NOT GRAND – BUT FINAL

In the middle of the countdown to the 2003 Grand Final I broadcast today’s programme on 3AW live from Victoria Park for Collingwood’s final afternoon of training before a repeat of last year’s Grand Final.

It is extraordinary. Both teams got here with identical 44-point victories. Their trials and tribulations dominate the news. Rocca, through his own reckless stupidity, will sit this one out.

That will hurt the Pies. Brisbane going for a “three-peat”. Whatever happened to the Australian expression “ Hat trick”?

Not that Brisbane is home and hosed. Voss’s Dicky Knee (to steal from Hey, Hey) is still a worry. Lappin’s ribs also a worry. Their much-vaunted Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the mid-field may be reduced to two.

But at Victoria Park with all the talk about the Magpies and the Lions I want to start this afternoon with a critique of another club: Melbourne.

My club, Melbourne. From today, as a former Number Two ticket holder, it is my former club.

I am resigning, as of now. I will not buy a member’s ticket next year. I was meant to be a guest panellist at the club’s Grand Final breakfast on Saturday. I shall cancel that when I get off air.

And the reason I am severing relations with the Demons is because of the news today that the club’s vice-president, Beverley O’Connor, has been banned from tonight’s official farewell to the Demons’ MCG historic dressing rooms –because she is a woman.

She is one of the club’s longest-serving board members but she has been asked not to attend because the blokes want it to be a stag night.

O’Connor was originally invited. So was the Governor John Landy. Now she has been uninvited – and I think it stinks.

What a bunch of yobbos. Are they going to have laptop dancers amidst the party pies? Naked women jumping out of cakes?

Would a woman inhibit them from reminiscing about end-of-season trips when even the married players got their rocks off with hookers in Asia?

The invitation to tonight’s “blokey-blokey” affair apparently says the function will be a “good old-fashioned pie night just like the ones we used to have”.

So somebody, for old time’s sake will pee in a pot plant and a dozen blokes will throw up in the car park.

This attitude is something I will not be associated with – and they probably won’t even miss me.

I shan’t be there. I believe the Governor of ALL Victorians should not dignify such macho bullshit, such chauvinism, such misogynism, by attending either.

And Beverly O’Connor should turn up or resign.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002