Matildas, V’landys, Eddie and Barassi: The best and worst of the year in sport

Bring it in tight, Fitzfiles. The year 2023 proved yet again the maxim of Roy and HG that “too much sport is barely enough”.

From the Penrith three-peat to the incredible performance of Matildas and the continued controversy of the LIV-PGA Tour greed battle, there’s been plenty to write about.

Here are some of the greatest hits.

Pre-season prediction on the money

You will recall TFF, last season, calling it early and saying after the first round, Penrith is going to win this thing. Let me make another prediction, this time, after the first round of trial games. Despite all the hype, hope, and hip-hip-hurrah for the new coaching regime of Tim Sheens and Benji Marshall, the West Tigers are going to struggle badly. Losing 48-12 to the Warriors? Seriously? And their new captain Api Koroisau had before this season, never played a game for the club?

What does it say about a team when the bloke you put out the front before the match to beat the drum about dying for the jersey, blah, blah, can’t possibly have the first clue as to what the jersey actually represents and is talking to blokes who in some cases have been there for years?

I repeat. They will struggle.

Got nuthin’, goin’ nowhere. You heard it here first.

(Mind you, I also thought the Knights would struggle.)

Best line and length. TFF again!

Here at TFF we don’t do much in the line of scoops, but I can exclusively reveal that – get this – Peter V’landys is in line to become chairman of Rugby Australia, replacing Hamish McLennan! It may happen as soon as late June, or early July.

I know, I know, it sounds unbelievable, but the role would go with V’landys’ other positions at the ARL Commission and Racing NSW, which has given him plenty of contacts, many of whom are billionaires with hugely deep pockets. In an age when Rugby Australia is looking for equity partners, V’landys has put together a consortium that could buy a 51 per cent controlling interest in rugby and make him chairman.

What a sporting yearCredit: John Shakespeare

“It’s perfect,” an insider told me. “He runs everything else, so why not rugby too? And once he controlled rugby, he could be the one who decides who goes where and what happens. Instead of wasting endless energy with the NRL and Australian rugby fighting, it all could just be put in the hands of Peter V’landys and he can do what he does in league and racing – steer by the star of whatever he thinks is a good idea at the time. It saves so much hassle.”

Fascinating, yes? And it just might work.

If only it wasn’t April 1 ...

(Got him, yes! MIDDLE STUMP! Cartwheeling over and over into the back fence!)

V’landys can take a joke even when it’s too good to be true

As to the piece above, one or two leaguies didn’t take it for the bit of fun it was: an April Fool’s joke that managed to have union, league and racing heavies momentarily choking on their Weet-Bix before they realised they’d been had. One person who did take it for the fun it was, however, was V’landys himself.

Bright and early Saturday morning, he texted me.

“Hi mate thanks for early morning concussion. My wife only saw the headline and started on me ... It was very funny as you had her hook line sinker. I didn’t help by telling her I was working up the courage to tell her about the new role ...”

With apologies to Mrs V’landys, that is ... gold!

Biggest sell-out of the year: PGA

I know. Me too.

We’re all still reeling after that double backflip in the triple-pike position by the PGA. It was the moral equivalent of the Yankees in the American Civil War suddenly announcing via President Abraham Lincoln:

“My fellow Yankees ... From tomorrow, we are all going to be under the Confederate flag, and you know what else? Now that we’ve had a chance to think about it, we’ve decided that despite all those nasty things we said about slavery, now that we’ve had a chance to think about it, it’s probably not so bad after all. And just think of how much money we can all make with cotton-picking slaves back in the economy! As a matter of fact, think of how much money I could make, running the whole show again. Circumstances change ...”

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.Credit: AP

“Honest Abe”, of course, never said any such thing. But the PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan is clearly not made of the same stuff.

After a year of rightly excoriating LIV and all it stood for, of lauding the loyalty of the PGA players who maintained the faith and wringing his hands over the players who had taken the filthy lucre offered by Greg Norman, Monahan did precisely what he had been urging his players not to do.

With no consultation – and in a decision seemingly taken by no more than half-a-dozen people at best – Monahan seems to have just sold the whole lock, stock and barrel of the PGA to the Saudis for billions of dollars and as far as we can see the only other condition imposed was that the Saudis had to lose Greg Norman. (OK, that part of the deal I guess we can all understand.)

“I recognise that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” Monahan added.

Funny he should say that ...

