Back Of The Net… Or Not

Went to the North Sydney Oval on Sunday to watch New South Wales (or the Speedblitz Blues if you prefer the sexy alter ego) take on Tasmania in the one day (50-over) Ford Ranger Cup. After the ‘testing’ test against Sri Lanka Brett Lee, Michael Clarke and Stuart Clark were all left out of the squad after ‘consultation with Cricket Australia’. Ricky Ponting then goes and makes them all look like a load of wimmin by picking himself for Tassie and slapping the blues all round the park for the most nonchalant century you’ve ever seen.
NSW won the toss, elected to bat, and were all out for 265. Being fairly new to the game I didn’t realise that this was a bad score but was soon put right by the helpful advice some of the thirstier spectators were hurling towards the wicket. Simon Katich (56) and Brad Haddin (74) did alright, but lads like Moises Henriques were copping it, especially when he had a go at bowling and was get belted all over the place as opener Michael Dighton and Ponting made a record 257 partnership to win by 9 wickets. I got in for free as my mate Luke’s a member but tickets normally cost a whopping $15. The North Sydney Oval’s a lovely ground too, one of the oldest in Australia, as this cracking wee site will tell you. I might become a member, it costs $50 and you get into all the games for nowt (and a free Speedblitz Blues baseball cap!).

After that we jumped in a cab to the football stadium for the mighty Sydney FC Vs Queensland Roar Hyundai A-league game. It’s a cracking stadium, holds 45,000, and as with the cricket there was a “sit anywhere you like” policy seeing as it weren’t a sell out. They normally get gates of about 8,000, but the crowd on Sunday was over 16,000. And why? ‘Cause Dave one-million-dollars-a-week-for-playing-part-time-in-a-conference-league Beckham came out with the Galaxy at half time and waved to the crowd ahead of their Tuesday night friendly with Sydney. .Seeing as the game finished nil-nil, I ain’t lying when I say he got the biggest cheer of the night. The standard is truly Gills-esque. This worked in Sydney’s favour as Queensland had the better of the game and missed a couple of absolute sitters. But oh you should have seen them quaking when Juninho got wheeled on in the second half… he’s now one of the slowest players on the park and turns like a ferry. How the mighty have gotten old. Danny Tiatto (can’t cut it at Leicester? Then we’re going to have to ship you off back home to Sydney son…) got put on for Queensland at the same time and made more of an impact. I barely noticed Michael Bridges either. Sydney’s set pieces were as good as the Gills an’all – when short corners didn’t work they’d whip them into the box and watch as a Queensland centre back strolled over to where it was coming in and lazily headed it out in about ten yards of space, the boys in blue deciding to camp about 25 yards out and wait for said header rather than put a challenge in.
The crowd are funny too. There’s a singing section of about 1,000/1500 that come out with a few tunes and it’s surreal to hear chants like “Stand up, if you hate Melbourne…” and “With a packet of sweets and a cheeky smile, Kevin Muscat is a paedophile” (Muscat’s now the assistant coach at Melbourne). “Oh when Syd-ney, goes marching in” was the most popular tune of the evening though, followed by the witty “Fuck off Queensland” sung to the tune of ooh-ah Cantona. There’s also a separate group of about 100 yoofs who sing there own songs and the same songs but at completely different times. A few of them look Mediterranean and there’s a big Italian community in Leichhardt, which probably explains the odd scarf-round-the-face, megaphone directing the chanting and “Ultras” t-shirts on a few of them. One of them was waving a ‘Sin City Crew’ flag which cracked me up an’all seeing as they’re all pissed-up fifteen year olds, with a few sad lads in their twenties thrown in. One thing that was (sadly?) missing was the higher level of anger, abuse and general despair that you get when supporters have hitched themselves to a crap team for the long haul. Being a second or third tier sport for most means they're all just happy to be there, which is quite a change of attitude from Priestfield - screaming abuse at your useless right back (Ruben Zadkovich) as he gets peeled like an orange for the ninth time gets you dirty looks and tuts... Oh aye, and the reason the singing’s such a popular thing in general is because song sheets with action diagrams were given out at the beginning of the season! Only $18 a ticket though and you can buy beer, take it back to your seat and get leathered watching the game, so I’ll be down there again hoping to see a goal, or even a challenge from a corner…

P.S. You can click on any pic for a bigger version, and what the hell's happened to Andy Fordham!!

