In the recently concluded second season of Ted Lasso, a number of serious issues are covered by this otherwise amiable show.

One is ‘Sports Washing’.

Sports Washing is the practice, by a nation or a corporation, of sponsoring a sporting team or competition in order to distract attention from either human rights abuses by a nation or of ruthless business practices by a corporation. That is my definition, and there are probably better ones out there. I do not pretend to be a latter day answer to Dr Samuel Johnson.

One of my favourite episodes in Season 2 of Ted Lasso is the one which deals with Sports Washing. In that episode, the loveable young rising player Sam discovers that there is a sinister side to the fictional sponsor of AFC Richmond, Dubai Air. Dubai Air is owned by a ruthless oil company who, with the complicity of its corrupt host government in Africa, is polluting Nigeria, Sam’s home country.

After he learns this (Sam, being only 21, is rather naive initially, but a very decent and honourable man), Sam decides before AFC Richmond’s very next match to cover up the Dubai Air sponsorship bar on his uniform with masking tape.

The other Nigerian players follow suit, with Sam explaining to the rest of the team why they as Nigerians need to do this. Then, in what is one of the most moving (and redemptive) moments of the show, former primadonna Jamie Tartt follows suit, telling the rest of the players that they are a team and need to wear the same kit, and they do.

The resulting publicity from the press conference Ted gets Sam to hold after the match does succeed in causing the parent company to cease their operations in Nigeria.

Dubai Air is a fictional airline. Emirates Airlines, on the other hand, is real, and is owned by the government of Dubai, which is controlled by a local Sheikdom (or Emirate if you prefer, one of several ‘United Arab Emirates’ which make up a nation state in that part of the world).

Taking a step back for a moment, let us look at what the various royal families of the UAE, particularly the more prominent ones such as that of Dubai and that of Abu Dhabi (whose royal family owns the airline Etihad) do.

Amnesty International is highly critical of the conduct of the UAE on human rights issues. As a prime example, there is the case known as the ‘UAE 94’ where 94 people critical of the regime were arrested and subject to an unfair trial. 60 of those people are still in gaol. Then there are other examples of unfair trials, arbitrary detention, suppression of freedom of expression, concerns about women’s rights, the appalling conditions faced by guest workers, and the UAE’s involvement in the highly lethal conflict in Yemen.

The ABC recently ran a story on the foreign ownership of various A-League soccer teams in Australia. There was concern about Melbourne City, which is owned by the City Football Group (most famous for ownership of Manchester City), being part of a Sports Washing racket. This is because City Football Group is owned by a prominent member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who are involved in human rights abuses in the UAE.

The message is a pretty clear one. Ownership and sponsorship of sporting teams and competitions is being used to distract attention from the human rights abuses the owners of those sponsors are active or complicit in. This is particularly a problem in Australian soccer, especially with the current ownership of Melbourne City.

This problem, Sports Washing, is not isolated to Australian soccer. It is a problem in Australian Rules Football. As the national sport, Australian Rules Football needs to endeavour to be cleaner than soccer (a sport which is tainted with many colours of corruption).

Who does not remember when the Docklands Stadium currently known as Marvel Stadium was called ‘Etihad Stadium’, after the airline owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi. Thankfully, this is over.

But Collingwood Football Club is the worst, longest and most complicit participant in Sports Washing. Ever since 1999, several months after Eddie Maguire became their president, Emirates Airlines has been a premier partner of the Magpies.

Because Eddie has always had many irons in the fire (at the same time he was taking over Collingwood he was telling us in very clever terms why we should become a republic, and soon after was managing Channel 9 from first to second place in the ratings, before seeking to run unpaid PR for King Kong), we cannot expect him to ever be very informed about any of his decisions, choices, or pronunciations (he is after all a Collingwood supporter, not a rocket scientist). However, failing to exercise duty of care over a 20 year period in the choice of sponsor for his football club is particularly concerning.