Team of the year: The Matildas

I’ll say it again. The significance of the Matildas’ triumph during the World Cup went far beyond just making the semi-finals.

For my money, and I suspect yours, it leapfrogs them in the nation’s consciousness well over and above the Socceroos. And, right now, they feel very close to being something like Australia’s team.

Your humble correspondent has long proclaimed that, as sporting triumphs go, the only thing that could be bigger than Australia winning the America’s Cup back in 1983 would be the Socceroos one day winning the World Cup.

Australia’s new favourite team, the Matildas, during the FIFA Women’s World Cup.Credit: Edwina Pickles

And I was wrong.

Because, of course, the Matildas doing the same would also surpass that – as would them winning a gold medal at next year’s Paris Olympics.

As big and as satisfying as that win was, America’s Cup sailing was only ever a sport for supremely rich white blokes on the porky side of things. It is as far from a mass sport as it possible to get, whereas soccer – despite what those Neanderthal knuckle-dragging egg-ballers say (sniff, sneering look of absolute contempt) – is a genuine GLOBAL game, and don’t you bastards forget it!

And here in Australia, from Penrith to Perth, Darwin to the Derwent, Port Douglas to Port Lincoln, soccer is many times more relatable than sailing, because even if not everyone follows it we all at least understand it, and even most who haven’t played it have spent a cold winter morning watching their sons and daughters running around a pitch.

After the America’s Cup win, we tried to stay interested for a few years but really, the damn thing was so dull they could now hold it in Sydney Harbour and it would barely draw a crowd. It was never the sport that interested us; it was sticking it to the Americans who hadn’t been beaten in 132 years that made us rise up. Once that was done, no one really cared.

This is entirely different. For the first time in years, during the World Cup, the nation felt truly united behind one sporting team who have comported themselves with absolute class and are a real chance of making a global mark. And yes, yes, yes of course the fact that we see footage of excited little girls cheering the Matildas on is enormously significant. But is it wrong to posit that the impact might be even greater on little boys? How long since young lads in Oz have grown up in a country where the most revered sporting team is, far and away, a women’s team? Shall we go with never?

All up, I don’t remember a time when a sporting team has so perfectly captured the zeitgeist that it is not only empowered by it but doing a lot of empowering along the way.

Vale Ron Barassi

Ron Barassi pictured in 2005.Credit: Vince Caligiuri

The great Ron Barassi – who died in September, aged 87 – took over as coach of the Sydney Swans in the middle of the 1993 season. This was after the most recent iteration of endless Swans disasters, which had brought the team to its very ankles, after a decade of being on its knees. The whole operation was a completely shambolic joke.

The first game under his command was against Carlton at the Sydney Cricket Ground. So stand beside him now as, with five minutes to go before showtime, he sits all his players down, softly closes the dressing-room door, and begins to spin them a tale. He speaks in a low-key but still strangely mesmerising tone. For he wants them to not be with him in the here and now, but to conjure another time, a time well in the future ...

“Imagine,” he says with soft intensity, “that it’s 20 years from now. Imagine the Sydney Swans have now won the flag three years in a row, that they’re continuing to break ground records and have more than 100,000 people regularly turning up to games.

“Imagine you’re in a bar, somewhere in Sydney, and at the next table someone recognises you and says, ‘Hey, didn’t you use to play for the Swans back in the early ’90s?’ ‘Hang on,’ they’ll say, ‘weren’t you there when they won that really big game against Carlton or Collingwood or someone that turned it all around, won it at a time when things were so grim their whole survival was in question?’

“And men, I want you to imagine what it would be like to be able to say right then and there, ‘Yes, I was there when we turned it around. I played the game against Carlton when, out of nowhere, the Swans won and then kept on winning from there. I was a part of that team the day we turned the corner.’

“Men, we can do it. It is possible that we can win this game. It’s up to you.”

And now, without another word, the new coach turns on his heel and walks out.

It was a vintage Barassi speech – told to me by one of the players there at the time, and confirmed by Barassi when I did a profile on him – delivered to some totally enthralled footballers. It is spoiled only by the fact that the newly pumped-up team didn’t go out and wipe their boots all over the fancy-pants schmucks from Carlton to record a famous victory. They did, however, run the men from Carlton close that day, and it really did signal a new era for the Swans. For, here we are 30 years later, and if the Swans are not quite at the top of their game at the minute they are still the jewel in the AFL crown, and with GWS are a pair of diamonds.

