Do I bring out the Rohan Connolly letter from 2008 and show what Stage Essendon are at. 
Please do Tucker.
Please do tucker, I wasn't here for that
Ok boys here it is once again for your enjoyment and our annual laugh at that sorry establishment that is the Essendon Football Club.
This was my response on this forum in 2008 in response to an article written by Rohan Connolly on how the Tigers will win the spoon this year and probably the next few without making a reference to his Bombers and the fact that Sheeds is now gone and his disintegration of the Essendon side that has left it without a spine and without key players who have retired and the lessening impact of the players in the twilight of their career. Furthermore the lack of any quality draft picks and players who have been recruited as quick fix jobs to plug a small crack in the dam wall.
Anyway as Lisa Simpson from the Simpson episode when Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday only for Marge to call Homer's bluff and keep the ball and learn to bowl with the sweet talking French homewrecker Jacques whilst going through an emotional rollercoaster on whether she will submit to his suave advances. Amongst all this Homer feels something is not quite right with his marriage and his feelings rub off on Lisa who goes through different stages of emotions depending on how advanced her feelings are.
Well these are the emotions that Essendon fans will go through 1 by 1 as diagnosed by me the regular shrink here on now that the Sheeds era has finished a new more useless apathetic and disillusioning era has begun.
Ahahahahahahah Rohan Connolly and 99.95% of Essendon supporters
welcome to Stage 1 Head in the Sand-
What the last 3 or 4 years have been for you all but despite the signals you were given you have managed to dig your head deeper into the sand. Hope there were no stray pieces of glass in the sand or any traces of urine but with the skata you Bomber fans will have thrown in your faces urine may be a pleasant change from the smelly diarrhoea you will have to live and breathe at the footy ground from now on.
Stage 2 Fear,
Maybe if I took the time to take all the sand out of my eyes then I would not have obstructed vision and really know what my plight is and the path I am going down. Oh no we can't be that crap. I know Collingwood are and Carlton and Richmond have won spoons in the last 10 or so years but not us. Hang on a sec what do we have here? Is that a real turd or just a polly waffle someone irresponsibly left behind? Oh no its a piece of skata. Why is it here and what does it mean? We are Essendon we don't have skata here.
Stage 3 Reassurances-
Yes someone from EFC board endorsing the coach and the team most likely the president wiping the sweat from his receding brow with a wrinkled and withered hanky whilst unbuttoning his top button on his shirt and loosening his tie from around his neck as a gesture of massive psychological proportions indicating that he will not be going to the gallows and admitting in a half baked way that they have on field problems and that they are working feverishly hard to rectify them as these results are Un Essendon Like with an assurance that this coming weekend the team will perform and will be accountable win lose or draw. Narrow losses over the next two weeks leave the place upbeat but 1 win in 8 games since the President's assurance leave the teams fans ready to embark onto the next stage.
Stage 4 Anger
Anger will set in when they will suffer a humiliating 100+ point loss. Most likely to a crappy Victorian team like Hawthorn St Kilda Nought or a pathetic interstate team like Fremantle. Questions that will be asked by disgruntled fans will be- How can a team ladled with talent like the Bombers lose like that? What are they doing? Its a shame Its a shame Its a shame. These players are good enough. We should be dishing out these sort of hidings not copping them. In the meantime footy talk back hotlines from the various radio shows will be clogged by Essendon fans with the same repetitive and hopeless theme of helplessness, places that were once specially reserved post match for Richmond fans whose blood was boiling and were experiencing the same lows. Hopefully the end of the season is nigh by then and most of these yokels can move on successfully to the next stage by which time Santa will be going down their chimneys on Christmas Day to give them their new seasons polo shirt or trackie jacket.
Stage 5 Optimism.
With the new pre season comes new hopes new dreams new challenges and quick fix solutions. By January these Bombers will have well and truly had that abhorrent year behind them so the law of averages says a club like the Bombers cannot stay out of the finals for too long in the modern era. Plus Santa brought me a new Essendon polo so that is definentely a good omen isn't it? Geez I can't wait till casual Friday at work and I can wear this collared masterpiece and show my true colours to all those bastards. Plus I have had enough of this cricket bring on the footy I am an Essendon fan yeah yeah yeah. Carn the Bombers.
Stage 6 What the fornication/anger2.
Surely we cannot be that bad surely we can't keep
losing the way he have been. After all we managed to coax blokes from the VFL who have failed already in their attempts at AFL football to come back and play AFL football. That in itself is a top 6 job isn't it? The guys we have recruited are really good why do we keep losing? Our coach has good intentions. This is so mind boggling. I just can't fathom as to why we are not winning. We are not skata. With a bit of luck things will change I am sure of that. We are better than a 5-17 side I will tell you that, stuff what anyone says. Its time to fly the flag for the footy club what's the talk back hotline for SEN?