It is time for the complicity of the AFL and of the Collingwood Football Club in the practice of Sports Washing to end. Collingwood should end their sponsorship with the fictional Dubai Air’s not so fictional real counterpart, Emirates Airlines.

My friends will know that I am a great fan of Shakespeare’s plays, which I do allude to from time to time in this blog. I believe that in them, particularly the various tragedies, you can find the questions which comprise most of the great dilemmas which we as humans face.

The great villains are of course my favourite characters: Iago, the passed-over-for-promotion army officer on his trail of vengeance and personal advancement; Richard III, the stunted hunchback who seizes the kingdom in a frenzy of fratricide and nepoticide; and Macbeth, who starts off as a decent and honourable man, but who is seduced by three witches and his ambitious wife to start on the road to royalty and perdition.

There are others of course, but these three, in their villainy, are the ones which stand out most, and whose motives are easiest to understand. For all that they are rotten to the core, Goneril and Reagan and their confederates are such from the start, with no real character development or explanation (although a vain and selfish father like King Lear perhaps explains how they turned out). And in Hamlet, I would argue that the ghost of his father is the real villain, seeking to destroy the living and the innocent in an orgy of vengeance.

What has all this got to do with Ted Lasso, the amiable sports comedy on Apple TV+ which features an American college gridiron coach hired to manage an underachieving English Premier League team (and which just finished streaming Season 2 on Friday)? Well, I would say that one of the main story arcs in Season 2 is very much a Shakespearean tragedy.

Ted Lasso is intended to be a play in three acts, as it is not going to go beyond Season 3. Season 1 was where Ted arrives, faced by a wall of skepticism and hostility, and gradually wins over the players, supporters, and the team owner, with his boundless optimism and humanity. The relegation at the end of Season 1 was inevitable. Season 2 is where they embark on a campaign to be promoted back to the premier league, and to build into a team that can win championship titles (something which the AFC Richmond of the series has never done). Season 3 will tell us what happens next, when AFC Richmond is back in the Premier League with all but one of its key pieces on the right side of the board.

And that is where the tragedy comes in. Nate was introduced to us in Season 1 as the team’s kit boy, bullied and treated with contempt by the team, insecure in his tenure in his humble role, but with a mad keen brain for soccer tactics. Ted, who treats everyone with kindness and seeks to bring out the best in people, sees Nate’s keen intellect and makes use of it. By season’s end, he has been promoted by Ted to assistant coach.

In Season 2, Coach Nate comes into his own. His growing confidence in his abilities and ego, stroked by his tactical brilliance in the FA Cup quarter final where he takes charge when Ted has a panic attack, sees him go from a victim to a bully. He is first admonished when he humiliates one of the junior players, and apologises, but his discreet victimisation of the new kit boy, goes unseen and unchecked.

His growing ambition then leads him to the ultimate betrayal – leaking to the press the secret of Ted Lasso’s panic attack in the quarter final – motivated by a misguided rage at Ted for abandonment and a snowballing belief that he is the real brains behind the team’s successes. At the end, after he storms out after having torn up the BELIEVE sign which has hung over the locker room for two years, we see him in his own senior coaching role, at the team which Richmond’s owner Rebecca’s ex-husband Rupert has bought.

What are the motives in Nate, and in his transformation from loveable supporting character into villain, in a show where every character until now has grown into the best version of themselves?

Like Richard III (whose transformation does not occur onstage, but rather is explained to us in the soliloquies at the end of Henry VI part III and at the start of Richard III), Nate has a degree of self-loathing. Richard has his hunchback to remind him of his limitations. Nate has a father who seems impossible to impress, and the recent memory of the contempt with which he was formerly treated by the team in his more humble prior role.

There is also some Iago in there. Nate expresses his desire for promotion and his belief that he can do the job better than Ted. He then does his betrayal.