And no, it wasn’t Barassi alone who did that as coach, but you can certainly trace the Swans’ evolution from running joke to credible team on their way to being a real force, to his arrival in Sydney.

I first got to know him a little on the speaking circuit and then more particularly after doing a book on Tobruk 20 years ago, where I covered the story of his father Ron Barassi snr, a great VFL footballer himself, who was killed by a German bomb on the evening of July 31, 1941, right by the Tobruk wharves. I wrote about it in the book, had laid a flower on his father’s grave at his behest, and he wanted all details I could glean beyond what was published.

I never knew him as a footballer of course, and only tangentially as a coach, but as man he was charismatic, generous, and wonderful company. Vale, Ron.

What they said

The last words of Australian captain Meg Lanning before the World T20 final against South Africa in Cape Town in February: “Let’s f---ing go!” They did, and beat the South Africans by 19 runs.

Wayne Bennett, after his Dolphins blew the Roosters off the park in the first match of the season, in March: “But the biggest winner today is the game.” Someone had to say it, I guess.

Gorden Tallis on NRL 360: “Rugby league will be the winner.” They just didn’t have to say it twice.

Dolphins coach Wayne Bennett.Credit: Getty

Collingwood coach Craig McRae as the AFL season got underway: “My wife thinks I am the Ted Lasso of the AFL.” Turns out, he was, as Collingwood took the flag.

Irish rugby captain Johnny Sexton after they won the Six Nations Grand Slam, beating all five opponents: “Honestly, I couldn’t make it up. It’s like living in a dream – I’m actually worried I’m going to wake up in the morning. To come here and get a win on St Patrick’s weekend, it’s unbelievable. What a day. Unbelievable.”

At least Tim Sheens hasn’t lost his sense of humour, trotting out an old TFF line after losing their fifth straight match to start the season: “I hope we beat the bye in a couple of weeks.”

Ash Barty on retirement: “There were periods where I felt like I had no idea what I was doing and then there were other periods where I felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day.”

Ash Barty at Melbourne Park in January.Credit: Getty Images

Rugby player Josh Flook on meeting Eddie Jones for the first time: “I’ll just try and start with a good handshake, I think. Just go off the [cuff]. Hopefully have a little conversation with him, at some point over these next couple of days. But try and start with a good handshake.”

Tasmanian independent Federal MP Andrew Wilkie in May: “More than a billion dollars, and that’s what the stadium will end up costing, for an AFL stadium in sight of another one, with just 3000 more seats and likely no roof, is beyond bizarre. This is a failure of governance on an eye-watering scale.” It wasn’t as ludicrous as the amount Brissie is spending on stadia for the 2032 Olympics – don’t get me started – but still insane.

Janice Hayes on what’s next for her pet “Buddy Holly” after he won the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in May: “He just gets to go back to being a dog.”

Richmond coach Damien Hardwick, in May, going out with a Michael Clarke in the pike position: “If I couldn’t give this playing group, this club, these people beside me, the very best of Damien Hardwick, I wasn’t prepared to see it out.”

Coach Billy Slater after Origin I on his Queenslanders in June: “But I’ll tell you what, there is a lot of guts and determination and courage in this footy team. We needed to play like Queenslanders for Queenslanders and our trait as Queenslanders [is] never give up. Queenslanders go through drought, they go through cyclones, they go through floods, they go through a lot of adversity – and we try and represent our people in that way as well.” I know, I know. Queenslander! QUEENSLANDER!

Maroons coach Billy Slater, left, and his NSW counterpart Brad Fittler during this year’s Origin series, which Queensland won.Credit: Getty

I wrote in July, New Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh is either optimistic, delusional or barking mad: “I think we can win everything. We are not that far away. I genuinely think we can win everything.”

Pat Cummins in July: “I’m really proud of the way our boys have conducted themselves this tour, especially on that day five [at Lord’s]. I thought the way they maintained respect for the opposition, the umpires, the crowd, their dignity was first class.” And so say all of us.

@NatMartin30: “Honestly, just f---g Mankad Stuart Broad at Headingley and let’s become a republic. Go all in.” Works for me.

Rory McIlroy: “If LIV Golf was the last place to play golf on Earth, I would retire. That’s how I feel about it. I’d play the majors, but I’d be pretty comfortable.”

