Special Interest

I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 the other night. My official review is that I loved the original.   To celebrate the second one coming out and at the very least not being the worst legacy sequel in living memory (Anchorman 2), I thought I’d run through Andrew Whelan’s premiership metrics using lines from the original, which is one of the most quotable movies since Goodfellas.   But what are the premiership metrics? The premiership metrics are a series of numbers that have been mostly closely associated with winning the premiership over the last 15 years.   Essentially, the numbers combine stats that capture your performance with and…

I went down to the G on Friday night to watch Richmond get eviscerated by Melbourne. Before the game, I was talking to another Richmond supporter friend and I was doing my usual thing, complaining about how Adem Yze’s conservative game style makes me want to spew.  My friend, another Richmond supporter, pushed back. He asked “well isn’t it possible that he’s trying to set a defensive foundation up first, especially with how short-handed we are? And even then, Melbourne has just released the shackles and have no structure to fall back on.”   We continued the discussion and eventually watched the game where we saw Melbourne, predictably, spread hard out of contests and essentially destroy…

It is famously hard to make the finals, let alone the top 4, when you leave round 2 with zero wins.   But that might be changing with the AFL’s adoption of the uniquely Chinese skill of copying the Americans. Unlike the Chinese, however, the AFL invariably copies the Americans slightly worse, but I digress.   Their latest act of slight inferiority mixed with plagiarism is the wildcard round which, in practice, gives two more teams a chance of playing in the finals, or at least in a single elimination game depending on how the league classifies it. The point is more teams can now make…

Sam Mitchell made a rare mistake early in Thursday night’s win against Sydney.   He started the game with Josh Battle on Charlie Curnow and Tom Barrass on Joel Amartey.   You can understand it. Amartey is nowhere near as threatening as Curnow, which would allow Barrass to zone off and help Hawthorn’s intercept mark game which is the backbone of their defence, and Battle can go with Curnow’s mobility.   Do you see the mistake?   Mitchell thought he was playing Curnow from 2023.   Curnow in 2026 is a much different, far less threatening animal.   Taking his cues from the lululemon girls on the Bondi…

I watched the new Louis Theroux doco on the Manosphere the other day and while it wasn’t my favourite Theroux (either The Settlers or the Weird Weekends about rap), all I could think about was those freaks pandering to the chat about who was ‘cooked’ and who did the cooking.  So, in the interests of being current, I thought I’d do a ‘Cooked Index’.   Basically, this is an investigation into who should pack it up because their season is cooked and who isn’t quite done yet.   Let’s get into it.  Is the Brisbane Dynasty cooked?  As they were in 2024, the Lions have started 0-2 after a Grand Final appearance. Keen readers will remember that they won…

We haven’t even played Round 1 yet but footy looks different through five official games.  I found the game itself last year to be a bit on the drab side, generally down on scoring outside of the Bulldogs and careening toward a more grinding, front half stoppage centric game.   But if last year footy was Anne Hathaway uglying herself up at the start of The Princess Diaries, in Opening Round she took off her glasses and revealed herself to be incredibly good looking.  The league went full Dulles Brothers and astroturfed a revolution from their office. Unlike the American coups in Guatemala, Chile, or the Dominican Republic, it might end up in good…

At the risk of sounding like Ezra Klein after He died (RIP), for St Kilda this season there’s a right way and a wrong way to lose.   The wrong way to lose would be to have spent an offseason renovating the list, then deploying it using Ross Lyon’s dreary, old-school footy from yesteryear.   Doing that is like buying a $12,000 couch for your caravan.   In their Opening Round loss to Collingwood, on the other hand, the Saints showed genuine attacking intent and zeal when they had the ball and at least some level of urgency to try and keep the ball in their front half. That’s the…

Footy is back! And in classic AFL fashion, it’s starting with a whimper.   We have a little over half a round, four fifths of which will be played in the northern states to “take advantage” of the NRL being in Vegas this weekend.   I’m not quite sure how that works but stick with me!   There’s also a fifth game, but that’s happening at the MCG because Collingwood has cracked the sads and doesn’t want another interstate trip to add to their three this season.   The internal logic of the Fast and Furious movies makes more sense than the AFL’s decision making around “Opening Round”.   By the way, don’t call it Round 1 or Andrew…

There’s a fine line between an admirable iconoclast and a stubborn idiot.   You can so quickly go from being Ange Postecoglou dragging Tottenham to their first trophy in a million years, to Ange Postecoglou not winning any of his only eight games in charge of Nottingham Forrest and getting sacked after 39 days in the worst Greek on Greek crime since the civil war.   Adam Kingsley, with this hyper talented but ageing and injured Giants’ list, is treading that line.   Kingsley has a clear way he wants to play, and when it works, oh boy is it sexy. They win the ball back close to their own goal…