Paul Sheehan, the Oz, futball in all its forms, and never mind the hits, feel the quality of the anger ...

(Above: phallic and other Freudian symbolism comes to Melbourne via the Docklands).

Let's resume the pond readings with an editorial full of pious cant celebrating a religion:

Sport occupies a sacred place in the vibrant national conversation that nourishes our democracy and enhances our shared sense of nationhood. (And the greatest of all is hope).

Is there nothing sport can't do? Could it be that sporting prowess resulted in Gallipoli? Hang on, at Gallipoli the national team did a St Kilda ...

We strongly disagree with a small but vocal group of inner-urban sophisticates who dismiss sport as trivial and mock its followers.

Damn you, you damnable inner city vocalising sophisticates, with your mocking ways and your snide innuendoes and elitist snooty ways.

Why damned if I didn't see an inner city sophisticate this very morning pick up a copy of The Australian ...

At once I knew deep in my heart that he had to be a supporter of the Roosters, and deserved a plucking and de-feathering and then a roasting in the fiery flames of a dragon ...

We remain a nation proudly divided by our sporting allegiances. We cannot even agree on the meaning of the word football.

Damn you, you French structuralists, with your relativism, and your needless arbitrary complexity. 'Football' becomes such an arcane and complex word, beyond the understanding of the general populace and incapable of an arbitrated meaning from the most diligent scribbler of editorials for The Australian.

Yet paradoxically, sport is one of the great societal levellers, the common ground on which everyone can converse.

Except of course those chattering sophisticated elites ... perhaps because they use poncy pretentious pompous preening words like "paradoxical" and "societal levellers" in their all too common and sordid discourse.

In a globally connected, multi-ethnic age, sport embodies the values that define Australians.

Say what? You mean the values that define Australians are somehow different to the values of a globally connected, multi-ethnic age? You mean sport is a special dinkum cobber virtue, unlike those hysterical French chappies? Who like the Italians simply fall over, and shriek and moan and clutch at shins while miles from the ball?

Graft, commitment and teamwork, a confidence that cheats never prosper, grit and persistence are chief among them.

Cheats never prosper? Or even help others make out like bandits? Except of course if you happen to be playing professional football or cricket?

But let's not forget hope. However dismal the past two decades have been, this could just be your year.

At last I get it ... supporting a team is like buying a lottery ticket. Never give up hope. Waiter, I'm in the malthouse, bring me a light beer ...

Never mind. After reading this tosh - best appreciated if spoken in a voice approximating the Majors in Fawlty Towers, and preferably followed by references to the sporting fields of England, and the glories of the empire and the first world war - I felt like grabbing the wretched inner city elitist who'd actually bought The Australian so they could read this humbug, and giving them a good shaking while asking What level of flagellating masochism drives you to read this kind of drivel? Don't you realise if you wear a beret and buy The Australian, you're an elitist incapable of a common conversation around the water cooler?

Ah well, it was a hearty way to wrap up the weekend, and all the more potent after an extended tour of the Docklands, an inner city development in Melbourne centred around a football stadium.

A more miserable, disheartening hodge podge of steel and glass and hideous banality, devoid of soul or humanity, couldn't be imagined. Most Melburnians, I'm told, dash into the grounds, then high tail it out of there as quickly as possible. We covered it on foot and by car in detail - and lucky to sight signs of humanity, perhaps a spoor here or there - and were hardly suprised when a senior Victorian bureaucrat informed us that the view within government was that it'd been a bit of a fuck up, requiring a restructuring of the unit that had helped birth the monstrous beast.

It will take years to develop any humanity, predicated as it is on hostile sealed off streetscapes, and the notion that the mice should work in vast forlorn open office spaces, trot off to small cramped apartments, eat out at wretched restaurants, get fit in an abundance of gyms, and keep repeating the whole "a place to live, eat work and play, and possibly fornicate before going out of mind and running amok" until death intervenes. At last private enterprise in consort with the Victorian government has developed the perfect battery hen lifestyle ...

So much for the hapless, wretched inner urban elites. Still, the footie's close to hand. That should fix it all. We hightailed it to the Footscray markets just to restore a little circulation with a good coffee ...

Meanwhile, it's cheering to return to the pond, and see that Paul Sheehan has scored 190 hits at time of writing, on the subject of football, in Fast and furious, a league apart.

Sheehan starts off with a sombre, solemn note that immediately tags him as an inner city elitist. After noting that some NRL players are to be banned for match fixing - or so a lawyer friend texted him, with said friend wondering about why there were no reports in News Ltd - Sheehan took an opportunity to contradict the smooth hopeful tones of the Oz editorialist:

News Ltd would regard this as an outrageous question. But the question was raised because News Ltd has a lot of influence with the National Rugby League, and has displayed little interest in this story.

In 17 pages of coverage of the 2010 rugby league grand final in its two Sydney-based newspapers on Saturday, News did not have the story that the Herald splashed on its front page at the weekend, about a betting plunge involving the alleged manipulation of an NRL game.

