system that confers UN-endorsed certificates on unruly imps just for turning up! We’re well-and-truly on track in the cosmopolitan stakes. Do we have to stoop to bloody soccer as well? Spare me! How’d it come to this?

A lot of it has to do with the “concussion issue”, I reckon. Hoax! Neurological damage is all in the mind. Here in the sportsman’s wing, most of us acquired our befuddlement on footy fields, although I have to say some of us got off to a flying start the day they clamped the old umbilicus a few seconds too long while it was still plugged in – oops! There goes 30 IQ points!

We’re getting a lot of ex-players claiming brain damage, but how lucky are they? Know why you don’t get blokes my vintage making the same claims? Most of them wouldn’t know the bloody difference!

The brain is a complex and delicate organ. A super computer can’t even emulate the brain function of a mollusc – something they have in common with my fellow residents, and AFL House. Now I hear neurophysiologists have set up a “brain bank” in Sydney to deal with the grey matter. Dunno what they keep in a brain bank, but a few blokes in my immediate environment might be lining up for a low-doc loan!

My old teammate and co-tenant Masher is, right in front of me as I speak, drawing ducks on the wall and feeding them. I admit that sort of behaviour makes people suspect something’s amiss. A few rugby league types here played a game I couldn’t help but admire! You judge a sport by the Biffs ‘n’ Brawls highlight reels it generates, and the ol’ mobile grappling would easily pump out three two-hour vids a season, no worries!

But they shouldn’t feel superior in the brain cell department! Back in the day a certain no-neck who dragged his hairy knuckles through two rugby codes, Rex Mossop, reckoned “aerial ping-pong” players were a bunch of quiche munchers. Must’ve said it. Couldn’t have written it. There’s no way that Cro-Magnon could have actually spelt quiche!

But me? No issue with the tissue here. I’ve been keeping the brain free of as many grey areas as possible – and believe me, the old “eternal persistence of consciousness” isn’t always easy to maintain around here, particularly on Bingo and singalong nights.

Activity’s the key. I take full advantage of our library so I can continue to effectively carry out duties as voluntary consultant to the AFL. As a footy futurist, I’m required to be eloquent, logical and visionary, with a vocabulary that won’t be exhausted ordering fags, a pie, coffee and People at the 7-11. The matron here calls me Thesaurus Rex!

I tend to bypass your popular contemporary publications like Plank Your Way to Mental Health and go straight for practical exercises like Sudoku. Being old sportsmen, we all used to enjoy a bit of full-contact Tai Chi in the mornings, much to the disgust of our instructor, Master Wen. Nothing funnier than a sage old monk doing his rag! One day he wanted to fight the lot of us! Eighty years of self-denial down the dunny in one moment of madness! Last I heard the old bloke had loosened up, broadened his horizons and now waits every morning at the door of the local Thirsty Camel. Good on ‘im!

Anyway, back to my point. I understand Aussie Rules is not a “world game”. But whose fault’s that? I blame lack of vision, bad administration and powerful elites. I’m talking the pedo and necro level of elite! Knights of the Realm types. Don’t believe me? When was the last AFL champion you saw on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list? ‘Bout as much chance of that as I have of getting an OBE for services to dentistry.

We’ve had our chances. We could have acquainted ignorant New Australians in other countries who’ve never been here and have no intention of coming with the game via some Biffs ‘n’ Brawls highlight reels. But no! AFL House can’t even organise one Atrocious Accent Trophy game between two countries in the little ol’ southern hemisphere that speak something approximating English, only without the humour. I’m talking of course about Noo Zulland and Seth Efrica.

Want irony? Officials don’t get manhandled in Aussie Rules like they do in soccer! Look at the recent circus concerning unequal punishments for touching umpires. Tom Hawkins touches one – week’s holiday. Simultaneously one of his teammates brushes him from behind and the intent’s different, apparently. But what if that bloke slips and accidentally lays a Ninja death-touch on the white maggot? Hang on. Just scribbling a memo to myself: “Workshop death-touch idea”.

“Duty of Care” is as relevant to contact sport as “food safety” to a Sardinian maggot eating contest. Now it seems the game will either become soccer, or a world leader in humane politics and equality for sexual lunatics and whingers. Blokes, distraught at the death of their favourite Celtic death-punk-Afro-funk-electronica DJ, will pull out of games. It’s not impossible to imagine some highly-paid imposter so distressed at the passing of his gerbil, he’ll miss a final, his team will lose by a point and no-one will dare complain.