The Big Weekend

It’s a huge weekend for voting here in Oz. Not only is it the final of Australian Idol with the good-looking, deeply religious young lad (Matt) taking on the stage school-ed, singing-since-a-foetus bird (Nat), but there’s a general election an’all! They’re every three years and I was here the last time they had one. After taking the country into the Iraq war and generally being an old right-wing bastard, everyone thought John Howard was going to get mullered, but he won by a landslide and everyone bar rich conservatives and racist bush dwellers was gutted. Since then he’s introduced new employment practices that shaft the working classes, built and promised more nuclear reactors, and got even even further up George Bush’s arse, stating that Australia are in Iraq for the long haul. He’s also said that he’s going to retire before the next election and let his right hand man in the Liberal Party (!!) take over. This has led to every one expecting a landslide for the Labor (their spelling) lad… Kevin! He’s even duller than John Howard, and he’s done a Tony Blair a la ’97 by stepping into the middle ground in order to win votes, but he says he’ll sign the Kyoto Protocol (I thought Australia was green and environmentally friendly as a country, but under big John they stood next to George Bush and America in telling the rest of the world to go and poke their climate change protocol).

It’s compulsory to vote in Australia and they’re always held on a Saturday, but the best bit is the adverts. There’s generally a simpler, more direct approach to life down under so adverts by the Liberal party warning about voting in a new government at this crucial time in the county’s history (interest rates are rising fast) consist of black screens with huge white letters and a booming Aussie voice over: “LABOR WILL STUFF UP THE ECOMONY!”. Meanwhile, the husband of a Liberal MP in a crucial and marginal seat has been tippled by the news for handing out fake Labor party leaflets saying they supported building more mosques and supported the Bali Bombers.

Can you imagine Jack Straw or someone doing that? There’s so much hilarious stuff that comes under the banner of ‘You couldn’t make it up’ that I might make it a regular feature.

Also this weekend, and much more importantly, it’s Sydney F.C. Vs the Queensland Roar (cheers Harjy-boy!), a crunch game featuring two in form teams, with a special guest appearance by LA Galaxy, who’re in town to flog shirts ahead of their friendly with Sydney on Tuesday (the whole place is going Beckham mad. Which is brilliant, obviously…). The game’s on Sunday evening and during the day I’m off to the North Sydney oval to watch the Speedblitz Blues (or New South Wales as they’re also known) dish out a pasting to Tasmania in the cricket. After dispatching Sri Lanka last weekend it looks like Brett Lee, Ricky Ponting and Clark & Clarke should be back in the squad.

I've got a couple of job interviews next week but the focus is firmly on the weekend, have a cracker at the darts lads...

Panicking At The Hotel

Saw a band called The Panics at The Annandale Hotel last Friday. They were alright, had some very good tunes, but also had too many that sounded the same though not as good. The venue was decent, very much like The Garage – is that open yet? From what I saw of it Annandale seemed a bit like Holloway, rather than the top of Upper Street/Islington.

A Media Buyers Dream?

The telly here is properly shocking. Saturday night, prime time between 8.30 and 9.30? That’ll be The Bill. One of the other channels is doing a Stars Wars season an’all, so on a Saturday in the run up to Christmas we can enjoy Empire Strikes Back, with Jedi next week. It doesn’t get much better during the week either, apart from the odd yank show like CSI or Without A Trace. But what’s interesting on the big American shows is that they stretch them out for 70 minutes with four breaks in each, as well as plenty of sponsorship and huge amount of ads between the shows. Interesting in a drives-you-mental way, natch, making their version of Sky+ (called Foxtel IQ, it’s got the same remote and everything) an essential purchase when we move into our own drum.

Channel Ten are also ‘going big’ on the fact that they’re just got the rights to show repeats of Friends. Every break you get a “coming soon to Ten – Friends!” like it was a new series or summat. Fair dos they probably haven’t had the chance to see it on E4 every night for the last hundred years, but still.
Oh aye, and one of the highest rating shows here (The Chasers, it’s a comedy thing taking the piss out of the media and current affairs) blows away the competition by getting a mahoosive 1.6m viewers a week! It’s on the ABC, which is like the BBC but with adverts, and there was some quote in the paper from one of the TV heads the other day saying something like ‘there isn’t a commercial show out there who wouldn't sell their grandmother for viewing figures like that…’

...And Why Not?

(Jonathan's alright, but Barry will always be the man)

There's an old art-deco cinema up the road, with the main screen having an old fashioned organ that rises up through the floor on special occasions, Saturday nights etc. I've been up there twice recently, once to see "Waitress", which was alright for a bit of a chick flick, made slightly more interesting by the fact that the lass who wrote, directed and appeared in it was murdered and it made to look like a suicide not long after it was finished.
"Tell No One" was better. It was out in the UK in the summer but it's pretty new here, and is a French thriller based on an American book. It's interesting to see the French depart from their usual "the plight of the human condition" mood pieces, normally filmed in black and white and about two gay fellys who see each other every day at the local cafe but never admit that they're in love with one another (err, probably).
It's good to see their take on a thriller and even better not seeing Willis tooling about in a syrup giving it the large. The main boy in it is the spit of Dustin Hoffman mind, so much so that it's quite distracting for the first wee while, in the same way that the German lad in (the Oscar-winning) 'The Lives Of Others' was the double of Kevin Spacey.

