"League's darkest hour"

It's gone very pear shaped for rugby league here - Melbourne Storm, who won the title (Grand Final, twice, in 2007 and 2009), won the league three times, and have pretty much been been the dominant team for the past five years, have been cheating for years and have now been stripped of their titles and hammered in fines and points.

They were fiddling the books so that they could spend more than the salary cap and therefore afford a better team than anyone else. The salary cap per team per year is $4.1m. They were generally spending about 400k more per year, which is what a star player would be on, or it'd be spread amongst a few to keep a team together.

At the end of every season there's always a lot of transfer movement because if you got a new player in, you'd have to get shot of someone (or two, or three, depending on the quality of the player coming in). They'd go to other clubs, who in turn would have to release players to be able to remain within their cap. Alternatively, if a young player blooms into a star over the course of a season and his contract is up for renewal, then he either goes to a new club that can pay him more, or his current club has to get shot of other players to be able to raise his wages to keep him.

Melbourne got away with it for so long because they got shot of some of their stars the same way everyone else did - teams like the Brisbane Broncos used to raise more eyebrows by being more successful at keeping their teams together.

With Melbourne and Victoria as a whole being an Aussie Rules state and only having the one League club, there's talk that this will be the death of Rugby in Victoria. It's aknowledged that the players and coaches had nothing to do with it, but their medals now mean nothing, and the teams they beat don't want to be awarded a tainted title by default (which they're saying wont happen anyway). They've also had millions of dollars in sponsorship deals cancelled.

As champions the odds of them coming bottom of the table this year were about 250-1, and bookies knew something was up when they started taking big bets on that outcome recently. They've been stripped of their points and been told that even if they win their games this season, they won't be awarded points so will automatically come last.

As silly as the wages are in the Premiership, at least it means that couldn't happen there, but imagine if it turned out Man Utd or Chelsea had been somehow cheating for years, by bribing refs or summat? Stripped of their titles and docked so many points they couldn't help but come last. It'd almost be worth the damage to the game just to see the look on John Terry's mooey. Mental.

The lad at the centre of it (Brian Waldron) has resigned as the top boy of the Melbourne Rebels Super 15s rugby union team, six weeks into their first season as a new club, and as he used to be chairman St Kilda in the AFL between 2001-4, which also has a salary cap, they're now getting their books looked at very closely.

In other news, Thailand's looking like it's going to go off properly, I reckon I could have called it right by saying this weekend could be when the laksa hits the fan. The reds and the yellows are shaping up for a big row, the army's in there and there's now pink shirts who are getting the hump at all the commotion that the others are causing. Someone's got to give the airport a tickle surely? That's how you get the world to notice, non? Excellent. If I was supersticious I'd think I wasn't supposed to come back, there's been the odd sign here and there...

Getting Better

"It's getting better all the time, I've got my wings and I can fly, I will fly to you..."

Here's hoping eh?

Things are looking up, but there's still many ways in which it could not happen, and at the moment that seems to centre around the fact that hundreds of planes and thousands of crew are out of position, and that flights will still be cancelled due to that for a fair while after planes are flying normally again.

The story I've imagined as the dream scenario is already happening though: one of the people they interviewed coming off one of the first flights to land at Heathrow, a flight from Vancouver, had been booked on that flight all along, and whilst he was sharing the plane with folk who'd been trapped for days etc etc, for him it went off as planned and there was nothing too out of the ordinary about his journey.

That would obviously be brilliant, but as any Gills fan knows, it's the hope that can kill you... then again, stuff like big important trips to Wembley have been successful twice as many times as they haven't in recent times...

BA are concentrating on getting their long haul services up and running first, which is encouraging, and I'm not due to arrive into London until Monday morning, which is five days from now, but the better the chances get the more you start to believe and the greater the uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach gets, along with that little voice going "it could still very easily go the way of the pear".

If my backside did manage to get onto a seat I'd obviously now prefer to fly straight through and not bother with a 'relaxing, jet lag-easing' stopover in revolutionary-ready Bangkok, but at this stage there's about as much chance of 'tinkering' with your itinerary as there is of Arsenal winning the league. Not that I'm too worried. If I find myself in Bangkok I'll be a happy man, and staying out the way of protests and slaughter for 24 hours shouldn't be too hard going by current news. It won't be a spot of shopping and a wander round town before a swim and a massage, but a kip and a feed in a hotel near the airport will more than suffice.

Fingers crossed!

Some of the secondary not-so-serious stuff is starting to spill out now an'all - this story here says Qantas aren't taking any new European bookings until the middle of next month, but you can get a quote for a single-journey econony seat on a BA flight for next week - for a mere seven grand. Business and first class seats have been 'adjusted' to reflect the new circumstances as well, by about forty percent.

Let It Flow

There are all sorts of gags to be had about no one wanting to hear about a new Ash release, or that it's the biggest excitement there's been about an Ash release since 1977 etc, but frankly, I'm in no mood for lame jokes about Irish pop rock trios. (Even if the above title is the aptly-named eighth track on their finest work.)

The new belch from Iceland means that plans to get things back in action by mid-week might not get off the ground (OFF THE GROUND! HAHAHA!), so I'm still sweating as chances get smaller, wondering if I'll be coming to the UK next week or next autumn.

The main problem isn't really my work (though that is an obvious consideration) it's that if my flight is cancelled, the queue of people waiting to get onto flights once they do get up and running is absolutely huge, and we'd be going to the back of it.

A mate of Anna's boss was due to fly to the UK last Sunday, obviously couldn't go, and the next available date they were able to offer him was May 9th. And even that was based on flights getting going again mid-week. Lovely! Presumably if we got cancelled we'd be offered something about four weeks from now, and we'd then have to look into whether that worked or not. To say nothing of waving goodbye to hundreds that have already been spent on stuff like deposits for Edinburgh accommodation, train tickets, hotels etc.

With the corporate belt-tightening that was going on before this, they tried to make sure every scheduled flight was as close to full as possible, and with tens of thousands of extra passengers to try and cram on to the flights that do go ahead, if my flight does go it'll be absolutely rammed, but that's better than no flight at all...


On a 'lighter' note - for those of you who watched the first series of Underbelly, the main character in it, Carl Williams, was murdered in prison yesterday. There were rumours that he was spilling his guts about other folk in order to reduce his 35-year sentence, and the day before he was topped a story appeared in the paper that the police were paying the private school fees of his daughter, which seemed to back up the rumours.

The third series of Underbelly started here last week, starring a load of old Neighbours, Home and Away, and Heartbreak High bods (as I've mentioned before, there are approximately twenty seven full time actors in Australia) as well as Anna's client, and it went off, doing huge numbers.

This time it's about the rise of John Ibrahim in the 90s, a dodgy geezer who is still a top boy and runs a lot of shady business in Kings Cross as well as nightclubs etc and who still regularly gets gangland death threats and raided by the police. His brother was shot in an attempted hit last year, though I still see him driving round my neighbourhood now and then in a subtle bright orange Lamborghini, and he loves hanging out with bits of skirt from Home & Away etc. I don't reckon it'll be too long before someone does him as well, though he's been known as 'Teflon John' for years so maybe he's charmed.

Down to the wire

Really? A volcano? Brilliant.

Not a strike by BA, or a death-filled red shirt revolution in Thailand, but a bit of a low-level geo-burp in Iceland is what is causing total mayhem across the travel world and may knacker my visit.

It's a bit of a perfect storm in that this window is pretty much the only time we can come until nearer the end of the year - Anna's TV show finishes this Wednesday, and my work project kicks into a higher gear from May 24 until mid-September, which whilst not ruling out any holiday from May to September, does rule out any 3-week trip back to the UK. I've heard of a few mad buggers from here going back to the UK for ten days, but I'm not mental enough, or rich enough, to be thinking about that anytime soon.

Even if the airspace opens and planes get back in the air by midweek there's all sorts of stories like this one saying that it'll take at least a week of chaos after that to get back to something vaguely normal from a logistics point of view, due to planes not being where there supposed to be, crew on disrupted work and sleep patterns, and the huge backlog of folk who were supposed to be flying now being crammed onto any spare seat that might be available on the flights that can now get going. Important Business-class John might trump me when it comes to getting a seat on the plane (or worse, get me moved from the exit row seat which I've pre-booked).

A bit like the Gills chances of survival, the run-in looks iffy and despite earlier confidence-boosting results, there's now quite a decent chance it could all end in tears. We haven't yet started looking at three weeks in Bali as an alternative, but it's a possibility.


It's almost a quaint distraction now, but Thailand's got worse over the past couple of days - the army's moved into the financial district, and the yellow shirts, who closed the airports the last time they got uppity, have told the Government to sort out the red shirts, or they'll be back on the streets waving their wads of baht in the faces of the poorer rivals. They made this announcement on Sunday, and gave a seven day ultimatum before "showing their voice". If they were punctual in 'displaying their noise' it would be getting an airing this coming Sunday, which is when we're due to be in Bangkok for a 24 hour stopover, flying out at just after midnight on Sunday night. Marvellous.

After 25 folk died in the clashes last week (many near the Ko Sahn Road), the comments coming from the yellow shirts are slightly scary, calling on the reds "to value their own lives by not making any untrue statements saying that the government killed the people."