Then like the agitated poseur inner city elitist ponce he is, he drove home a chattering nail:

This strikes at the core of the game's integrity. It is also a big story - unless you work at News Ltd, the same company that owns last year's premiers, the Melbourne Storm, who were exposed as having engaged in systematic cheating. Not that News Ltd management knew anything about this. News merely owns the team.

But then Sheehan goes on to become a Susan Greenfield, and I'm afraid I became agitated, manic, and distracted:

The favourite game among young males, by far, is video games. They are fast, furious, interactive and usually brutal. These games have changed the attention spans of young people, and football needs to adapt to the tempo of the video age. The NRL has adapted, becoming more manic, and is now the most-watched sport on Australian TV.

Strange, I don't play video games, but I guess it must seep in somehow, like ether through the air. No doubt Sheehan will publish a more extensive monograph in learned journals, perhaps refereed by Sherlock Holmes, explaining precisely how and why video games have changed the attention span of young people.

Clearly this profound change spells the death of tennis, golf, lawn bowls, ten pin bowling, swimming, athletics, shooting, cricket, baseball ... why the list of tedious, slow moving games out of tempo with the video age is vast and huge, but no one notices because they lack the manic quality designed to attract attention ...

But relax lawn ballers and basket weavers, it's only a prelude so that Sheehan himself can go on to bash up rugby union, and of course soccer, which of course isn't football, though the foot might be applied to the ball ...

And when he gets going on this and waxes lyrical about his preferred tribes and viewing habits, it's simply a chance for Sheehan to indulge in hubris and some bashing of Europeans, who of course are just pansies and cry babies and cheats, and lovers of debt ...

Even the biggest tribes and biggest brands in global football are floating on a sea of red ink. The 20 English Premier League clubs have a combined debt of $4.6 billion. It's the same in Spain and Italy. The business model of Europe is debt and dynasty, with a handful of mega-clubs sharing the championships while the rest of the clubs make up the numbers.

Funny how Sheehan doesn't find the time to mention how News Corp has been funding various rugby league clubs and taking a pounding, most recently the Melbourne Storm, treating the club as a kind of loss leader for its television activities, and pissing millions against the wall on an annual basis ...

You can always get a conversation going - or so I'm told - arguing about which league club is likely to go under, or go belly up, or do whatever such clubs do when they can't get the punters to the poker machines quickly enough ...

Could it be that the business model of Australian rugby league is debt and Rupert Murdoch? With a handful mega clubs sharing the championships while the rest of the clubs make up the numbers?

No siree Bob. Sheehan sees a rosy future:

Australia has chosen the American model (ironically, the socialist model) of salary caps and player drafts. The NRL and AFL can each expect billion-dollar contracts when their TV deals come for renewal.

Rugby union and the A League, unless they adapt to the era of attention deficit disorder, can expect the leftovers.

Yep, a country of twenty odd million is surely going to put soccer in its place. Why it's not even football.

And no wonder I've got attention deficit disorder ... could it be from the manic displays of attention getting put on by Herald columnists?

Still Sheehan has played the game well, as Caroline Overington explains, as she defines what makes a good columnist while gloating about Miranda the Devine's imminent return to the mothership:

The Herald used to get more letters in response to her two weekly columns than all the Herald's other columnists combined.

Never mind the quality, feel the width. Never mind the intelligence of the things said, marvel at the rage provoked. The rest of Overington's rant (Two needed to fill Devine shoes) is a wonderful mix of condescension and Murdoch hackery.

One of the most wonderful things about the internet is surely the opportunity it presents for all people -- smart or stupid -- to have their say.

Quite a few are having a red-hot go at it, screeching loudly into the abyss that is the world wide web, and good for them.

To be a columnist on a real newspaper, though -- that takes skill.

And please, pray tell, who might possess such skill? Which is to inflame the sensibilities of any bystanders, by screeching loudly into the abyss such fine thoughts as "hang a greenie from a lamp post today"? Why, naturally it's Miranda the Devine:

Good columnists bring a range of tools to the table, chief among them common sense. They understand that they have to be provocative, without being putrid; entertaining, without being juvenile; fair, without being boring.

Yep, that surely sounds like Miranda the Devine. Putrid and juvenile in a way that's provocatively entertaining:

It sounds easy but it isn't (and if you don't believe that, go swim in the open sewer that passes for commentary on the web, and see if you don't come up feeling filthy).

As opposed to the global warming and NBN cesspit of The Australian's commentary pages ... where you come up unwashed and uninformed ...

Given all that, no one envies The Sydney Morning Herald, as it tries to fill the hole left by Miranda Devine.

Well she's right about that. It surely is a hole, but thankfully no root canal therapy is required ...

You have to hand it to the denizens of the pond. A few days away in blissful quiet and awed contemplation of an urban disaster, but on and on they go, berating the inner city elites, celebrating the football preferred by manic attention disordered teens, and measuring the quality of the scribbles by the rage they inspire ...

By golly, it won't be long before I'm living behind smokey glass in the Docklands, wondering if this is the fate of all inner city elites ...

Damn them all, and their Oz newspaper buying ways ...

(Below: innocent urban elites caught grazing in the Docklands, this time in London, at one with Melbourne in its love of glass, metal and desolate urban spaces).