And of course there is some Macbeth in there. Nate starts out as good, and does get prodded, partly by Rebecca’s ex-husband as we see, and partly by the lack of appreciation shown by his father at his moment in the sun in the FA Cup Quarter Final, to start seeing himself as more fit for the role of king (or senior coach) than the incumbent. He starts out as Thane of Glamis, and when he becomes Thane of Cawdor, he sees himself as King hereafter.

Which sets things up for an interesting season three, or third Act, if you will. We have to wait til next July for it. Ted Lasso and AFC Richmond now are back in the Premier League, desperately chasing their first ever major trophy. But up against them is the Rupert owned West Ham United, now coached by tactical prodigy Nate. Rupert always has a motive to needle his long suffering ex-wife, and Nate wants to prove that he is the better coach, and avenge his perceived slights.

I hope for a happy ending, the way that only a supporter of a historically underachieving football team can hope. I hope that Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, or rather, to Selhurst Park, and that the fictional AFC Richmond gets its EPL fairytale. But it is going to be a greater, more thrilling, story to watch, with the twin villains of Rupert and Nate seeking to thwart Ted at every turn.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is quite an enjoyable novel. It’s hero is mischievous, idealistic, and uncatchable. He spends the whole novel tormenting the villainous Jacobin zealots and saving their victims from the Guillotine.

I see some parallels between The Scarlet Pimpernel and Real Freedom News, an insider website revealing a lot of the factional machinations of the Victorian Liberals to plain sight.

I was rather dismayed recently when it appeared that this site had been taken down. However, it is now back, to my great delight, and I will enjoy reading its wicked narrative yet again:

https://realfreedomnews.com

I am sure that the puritanical prig Oliver Cromwell meant well when he organised the regicide of Charles I. Many tyrants do when they start on their path to untrammelled power.

In 1648, the Long Parliament stood in the way. Many of its members, more than a majority, were reluctant to put Charles I on trial for treason.

This was easily solved. Colonel Pride took two regiments and purged the parliament of 55% of its members, leaving what became known as the Rump Parliament, a group of barely accountable zealots who were quite happy to do as Cromwell and his henchmen suggested.

It did not end well, although Cromwell himself did not end up with his head on a pike until after he was dead.

Another regime which did not end well was that of Benito Mussolini who, after being given the premiership of Italy by a weak king, held fresh elections in 1924 under laws which were loaded in a way which gave his party a majority of seats. No more multiparty elections were held until 1946.

Benito himself ended up hanging from his ankles in Milan, although he too was dead by then.

Premier Andrews has today sought to ban from the Victorian parliament any members who refuse to reveal their health status – supposedly a public health measure to prevent the spread of covid.

Given our MPs are all elected in fair and free elections, I consider this to be a serious affront to the nature of our democracy in this state, a way of purging those who will dare to dissent from the views held by Andrews, and who feel so strongly about it that they will make a strong statement about it.

Members of Parliament hold their seats through their mandate from their constituents. Purging them for their beliefs is antithetical to both the spirit and the word of democracy, and is a disgraceful proposal on the part of the Premier.

To harken back to our friend Oliver Cromwell, the Rump Parliament dragged on for five more years until he dismissed it in 1653. His words in dismissing it serve as a salient message to our appalling technocratic premier:

‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

It is for good reason that I love Melbourne, formerly known as the World’s Most Liveable City. We have the world’s largest tram network (who does not love trams?), clean air and water, a reliable power grid and sewerage network, lots of parks and gardens, respected universities, a cosmopolitan atmosphere, and of course 9 of the 18 AFL teams.

The biggest problem that we usually have is that real estate prices are increasingly locking younger people out of the housing market – which is one of the prices people must pay for living in one of the best places on Earth.

Right now, things are not so rosy. This week, our technocratic Premier Dan Andrews gained us the dubious title of the most days in lockdown of any city in the world.

The problem I have with the repressive orders which the technocratic Andrews Government has been inflicting on the public have to do with mostly with the lack of both proportionality and accountability.