Which brings me to Zinedine Zidane. Sorry … I laugh every time I think of the Bozo and his little nod in the direction of an opponent who said something about his mother, which actually lost his team a World Cup final – something harder to get into than the front door at Goldman Sachs! Apparently it was an honourable act. How European! If that melodrama is capable of producing heroes at all, the recipient of that headbutt is one for sure!

A key opposition player who takes the bait at every reference to his mother or sister or whoever it was is gold mate! Solid gold! I’d be trawling Goggle for every “your mama is so stupid/ugly/fat/dumb/easy” gag I could find, especially if there was a world bloody cup involved! Imagine him playing real footy. You’d probably only get a “Ta mère” out before his spud head’s tapped your onion, ump’s blown the whistle, Sherrin’s sailing through the posts, and he’s good for five weeks on the sideline! Beauty! No red cards, so you get a chance to even up!

I reckon we’ve caught some European histrionics. Where else have all these bloody Social Justice Warriors come from? At my old suburban club, I recently saw a donation box on the bar for some cause involving sex tours to Asia. Once, to their eternal discredit, my teammates might have mistaken it at first glance for a contribution box toward the end-of-season trip!

Now I understand empathy and compassion. I keep ‘em somewhere. I’m no Mother Theresa – though I was conferred that nickname after ignoring a drunken beggar in Adelaide. Look, I was between pub appointments, already a bit Schindlers, and didn’t want to see my hard-earned wasted on mood-altering substances. Fair enough, don’t you reckon?

But these days it’s all about caring and sharing and Nat Fyfe man-buns. I got on a fan forum recently and one current player who’s so hipster playing in the firsts is obviously too “mainstream” for him – either that or he’s enfeebled by veganism – asked me what my “spirit animal” was! Spirit animal! Since when was that a thing? Anyway my response – “roast chicken” – went over like a wrought-iron kite. How was I know spirit animals are supposed to be alive, or at least served raw? Ah well, he went silent for two weeks. Bonus! Probably cost his club a fortnight’s worth of Shamanic healing, the touchy-feely freeloader.

One thing I never hurt was a bloke’s feelings – not unintentionally, anyway! Nowadays players have to worry about it all the time. What about that Carlton midfielder who went running to an umpire whingeing about persistent homophobic slurs, disablist abuse, body shaming and threats of violence? The fact that it came from his teammates made it more upsetting, I suppose. But still …

No-one likes to see anyone hurt in any way on the field, unless the team needs it, or he deserves it. Or it’s a low-life on the opposing side. Generally, once a bloke puts on an opposition jumper you know he’s asking for it.

Might as well go the biff, because these days you’re a potential criminal no matter what you do. Questioning a bloke’s sexuality? You’d have to bloody guess it first! Once you’d line up on a bloke and you might open with, “what are ya? A sheila?” Today, with the amount of genders the sentient being you’re playing on who’s decided to bravely shun social norms and preconceptions has to choose from, you’d be sucking the quarter-time orange by the time you finished asking!

Look I know we only go along these days to cheer those superheroes of the game like Tolerance, Equality, Opportunity, Affirmative Action, OH&S, Duty of Care – but honestly, can we really fit in any more HR practices and remain a mere game?

Soon, everyone will be allowed to bring their bloody “comfort animals” onto the field. The precedent was set when some sheila tried unsuccessfully to bring her comfort peacock onto a United Airlines flight. They apologised and reviewed their policy. Lucky it wasn’t a comfort bloody rhinoceros! Mind you, that might dovetail neatly into this great idea I once had of allowing at least one non-human on every team.

But it won’t stop there! Once headgear’s compulsory, players will demand safety accessories that express their current identity, and add more! Every hipster with 20/20 vision will be wearing his clear-lensed non-prescription unbreakable black-rimmed retro glasses onto the field and having his club pay the life-coaching bill for his inner conflict between the necessity to be competitive on one hand, and remain ironic about winning on the other. Oh, the bloody angst!

The “isms” these petals throw about! If they were punches, every game would rival the Windy Hill Brawl. Not a bad thing! We must have landed ourselves a generation of real bigots with so many blokes being accused of racism.