No fan of LIV Golf: Rory McIlroy.Credit: The Canadian Press

Ange Postecoglou at his first Tottenham press conference: “For me to come from where I’ve come, and be sitting here today, I needed to have that instinct to know when to move on because I’ve had to be faultless in my career to get here – that’s because no one’s going to rate an Australian manager, are they?” A hint of hubris, but good luck to him.

Carlos Alcaraz on defeating Novak Djokovic to win Wimbledon: “I did it for myself, not for the tennis generation, honestly. Beating Novak at his best, in this stage, making history, being the guy to beat him after 10 years unbeaten on that court, is amazing for me. But it’s great for the new generation, as well, I think to see me beating him and making them think that they are capable to do it.”

A gracious English captain Ben Stokes on finishing the Ashes 2-2: “You can look back and say a few things went our way and a few things went Australia’s way. Hand on heart, I think 2-2 is a fair reflection of where the two teams are at in this moment.”

Lance “Buddy” Franklin takes a lap of honour at the SCG.Credit: Getty

Lance Franklin hanging up the boots: “What a journey. Thanks to everyone who has been on this crazy ride.”

Peter Bol after his positive drug test was officially ruled a false positive: “I have been exonerated. It was a false positive like I have said all along. The news from Sport Integrity Australia was a dream come true. I am glad that WADA has agreed to review the EPO testing processes to prevent future false positives. No one should ever experience what I have gone through this year.”

Here’s ... Eddie (Jones)! When asked if the Wallabies could win the World Cup: “One hundred per cent. As a matter of fact, I think we will. If I could bet on it, I would, but I think you get in trouble if you bet.” Later in the year, after the whole thing had fallen apart, Eddie acknowledged to TFF that he never thought that remotely, but felt obliged to say that he did.

Sam Kerr: “We’ve kind of captured the nation. The support we’ve had has been amazing, and we’ll do everything we can on the weekend to get them a third place. We just feel really proud that they’ve got behind us, and we’ve changed the way women’s football is seen in Australia. It’s been amazing. A big thank you.”

Tenth penalty taker Cortnee Vine, after her heroics in the quarter-final: “It just doesn’t feel like I kicked the penalty to get us to a semi-final ... I think it’s something I’m going to have to watch back. It’s one of those things you dream of, that it’s going to happen and you’re going to be the person to do it. For me to do, I’m speechless. I feel like I’m in a dream, I feel like I’m dreaming right now.”

Eddie Jones ended a turbulent year as new coach of Japan.Credit: Viola Kam

Retired wheelchair athlete Dylan Alcott in response to the victory over France victory: “My god that was the closest I’ve ever been to standing up. @TheMatildas UNBELIEVABLE effort.”

Eddie Jones: “I think I’ve left Australian rugby in a better position.” I can’t quite believe he said that. Can you believe he said that?

Team of the year

Matildas. Won the nation’s heart this year.

Cortnee Vine. Her successful spot kick against France etched her into Australian sporting immortality.

Pat Cummins. Became the most successful Australian cricket captain since forever. The fact that he also proved to be a hugely likeable man is no small bonus.

Pat Cummins and the Australians celebrate their World Cup win.Credit: Getty

Queensland. The sun rises, the sun sets. Winter comes. Queensland wins the Origin. Again.

Gordon Bray. Sixty years after wagging school to see his hero, Australian fast bowler Alan Davidson, play his last Test, last Friday Australia’s iconic rugby commentator won the annual “Davo Award” from the mighty Carbine Club, “in recognition of long and valuable outstanding contribution and service to sport, media and the community.” Bravo, Gordie.

Brisbane. Lost the AFL and NRL grand finals by a combined total of just six points and the Women’s BBL final by three runs, but they at least won the AFLW.

Nathan Cleary. Put in one of the all-time great grand final performances to completely blitz a Broncos side that held a 16-point lead over the Panthers with just 20 minutes to go.

Collingwood. AFL premiers over the Brisbane Lions by the hairs of their chinny-chin-chin.

RIP John Sattler. One of the most beloved and revered men in rugby league. He captained the Rabbitohs to four premierships between 1967 and 1971. He played four Tests for Australia and 195 games in total for the Rabbitohs between 1963 and 1972.

RIP Brian Booth. Australia’s 31st men’s Test cricket captain, died aged 89. Also represented Australia in hockey at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

RIP Tina Turner. I know it. You know it. I have to say it, ’cos it’s true. Simply the best.

Tina Turner performs at the 1993 grand final.

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