With the aid of such civic minded minds of the Legislative Council cross bench last year, such as the Greens and the misnamed Reason Party, legislation was passed enabling the emergency powers relied upon by various of the government ministers and unelected technocrats to issue highly authoritarian edicts were extended for twelve months in the one go. [And you thought that Fiona Patton of the Reason Party was mostly interested in abolishing prayers at the opening of Parliament, when actually she is more interested in not having Parliament sit very often at all.]

This legislation is now up for renewal, and you would hope that those hard working members of the Legislative Council cross bench wake from their slumber long enough to actually consider whether it is a good thing to give a government such powers for an extended period without oversight.

I believe, as was espoused 90 years ago by Dale Carnegie, that you can get further by what is called ‘soft power’, that is, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Instead, the public have been hectored and lectured and subject to threats and dictates which are better suited to communist China or fascist Italy (eg the night curfew which is all about social control rather than disease control).

Trying to avoid getting really angry about all this is difficult. We have lost a lot of freedoms, and the government has gotten very used to using the police in an unprecedentedly repressive manner to suppress dissent, including equipping them with weaponry which is highly inappropriate for use in Australia.

Hopefully, the newly announced corruption investigation by the state’s IBAC will result in the exposure of sufficient issues of concern as to cause Andrews to resign in disgrace. Because let’s face it, the state opposition is currently not very credible as an alternative government and the only way to get rid of Danny boy is for some or other of his back room deals to blow up in his face.

The authoritarian abuses of the past 18 months, along with the blame shifting and the lack of accountability for whoever is actually exercising these emergency powers, have not gone down well with the public. People increasing see the state government and its agents as illegitimate.

It does not help when the police do dawn raids on pregnant bogans for suggesting on Facebook that people should go out and protest. Nor does it come across as reasonable use of force when an acting sergeant of police effectively ‘coward punches’ (it was not a punch but the victim was knocked unconscious) a protestor from behind when he is already being spoken to by other police (that policeman who committed this assault should face dismissal and gaol time.). Nor does the litany of other abuses of force, such as the pepper spraying of elderly women already on the ground, or the shooting of what are apparently rubber bullets at protestors, endear this technocratic government to freedom loving people.

And it sickens me when this power drunk Premier boasts of a ‘ring of steel’, as if his speeches were being written by the Maoist lobbyists who had persuaded him to sign up to the Belt and Road initiative – the kind of language which relates more to running protestors over with tanks than to protecting the public.

In his 1927 essay La Trahison Des Clercs, French writer Julien Benda deplored the dogmatism of public intellectuals, who had lost the ability to reason dispassionately about politics.

Almost a century on, what would he have to say about current so-called public intellectuals, whose utterances are mostly reduced to smug and condescending tweets, intended to draw attention to their own self-claimed superiority?

I am referring today to that doyen of the Australian literati, Jane Caro, who ruffled feathers when she tweeted, in reply to the outcome of the AFL Grand Final:

“Dear most Aussies, who are the Dees? What is the thing you all care so much about? Actually, no, please (PLEASE), don’t explain. This tweet is just for all those kids like I once was who could not give a toss & felt weird and had to pretend. It’s OK. One day you can just ignore it.”

Given the third and fourth sentences dismiss the questions in the first two sentences, this does beg the query as to why she addressed this question to ‘most Aussies’ in the first place, except to needle and to publicly demonstrate her personal smugness and disdain for the hoi polloi.

I was personally disappointed with the outcome of the Grand Final, and not only because I lost a very good bottle of wine in a side wager (you would know by now that I am a proud Western Bulldogs supporter), but I am quite happy for all those people who are Melbourne Football Club supporters and who broke their 57 year drought.

Several years ago, when asked why he pumped so much money into funding soccer in Australia, Sir Frank Lowy replied along the lines that Sport brings joy. And it does, as a distraction from the usual struggles in life and in an opportunity to connect with a like minded community.

Jane Caro appears, with her joyless tweet, to miss this. When someone replied that she did not know what she was missing, her haughty reply was:

“No. Lovely way to live, frankly. Have you read all of Dickens and Austen and Gaskell? If not, you don’t either. Such is life.”

Obviously to her high brow tastes, a community of ‘most Aussies’ who draw joy from following a sporting competition is inferior to a community of herself and her few friends, people whose exclusive interests are nineteenth century novelists.

Oh my, what condescension from Queen Karen.

Well, I was good at Maths at school, and set theory does not hold a love of sport and literature to be mutually exclusive. I have read all of Austen’s novels, the overwhelming majority of Dickens’ (most of which you can happily skip – and I can go on for pages as to why) and have greatly enjoyed the more popular of Gaskell’s works (North and South is great, not so keen on Mary Barton). And don’t get me started on why I much prefer the much maligned Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens.

But arrogance and condescension is first nature for Queen Karen. On election night in May 2019, she expressed her horror at the outcome and her esteem for her fellow citizens and our free democracy in a bitter and angry post including a couple of naughty words which ended:

‘So I shall just dance & get pissed & stick two rude fingers up at all the truculent turds who voted to turn backwards.’

Off with their heads, I suppose.

I don’t just stick, unlike our mesmerising friend Jane the Joyless, to nineteenth century literature. I have long had a problematic fascination with American writer Kurt Vonnegut. In one of his novels (Bluebeard, if I recall), the narrator tells us that if we swear, we are inviting people to not listen to what we have to say.

And so it goes with our friend Jane, who seems to be a Karen. She aspires to be a provocateur, like the brilliant Germaine Greer, but she lacks the wit, the sense of irony, and the talent.

You could say that the Liberal-Conservative (ie non-collectivist / anti socialist) Right in Australia is a very broad church, one which has a lot in common with any cathedral in Naples. That is, it is big, rundown, lacking in the money to maintain it, has a very leaky roof, and lacks enthusiasm from its parishioners.

This has been apparent from the writings in the Real Freedom News blog, which I have been reading since May, and which provides some insiders views on matters occurring within the Victorian Liberal Party, along with some ad hominem attacks on persons active in said party whom the RFN disagrees with.

Real Freedom News has been, to some degree, a Scarlet Pimpernel tormenting machine politicians since early this year. I have been reading it avidly and with great amusement (some might say schadenfreude) since I stumbled across it during some google searches seeking insights into certain matters.

So imagine my disappointment this morning when I clicked on my bookmark to it and found that the account has been suspended. I hope that this is a temporary development, and that whilst I do not agree with everything they say, that Real Freedom News returns and continues to inform us on all the news that is not otherwise available on internal Liberal machine politics.

The 2021 AFL Grand Final is over. After texting various friends and acquaintances who barrack for Melbourne to offer my congratulations this morning, I have untied the Bulldogs scarf from the corner post of my front porch and put it and the other Bulldogs fan gear in the laundry basket.

Next year, hopefully, the AFL Grand Final is back in Melbourne again, although there is little cause for optimism with the way the plague is continuing to affect our day to day lives.

Three and a half weeks ago, I suggested in this blog that it is time for the AFL to consider holding the AFL Grand Final once every five years outside Victoria. Yesterday, my suggestion was echoed by the Chairman of the Gold Coast Suns, whose voice, unlike mine, was then reported in the mainstream media.

After the enthusiastic celebrations held in Perth on Friday in honour of the two competing clubs (I did give my membership number to a friend of a friend who is in Perth and a fellow Bulldog, to help him in his quest for tickets for the non-Bulldogs supporters in his family to the big game), you cannot deny that any grand final held in any part of Australia will attract a joyous welcome, regardless of whether a local team is playing or not.