Back in my day, we’d never heard of racism!  We had a multicultural little bloke on our team in the early ‘80s. Agamemnon Ng. Great little fella for a souvlaki-sucking rice-burner, we all agreed. Lousy player, but tactically crucial. You see, we’d bend to no opponent who maligned Agga, and it happened our response to that abuse was perfectly in keeping with our game plan. “Render them edentate”, our legendary philosopher coach, “Delicate” Des Foster would say. We had to look it up – there was no Goggle in those days – but when we discovered it entailed an opponent requiring a proctologist just to locate his choppers, we got his drift. No worries about that!

The all-in that would inevitably follow such unacceptable vilification gave me a chance to “tag” one or two elusive mouthy little smartarses who’d had more comebacks than Johnny Farnham and had been giving us scoreboard grief. And engage the occasional crowd member in a bit of good-natured badinage. Once, I light-heartedly spiflicated a smartarse who’d got out of his car and invaded the sacred turf to remonstrate about me belting smartarse junior. Eighteen weeks all-up, plus an assault charge, a night’s accommodation courtesy of the local constabulary and a $1700 fine. That hurt. Seventeen hunge would have bought you a Honda Civic in 1981. Ol’ Ngy owes me, I reckon!

We knew how to resolve things like adults in the ‘burbs. We had the practice of cordially inviting the opposition into the club rooms after a game, win or lose, for a few cleansing ales. Maybe they’d stay for the pie-and-porn night, and perhaps we’d end it, cleansed to the gills, with a friendly mass melee in the carpark sometime after 2 a.m. If mediation was required, there were generally off-duty or uniformed wallopers enjoying a quiet one in the rooms – unless they were rat-arse themselves and heavily involved in the action. All good fun.

The old-style scallywag is now as common as a Thirsty Camel in Saudi Arabia. Even Premiership celebrations have come under scrutiny ever since Sam Kekovich – a lousy leader of men but an accomplished follower of women – failed to break free of a celebratory embrace for the official team photograph morning after the 1975 Granny. The poor old Western Bulldogs’ Grand Final festivities of 2016 were still being discussed a year later – mind you, they were still in progress at that stage.

They tried hard to nail Richmond, as well, getting mileage out of some topless opportunist who posted on Instagram or something. Big deal. I remember our ’77 Grand Final celebration. The dressing room was a bloody riot! Party girls, party pies, streams of Carrington Blush flying through the joint like tickertape, congratulatory strip-a-gram, four cartons of VB consumed in the first five minutes, all the boys lighting up, lightbulbs flashing, ice-bucket tipped over the coach, the club president and his lovely missus. What’s wrong with letting go after a long, arduous season? Looking back, we might have got a bit ahead of ourselves, as it was only half-time – but we led by 12 bloody goals!

We came out for the second half inexplicably flat. Asleep on the job. In some cases, literally. No excuses though. Bastards ended up beating us with a rushed behind, after the siren. In the ensuing fracas, sparked after I gave the over-celebrating opposing captain a congratulatory pop on the snout, someone accidentally picked up the offending umpire and drove him headfirst into the mud. No-one saw him after that, until he bobbed up in the club rooms for a beer in a neck brace. His atrocious decision was largely forgiven but he nevertheless sat by himself, in the committee room, with the door locked, until he saw his chance and hurried off, a forlorn figure, empty can bouncing off his bonce on the way out.

What does all this have to do with soccer? Nothing! And that’s my point. Soccer ain’t football! Turns out this takeover conspiracy’s been on the cards for decades. Don’t worry, I’ve noticed sneaky little popular culture references preparing us for it! See ‘em everywhere! I draw your attention to an obscure 1982 Neighbours episode they showed here the other night, full of occult symbols linking FIFA and the AFL, in which an actor named McLachlan (That’s right! As in Gillon!) mentions donating his organs, which of course include the bladder – a veiled reference to the innards of a Sherrin. Note, too, how “bladder” sounds like “Blatter”. Coincidence? I think not! Hidden in plain sight – but I gotta go! My mate Masher’s finished feeding those ducks, and I think he’s about to start shooting them! Thanks for listening.

Mash! Where’d you get that? Put that down, Mash! Nurse! Call Security …

Published in Inside Sport, July 2018