My team had a good result in this weekend's round of AFL footy. As mentioned before, I am a parochial Western Australia and as long as one of our two teams wins I am happy. This weekend it was the Eagles. The Fremantle Dockers lost by a heap of points. The Freo Dockers has been lumbered by this stupid name Dockers. It is supposed to show that they are from the harbour port. In fact the wharf labourers have never been called dockers. They were and still are, called wharfies; although there aren't too many left thanks to containerisation of cargo. I guess this is just like a host of other Americanisms creeping into our language. Cookies indeed!
I have been to only one real footy game in my life and that was in around 1950 when I was taken by my grandfather who was down in Fremantle from the farm. It was a memorable day, mainly because he treated me to fish and chips at half time. For a long time I looked at football on TV and thought that it looked like a helicopter had dropped hundreds of dollar coins on to the playing field and players were fighting and groping after them. I am warming to the game in my twilight years, but still don't know the rules well or even the names of most of the other teams in the national league. That said, I do think it has a lot more going for it than soccer and gridiron.
Many of the followers attending matches seem more concerned about getting their mugs in front of a TV camera than the game.
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