Stage 7 Indifference
Lets play out this scenario. Lets say in a work situation or a social one.
Hello so and so. How are you ?
Fine.
Follow the footy?
No not really used to go but don't have the time now with kids and my wife.
Who do you support?
Essendon.
Didn't you have kids and a wife in 2000 though?
Yeah why?
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha tosser, bet you weren't busy in 2000 going to the footy to watch the Bombers you moron.
You find that you have no emotion not because you don't love your club, but because you just don't ,you just sit there and cop it. You have no comebacks to other people's degrading comments about your footy club. The wit has all gone and all you have left is a tendency to become personal with those making the comments such as calling them smart behinds, behindholes or idiots or you merely tell them to get fornicated and have a tendency to lean into violence to quell the situation and give yourself something to hang your hat on. Then you realise that you don't wear hats and that your Bombers scarf is gone too stolen by some smart behind kid from the wrong side of the tracks who found it hilarious to watch you mentally disintegrate at the hands of some knowitall and in your time of frailty when you were not concentrating he took it as a souvenir of his trip to the big smoke just to compound your bad day. Scary for you so and so middle class politically correct suburbanites At least you have your wallet and credit card for now.
Stage 8 Embarrassment.
Realising you have become the butt of jokes from your circle of friends you find a happy medium where you love the game and go to the games
without your friends who conveniently support better sides but on the plus side you have no expectation or any goals. You find the train trip to the G or Dome quite daunting wearing your Essendon polo or trackie jacket that Santa so thoughtfully brought you, as fans from real loser clubs like Nought , Bulldogs, St Kilda and Hawthorn look at you like a cheshire cat who just ate the cream with a sly grin on their face laughing at your pathetic choice of team. You console yourself with the fact that they have never supported a club that had the pedigree of your team. However your current plight almost makes their annual failure for the last 100 years worth it as they may break their greatest winning margin against you each time you face them.
Devoid of pride and answers you avoid the water cooler at work on Monday as management tend to chew the fat there over the weekends footy results and your presence there no matter how brief may invoke an anti Bomber rhetoric which will make you look like a real idiot and hold you back from any promotion that you may be in line for. You have stopped sitting with the stigmatised clappers at the ground on match days. Stories of Baby Bombers and losing 1 game for the entire season become as tiresome as Collingwood's 1958 premiership anecdotes. In a last form of indignity towards you the sweet virginal girl at work with the figure of a model and a pair of breasts hand sculpted from the deepest regions of your fiendish mind who you have fantasized bending over the photocopy machine in that deviant mind of yours, who doesn't even talk to anyone unless she's spoken to overhears a conversation between you and a few workmates on a Monday in the work tea room while she is boiling water for her morning coffee and sifting through the family assorted bikkies in the tin trying to prize out a sought after Scotch Finger from the 60 Granitas nobody wants to eat. Your talking about the weekend footy and all of a sudden she is compelled to tell you she's a Collingwood fan and that 1990 was her favourite year and that years Grand Final was her favourite footy game ever growing up just to rub it in a little further after your Anzac Day loss to the Pies over the weekend. Without a meaningful response and not wanting to seem stupid and rude in case she lets her guard down one Friday night drinks night and hence ruin your chance of a quality fornication you roll your eyes back in a joking way as if you are ignoring her and you keep your responce to yourself. Much to your workmates amusement after she retires to her trusty pod back in the office, they fall into sidesplitting laughter whilst your face turns red much like your teams sash on their jumper. Now your a two time loser you follow a crappy team and you ain't getting near this dame come Friday nite drinks no matter how much she's gonna drink. Moral of the story- Even people who you did not think could or would be threatening are making you feel threatened and are now scoring brownie points against you all because you follow a team that is the laughing stock of the competition.This creates another office problem -Scabbing smokes when you run out is becoming dangerous as somebody who has a spare one may ark up at you and remind you of your place in the football jungle whilst you are still trying to separate the Longbeach/Peter Jackson smokers from the Dunhill, Winfield/ Peter Stuyvesant smokers and you then have to subject yourself to an inferior smoke merely because the person you are asking has no idea on football and you need to fulfill that nicotine urge in your mind that will in turn take away the stress piled on you by these unlikely threatening people.
Stage 9 Rage.
