Round Seven: A Sartorial Shocker

Regular purveyors of the Wrap (best regards to both of you) will be aware that the topic of dodgy change/ preseason/ novelty/ rip off the supporter jumpers is one that raises my ire. For starters, teams seem to wear them for no logical reason whatsoever. I well recall Geelong some years back bringing out their all navy blue change jumper (the Carlton-wannabe) in a game against Melbourne, which of course also wears a predominately navy blue jumper- thereby creating a clash of jumpers in a fixture where no clash had previously existed. More importantly though, they inevitably look shithouse. There's a reason why the traditional jumper designs have survived the decades- they are simple, classy, distinctive and they look like football jumpers. The melange of poorly conceived jumpers which have sprouted up like poisonous toadstools in recent years have been legion. They've ranged a veritable menagerie of stupid animal shapes (surely the supporters don't need a picture of a Crow on the jumper to grasp the concept that the team's nickname is the Crows for example?). They've featured an eyewatering array of garish colours completely unrelated to the team wearing them (North in orange, St Kilda in canary yellow, Carlton in sky blue and last week for some reason in lily white). That one got past me in last week's wrap, possibly as I was overwhelmed by Richmond's stunning capitulation, but it does raise the question- had Carlton won the match, would they have had to alter the lyrics to the club song? Possibly along the lines of "We are the lily whites, in recent sea-sons, we've been shite..." Fortunately it's all academic now. Up until this point in time, I would have rated the worst jumpers ever as Hawthorn's Derby Day preseason outfit with the blue, gold and brown diamonds, Collingwood's barcode preseason effort with the magic eye magpie on the front (wearing an actual Collingwood jumper and therefore looking far more dignified than any of the players) and West Coast's rainbow gay pride away jumper. But on the weekend just gone Port Adelaide unveiled a horror that has shot to the front of the pack and which will surely live in infamy forever.
How to describe it? Well, it did remain true to the Power's traditional (well, since 1997) colours of black, white and teal blue. The design however was, to say the least, poorly conceived. The top half was teal, the bottom half black. Emerging from bottom centre was a grey arm with a clenched fist grasping a white lightning bolt. The overall effect? Without wanting to be rude, crude and altogether unattractive, given that the arm was emerging from the players' shorts it looked rather more like a slightly different appendage, particularly with the clenched fist on top. The lightning bolt was a bit of a worry. One could imagine that the entire jumper was designed in tribute to a failed romantic liaison between The Thing (the scaly one from the Fantastic Four) and Storm (the weather-controller from the X-Men), which had ended disastrously in a painful and embarrassing journey to the emergency room which attending medical personnel had dined out on for weeks. As if poor old Richmond didn't have enough on their minds after last week's shallacking. Faced with such a ghastly vision they never stood a chance and went down for the seventh week in a row. Port on the other hand shot to the top of the ladder and are currently auctioning off their jumpers on E-bay. Hopefully purchasers will burn them on arrival, thus ensuring that they can never disgrace a football field ever again.
Other fixtures largely went according to script, although Adelaide's away victory in Brisbane was something of a surprise. The Demons went agonisingly close to breaking their duck before going down to a last minute goal against the Bulldogs. Essendon as usual started like a house on fire but sprayed their chances and then wilted in the face of opposition pressure to give North their fourth win on the trot. Carlton and Collingwood duked it out at the MCG in front of an appreciative crowd, the Magpies were too good in the end. The Swans' sluggish start to 2007 continued as they went down to St Kilda. The home ground advantage proved the difference over in the west as the Dockers took the points over Hawthorn. And the Eagles have finally been grounded as the Cats did it easily down at the Cattery- the Eagles' first defeat since last year's finals and enough to topple them from their lofty perch of top spot.
A third of the season gone, still a lot to play for. See you back here next week, although if you want to find me in the meantime look no further than Port's jumper auction on Ebay- I'll have my money in one hand and a lit Molotov cocktail in the other. (Not literally, if anyone from Ebay/ the Australian Federal Police is reading!)