"If you value your life you won't say that government troops killed a load of folk by firing into the crowds, even though they did. Just shut it, right? Or you'll get some more of the same which will result in even more of your lot not getting killed by government troops. Long live the royal family!"

"What has Thaksin Shinawatra ever done for us eh? Alright, apart from supply fresh water and electricity to poor rural areas. Yeah, and provide other forms of basic infrastructure vital for economic development in underprivileged parts of the country. But apart from that..."

The land of smiles. and bloody revolution.

That's it properly kicking off in Thailand then, brilliant. For our stopover we're looking at an airport hotel or somewhere well outside the centre of Bangkok anyway, but if it gets moodier then the protestors might fancy giving the airport a tickle, which would be a hassle for me and the many overweight middle-aged Germans hoping to find Miss Right.

Gormless Broon loves the Gills

...and we're off! For years a joke (home of the Chav etc), but what does the Prime Minister do as soon as he announces the date for a general election? Gets on a train and tears down to the most important part of the country, the Medway Towns.

It's only natural. It's only right.

My mum will be spewing, she does the odd trip over to Morrison's (supermarket variety being the spice of life and all that), and having been a radical Marxist whilst living in San Francisco in the sixties, would have relished the opportunity to pin Broon down on his socialist beliefs, and the abandonment of such. (Not really, she'd have got in a flap and hovered about gawking, then given me chapter and verse on it for an hour when I spoke to her on the blower on Sunday. She saw Prince Charles visiting a retried serviceman's home next to Gillingham Park last year, so she's got form in this area.)

So, it's going to be the tightest election in years and Cameron could be the youngest PM in nearly two hundred years. It seems like it might be really close because it really is a close call trying to decide which lot you dislike the least. Well, out of the top two anyway. I'd vote for the Lib Dems and their promise to introduce proportional representation, but then you can promise all sorts when you've got Bob and none of winning. It might count if it's hung though.

So Labour or the Tories then? As much as Gordon seems to have done a shocking job since coming in, and generally seems a bit mental and unsure of himself, like Cloughie at Leeds rather than his Forest or Derby days, the fuck ups he makes seem like accidents, whereas Cameron seems to be trying to hide his true identity until he can get his foot in the door, trying to get you to avoid looking too closely at what are scary Thatcher-type beliefs. It seems that once he was in, getting fucked over wouldn't be any accident at all. If you're minted, got private healthcare, put your kids in private schools, he'll probably be the best bet, but as the rest of the country went to shit you'd have to build a bigger wall around your little world to protect it from increasingly desperate times.

My old boss is big mates with Dave, went to Eton with him and still goes round his house for dinner. My boss also toned down his nyron-n-hookers stories from the good old days once Dave was shaping up to be top boy of the Tories and then the country, but there's no doubt he enjoyed himself as a lad. Which is all well and good, but it's the hypocrisy that has to follow in your quest to secure the Tonbridge Pensioner Daily Mail vote.

Annoyingly, it's Broon that probably got up to nothing much more than ten pints and baring his arse for the rugby team as a lad, so he's probably in a better position to appeal to right wing old farts who shit themselves every time their doorbell goes thinking it's some Romanian come to rob and rape them. Give them my old boss's nudge-nudge wink-wink stories about what him, big Dave and Charles Spencer got up to back in the day and they'd be voting Labour quicker than you can say Daily Mail.

My boss seemed like an alright lad at times, and he had some cracking tales to tell when we'd be out on a work do and he got loose-tongued after a few bevvies, but then every now and again he'd come out with some right wing viewpoint or some story about growing up with servants and you realised he was from a different planet and you had absolutely fuck all in common with him. He was the owner, you were the worker who made money for him. Unless you were a fit bird, cause as well as making money for him he'd take you out for a long lunch, get you pissed, and try to give you one. Marvellous.

Labour with a small majority? Could a hung parliament be any use? I'm not a fan of voting someone in then watching as they do whatever they like for five years, completely ignoring the public until the next election then using "we're better than the other lot" as a campaign slogan. Pity there aren't more top boys like Jezza Corbyn, voting for him didn't leave a bad taste in the mouth or seem like a total waste.

Gillingham's got to turn Tory this time hasn't it? It's always felt more conservative than labour. Get your applications in now to the Upper Gillingham Conservative club, I'll get my uncle to put in a good word for you. I think it's still under one-fifty for a pint of lager, there's a snooker room, and the fruity jackpot is two hundred quid. All that and you're on the winning team, what's not to love? If it goes really well it'll be back to the days of Masonic handshakes and climbing the business and social ladder with one elbow propped on the bar. Happy days.