So, in conclusion then, Waitress: no that great. Tell No One: Defo worth seeing. Join us next week when we ask "Paul Hogan, where are you now?"

“So, what are you good at?”

More than one person has told me that for online jobs in Sydney, there are a couple of recruitment consultancy punters that are the folk to speak to. Total pros, if anyone can sort you out, they can, blah blah blah. Unfortunately they haven’t worked out how not to sound like recruitment consultants yet.
I think most of us had the joy of going through this about a thousand years ago when we were still children (or that might have been the way they make you feel), and combined with the fact that we’re obviously brilliant at what we do, could partly explain why there hasn’t been a lot of eagerness to revisit such times again. Needless to say, visiting one of them for a ‘consultation’ is still the cracking time it was way back when. Being asked by some bird who’s a GCSE in typing away from working down Tescos what you’re good at is a right laugh, her sitting there grinning expectantly at you, pen poised over some assessment form whilst you cough and splutter about what your strengths and weaknesses are.

“Well, number one, I’d say my main weakness is a lack of ability when it comes to self assessment vis-à-vis the search for employment. I find myself focussing on things like that expensive and trendy looking cactus you’ve got on your desk there, and wondering what it’ll feel like when I impale my face on it thirty seconds from now… number two is a definite inability to listen and play along with the type of absolute bollocks you lot come out with, it makes me want to get a job in a chill warehouse and never ever leave it.”

Obviously I expressed this to the doris through the magic of body language whilst expressing verbal agreement with the recommendations she ‘threw out there’. My CV now contains lines like: “I have excellent communication skills, strong team and relationship management skills and first rate multi-tasking abilities.”

What the fuck does that even mean? I can speak and I’m not a mentalist? Even then, the “strong team and relationship management skills” bit is true only when compared to the night pickers at ADL.

Melbourne Cup

It was the Melbourne Cup today, the Aussie version of the Grand National, held on the first Tuesday in November and billed as 'the race that stops a nation', which would tend to happen if you held the grand national on a weekday, but it's a decent excuse for a work drink and time off. Unfortunatley my clinical efficiency let me down and I went with my heart and backed English nag Tungsten Strike, thinking the darts connection was a sign. No idea why as I've missed all the big darts nights this year and the eventual winner was called... Efficient.

Also big in the news (and to tickle the fancy of you creative media sales types) was the subliminal advertising during the ARIAs (the Aussie Brit Awards). You couldn't make it up.

Hullo!

G’day brothers! I’ve finally got here, and finally got some type of blog up and running. I reckon I can just bang on about the stuff I’ve been up to and save typing the same thing in five different emails (or copying and pasting if you’re Dumville – ooosha!), and you can leave comments or questions which will get us all ‘talking’ in the same place. Hopefully summat like that anyway. I took the picture on the top right hand side myself, one of the upsides of living with Anna’s mum for a bit is that she lives in a stunning location and this view is thirty seconds walk from her house. It was hot when I got here on Sunday and I went for a swim in the local pool (also a short stroll from the house), a picture of which can be found here I know, I know... but I’ve got to start this thing with one decent/shocking view! It’s going to quickly descend into inane ramblings about how corn flakes taste different here or whatever. I'll balance it out by saying I didn't get an interview for that MTV job. It was more of a techie 'project manager' role and I was considered too editorial, so I'm not choked.


Got here on Sunday after a twenty hour flight from New York, which went off without a hitch. Left Friday evening and completely lost Saturday due to crossing the dateline from east to west, which was weird. Just one wee point though – never fly United if you can help it! They were the only ones who offered tickets on the route and time we wanted, and they’re terrible. Having to buy an awful sandwich Easyjet-style on a six hour flight from NY to LA was almost funny. On account of getting bad seats on the flight over from London and me being such a lean and athletic type, we got upgraded to ‘premium economy’ for the journey but all they’ve done is effectively create a fourth class and called it regular economy. You had to walk through it to go to the lav and it was mayhem. Remember that time coming back from Edinburgh on the train, when you had to leave first class to go to the toilet? It was like that, except you returned to a seat that was like any normal one you’d expect anywhere else, and for that you normally pay 85% more than economy. And the food! What’s the deal with that… (I’m not going into a Seinfeld stand up routine about the grub, but it was meatloaf. Seriously).