Weekend comes around and for the umpteenth time in the last few years its a pivotal game against a much more credentialled and battle hardened team. Win and you have a golden ticket into the finals. Your season is set up and you can pinpoint that game as the defining moment in which you launched your premiership or final 8 thrust. Lose and its mothballs with all the standard soulsearching questions and emotions. Guess what you lose.... badly............Poor skills, poor decison making by players, players playing in a reckless and undisciplined way, coach playing players who should have been dropped weeks ago due to their poor form and committment all make your blood boil after all you have been witness to this for the last 5 or so years. In fact lets be real frank about this you were never in this game either with the margin ballooning to greater proportions at the end of each quarter. However to your credit you keep your dignity and hold all your raging emotions in check until......... a trivial mistake by a player at a point in the game where you have no chance of winning makes you start to brood like Ted Bundy in a sorority house full of brunette haired women parted in the middle. Come the final siren you break the shackles and restraint is a futile exercise as you start throwing merchandise off your own body down onto the race as the players silently and solemnly trundle in after their awful loss. You continue by throwing your membership at the coach who chose a quick fix solution to see out his contract rather than go the full rebuild and call SEN and all other forms of radio media to express your vitriolic opinion on why your club is crap and mutton dressed up as lamb and how long will this run of crap last. Blah blah blah. You even make it on the news with the terms crisis, failure, disaster and catastrophe describing the story of your clubs shocker of a game with an image of you right in the middle of the screen giving the spray of all sprays and giving the beleagured coach another headache in his herculian task of lifting a side that can't lift.
Stage 10 Hope.
The board notice that the natives are restless. They can see all is not right so they sack the coach and the board then fall on their own sword with a new board pledging on their honour they will come in to rectify the on field situation and restore it to something that will resemble what it was when you were winning flags and making finals at regular yearly intervals. Restorations of the off field variety are also on the cards. Finances are dwindling and so is universal respect. Players from a club who were once cocky and arrogant are now apologetic and sombre to their fans but relieved that a new coach has spared their sorry hides from the AFL scrapheap for another couple of seasons yet or until the new coach has finally completed his player review. The fans talk this all up as a recipe for success. After all they have been through who can blame them. The law of averages says 16 AFL teams 8 finals spots that's a 50% chance. Now that new blood is in and entrenched that surely equates to success. This board is not capable of blowing merely their own trumpet and having personal interests at heart only. It won't affect the on field performance. After all we are Essendon.
Stage 11 Spend
When you are fearful of something going wrong what do you do? You spend, it takes your mind off the real issues concerning you and you feel temporarily better. In football parlons that means going into the draft and picking up cheap recycled goods that can hopefully do the job properly this time around. After all if you do nothing you will incur the wrath of our constituents, so at least we are showing that we are doing something. With spending comes a false confidence and a false bravado so all this unbridled faith has to turn to something good eventually even if we no longer make a yearly profit and our finances are becoming more and more dire by the day. We also undertake a venture in which we lure back to the club former premiership players from bygone eras and give the fans a chance to mingle with them and take their minds off current matters by shrewdly disguising them as Club 2000 or Club 93 something that was once revered and fans can relate to. We will spend heavily and serve the best champagne at the best venue with the best finger food. By the time our money runs out the fans will be lucky to get a Patties Party Pie let alone some decent tomato sauce to accompany it and Gold Medal Coca Cola rather than the real thing.
Stage 12 We didn't cater for this.
After a reasonable start that had the conservatives talking about scraping into the 8 and the optimists talking about top 4 and yes even a Grand Final as well ,the dream has crashed after a number of lossess in a row some heavy some heavier and some that they should have won if they weren't skata finals is merely a pipe dream. How could this be? All the so called preparation, dedication planning effort how can it amount to mediocrity, zilch, failure? Where to from here? Rather than trouble yourself and turn yourself black and blue,give yourself a break and return to stage 1. It will take the heat off for at least 18-24 months after all you'll get your social life back and that will at least prosper. Once the gloss of your binge drinking subsides after a couple of drink driving convictions and a failed marriage to complement all your personal and social misgivings then proceed to go through the other stages one by one till its time to go back to stage 1 in about five years after two full terms of coaching served by two separate coaches who were so skata that the club were never going to renew their contracts or increase their tenure and repeat the process over again. Continue all this for at least 25 years as a minimum and only make the finals once or twice as a token gesture in between to break up the fun or monotony depending on the fragility of your state of mind. Furthermore factions within the supporter group emerge and the club is looking more disjointed and fragmented with each passing year. Enjoy Rohan Enjoy. You have been a journalist all your life to become what a male Bomber version of the bitter twisted and degenerate writing that Caro produces in regards to the Tigers. Oh Rohan would you like to see the psychaitrist now or in 25 years?
