- Ooops. Forgot to publish this one. Anyway…
‘Kill for Collingwood’? Well, almost. But that’s a metaphor, one not intended to encourage players to drink, drive, and be a bloody idiot. Oh, and to then lie about it.
Recently, on signing his new $800,000-plus, two-year contract with the Magpies the 25-year-old [Alan Didak] refused to front the media but appeared in a Magpies-generated interview on the Collingwood website.
On Sunday night, after two nights of heavy drinking, Didak disappeared when the police arrived. It was Heath Shaw who visited him in the early hours of Monday after his positive breath test had been made official and suggested he protect Didak.
Didak only too readily agreed. Like Ben Cousins before him, the Magpies’ best player now appears to have run away from his responsibilities once too often. It now seems clear that Collingwood has suspended Didak with a view to trading him at the end of the season.
Uh-huh…
Had he been at all interested in working class recreations, Karl Marx may well have joined the worshippers at the Magpie shrine. For around Victoria Park ‘all facts and personages of great importance… occur… the first time as tragedy’ – only to be endlessly repeated in black-and-white farce. Football followers no longer see a tragedy in the Magpies’ modern history. Now the Collingwood fiascos seem comic. In the latest farce, The Fall of the New Magpies, there are constant calls for Stremski to come forward – and play the oracle – raising a sordid tale of swollen pride into majestic tragedy.
~ Chris McConville, review of Kill for Collingwood (Richard Stremski, Allen & Unwin, 1987), in Sporting Traditions, November 1986, Vol.3, No.1
The new, improved, Collingwood theme song:
