Fairytales, like footy, might be cruel, but can’t Pies fans wish for a happy ending?
Fairytales, like footy, are cruel, brutal and unfair. Even so, for Pies fans there’s no harm in wishing for a happy ending, writes Collingwood tragic, Terry Brown.
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Around finals time, you start to think about fairytales.
They’re everywhere, these finals fairytales, like Hamlin bloody rats.
Richmond got one. So did the Woofers. Most everyone got one last year seeing the Pies carved up better than Pinocchio — everyone’s Second Wish.
As a Pies fan, you believe in September fairy tales with all your scarred soul — just not in happy endings.
We are the grannies the wolf trained on, the sweat shop elves with self inflicted awl injuries, staring at an open door but never leaving …
Doomed and cursed, we clump side-by-side, stuck together, perpetually locked in some witch’s warming oven!
Would a happy ending hurt? Just once?
Fairytales, like footy, are cruel, brutal and unfair until Disney bleaches the crime scene. Cinderella’s stepsister originally hacked off her own toe to try to fit the slipper. Helluva one percenter there!
It is no surprise Sleeping Beauty sold its unbloodied socks off. Sleeping suffered no more than a mega nap and me-tooish wake up call from a prince.
The Tigers got that sort of Disney tosh. Softer than a 100-year mattress but popular as hell. Chronic duds crack one? Nah. It’s a fairytale.
Out west, where they could use a pied piper, they got a Repunzel type flag instead. Nothing for years. Dull as watching hair grow. Did it even occur to her to climb? That was the Dogs all over. Yawn, cheer, back to the tower.
Collingwood, though, is the grimmest of tales and a never ending story where the plait snaps, oven jams and a rogue glass slipper shard ends up being four weeks out, and two more for blaming the huntsman’s dog. Often all at once.
I have seen four generations of my family cry actual salty tears watching the Pies curse play out in September — Barry Breen, Wayne Bloody Harmes, Fab Phil Carman’s two week love tap …
Children of the Colliwobbles ran out of fingers to count the grand final debacles in 2003 and started on the toes. If they take their ugg boots off in the pub and cry now, that’s why.
How about a happy ending? Just once for footy’s golden goose and its thoroughly goosed fans?
Like Cinder’s step (hop?) sister, Collingwood has done the tortured legwork for a ripping fairytale this year and, indeed, most of the thighs, shoulders, hamstrings and ankles.
To find a better underdog, you’d have to exhume Sid the Mascot (too soon?).
And cruel twists?
Big Coxy is sitting September out for taking one eyed too literally — him and about a dozen maimed other players, which is an actual improvement.
As this is typed, some Dr Strangelove type is whispering DeGoey’s hammy.
Sidebottom, always good for an explosive September, had the ball on a string for a bit but they’ve sewn it back in. Yesss!
Sometimes you kiss a toad hoping to get high and all you get is a royal. Who knows how it will end?
Because, in all the best/worst fairytales, there’s a malevolent entity too, scheming. And that’d be the AFL.
Banning tattoos under clash strip rules would make half the Pies play in head to toe bandages. Word is it is Gill McLachlan’s nuclear option, tucked away under his Toby Greene cuddle toy.
AFL mates BetEasy are no doubt offering Stevo 5-1 the Pies for the Flag, and regular punters 7-2 that Stevo will take it!
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Maybe Gill got Stanley Kubrick to knock up fake film for goal cam after meeting him at one of Meatloaf’s slumber parties?
Like a blind Bambi at a woodcutters convention, no idea.
Because fairytales aren’t fair.
But on Saturday week, here’s wishing.
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