Australian Rules has successfully taken root as the national football code since the inauguration of the AFL era in 1990. Eight of the eighteen clubs are located outside Victoria, and five of those non-Victorian clubs have won, between them, 12 premierships over the course of 32 seasons, including the purple patch between 1997 and 2006, where eight of those premierships were won, including (for Victorians) the horror period of 2004-2006 where no Victorian teams were in the grand final.

The MCG is indisputably the greatest stadium in Australia. It rightly deserves, as the birthplace of Australian Rules and Test Cricket, to host the AFL Grand Final regularly. But we do have other options. Perth Stadium is definitely a worthy stadium to host grand finals, and Adelaide Oval itself would merit hosting rights occasionally. After the Gabba is rebuilt for the Olympics (especially if they listen to me and build it to a 60,000 seat capacity rather than 50,000), it too will be a worthy venue.

Obviously, for a national sport, AFL Grand Finals should be occasionally held in the largest city in the nation, Sydney. My one hesitation there is that I have doubts currently about both the SCG and Stadium Australia’s abilities to host decent matches there.

It’s now 40 years since the decision was made to send South Melbourne Football Club north up the Hume Highway, starting the journey to a national competition. The necessity born of crisis in the past two seasons to host major games outside of Melbourne has created the opportunity to further grow the popularity of true football across the nation. This should involve expanding the competition to include teams from Tasmania and representing a composite of the NT and FNQ, and to 25 home and away matches per year.

And it definitely should involve slaying the sacred cow of perpetual Grand Finals at the MCG. Giving one out of every five to the rest of the nation is not only fair, but it is sensible marketing.

One of the things which fascinates me most about football is the anthropological aspect. That is, the culture of a football club. Being a lifelong supporter of a team which, until its current golden age, had a long history of underachievement, I am firmly of the belief that a club’s culture off-field will determine its success on-field.

A club needs to have a culture where winning is seen not only as possible, but as natural.

This can be quite hard to achieve, and sometimes to keep. Melbourne Football Club used to have it in spades, right up until they sacked reigning premiership coach Norm Smith in 1965, destroying their club’s mo-jo.

St Kilda did build a bit of such a culture in the mid 1960s, after decades of failure, but chose to waste it by choosing to become a club which partied and misbehaved after hours to excess – a party culture which it was indulging in as recently as at least 10 years ago.

Carlton lost it, and then regained it in the late 60s after it poached Ron Barassi from Melbourne, and hence enjoyed 8 premierships over 28 seasons before the salary cap scandal destroyed its winning culture.

Ron Barassi then went to VFL perennial cellar dwellers North Melbourne as his next challenge after Carlton, and passed on the spark which led to 5 consecutive seasons of grand final appearances and 2 flags.

Hawthorn, once it got started with its first flag in 1961, never stopped. It’s longest gap since then was the 17 years between 1991 and 2008.

A lot of this depends not only on the club’s history and the leadership of the club, but on the coach. An excellent coach, such as a Barassi or a Hafey or a Sheedy, can do wonders for turning around a club’s culture and making it believe that it can win.

Which leads me to Paul Roos. Roos has only coached one AFL Premiership, Sydney’s 2005 drought breaker. But his impact is far greater than that. Not only was he able to win a premiership with the Sydney Swans, but he was, because he was not really interested in making coaching his lifetime career, to develop a succession plan at Sydney which meant that his handpicked successor, John Longmire, coached Sydney to another flag in 2012 and to various other grand finals.

And then Paul Roos moved to Melbourne Football Club. He did this at the behest of the AFL, at a time when the oldest football club in Australia was a basket case. He made it clear that he was not there long term, that his goal was to rebuild the club and to select and mentor a successor who would build on his foundation.

As a result, his handpicked successor, Simon Goodwin, is today leading the Melbourne Football Club into their first grand final in 21 years, and with a chance of winning their first premiership in the AFL era, ending a 57 year drought.

Win or lose (and I hope they lose as I am a Bulldogs supporter!), the impact of Roos both on the Sydney Swans and on Melbourne as a transformer of the club culture is highly significant. This should never be underestimated.