Amateur hour
Before we begin, please stand, stare forlornly into space and observe a minute’s silence for Gold Coast United.
Thank you.
As you’ve probably noticed, The Ancelottery is no stranger to incompetence. Abstract reasoning, syntax and humour are just some of the things for which we display no aptitude. We don’t whinge about it, no… instead we just get on with it, striving always for mediocrity.
But, there are some incompetent people out there who have been handed fancy titles in an attempt to stop them from banging on inanely about their supposed ‘specialist subject’: Les ’Mr Football’ Murray, ‘journalist’ Tracy Grimshaw and newly appointed ‘Foreign Minister’ Bobblehead Bob Carr, we’re looking at you.
What’s all this got to do with Melbourne Victory you might be asking? Well, according to dour Scotsman, Ernie McMerrick, the Melbourne Victory board are incompetent and they have failed “to nurture a strong culture”, therefore rendering Victory “dysfunctional.”
“The board is condescending and fails to treat (fans) with respect,” he condescendingly observed, “I’m not a vindicative person,” he vindictively said, before ruining it with, “I found it remarkable to read the squad is comprised largely of ‘old and slow’ players. Rubbish!”
Ha! As if!
Meanwhile out on the pitch the incompetence continues. Victory started well enough against Perth Glory, with former Brimbank Stallions midfielder, Carlos “the Leaping Esky” Hernandez in fine form. That was before Table tennis champion, Matthew Foschini, intervened with his own version of “heads, shoulders, knees and toes.” But contrary to all of our expectations, Victory led at the break courtesy of the recently departed Mark Milligan, giving it “some violence”.
But football is a game of two halves. You know it and we know it. And it ain’t over til Kate Ceberano starts singing. Victory played the second half like they were only introduced to each other in the changing room at half time. Their abject second half performance was even less convincing than their 5-1 defeat at the hands of Perth the last time they were at the NIB. Post-game, Archie Thomspon described it as “amateur hour”, which is probably a bit harsh on St Kevin’s Old Boys SC, as there are some very good defenders in the Men’s Metropolitan League Central Reserves Division.
Still, speaking post-game, at least Jim Magilton was prepared to call a spade a sharp garden tool designed primarily for moving earth, “In the second half we just didn’t produce enough quality when it really mattered and we got punished. Our ineptitude showed through at times and our concentration levels again cost us dearly.” But who can complain when we got to hear this again?
Good news for Jim Magilton though, whose job, by all accounts, as Coach In Charge Of Arguing With Harry Kewell is safe. His record of five defeats, five draws and two wins, has been good enough to get himself a “J. Magilton (Head Coach)” plaque next to a space in the AAMI Park car lot. That is, until the Melbourne Victory board sacks him for getting a bad score on Words With Friends, or for winning five trophies.
Big Jim took over at Victory with the club sixth on the ladder, one point adrift of a finals berth. And they end the season in eighth spot, eight points adrift from a finals spot. If that’s not progress, The Ancelottery doesn’t know what is.
***LATE BREAKING NEWS***
You know what they say, give one hundred monkeys, one hundred typewriters and eventually they’ll come up with a premature press release about Roddy Vargas.
On a serious note though, the incompetence doesn’t stop there! Anxious to prove that even non-football departments can get involved, Melbourne Victory’s webmasteramateur couldn’t help themselves in releasing this need-to-know-basis-not-for-public-consumption-don’t-publish news today, before promptly withdrawing it.
Comforting for Roddy we’re sure. On the upside Roddy, we heard that Brimbank Stallions are on the lookout for a work shy midfielder. Every cloud and all that.
It’s a Knockout!!
Filmed in front of a live audience at 8pm on a Friday night, the I’maMelbourneVictoryBigWipeoutSurvivorCelebrityBrotherIdol contestants are now down to ten! And the show just keeps on getting hotter as the contestants battle it out to win the ultimate prize - a new contract!
Regular viewers will remember last week’s episode, when elderly contestant, Tommy P, was sent packing with a commemorative carriage clock and a Mehmet Durakovic pin badge, ever to be remembered simply as, “the guy who went out first.”
Who will fall by the wayside this week!?!
(Cue dramatic montage sequence)
After last week’s horror show in the Sydney Immunity Challenge, all eyes are on eBay Luzardo’s efforts to convince a hostile crowd that he’s not the Kyle Sandilands of the current series. Paired with a new partner, it’s only a matter of time until this ‘Intruder’ is evicted.
Next up is Diogo Ferriera who seems to have nicely avoided the “Pit of Leigh Broxham’s ability”. He’s playing it safe, very safe, but will he have the social game to go all the way?
BAM!!! A contestant’s down! What a hit! Last year’s winner, Marco Rojas, will be seeing a procession of bright pink Manny Muscats cha-cha-cha-ing around his head a good 18 hours after being hit at 100kmph by that elbow! That will surely rule him out not just of this competition but also Young Talent Time.
Meanwhile Brazilian defender Fabio better learn the forgotten art of defending, and fast, otherwise he’ll be blubbering down the barrel of a lens at Morwell Heart!
Bookies favourite, Grant Brebner, has done his chances no harm (mostly by not playing) but is banking all his money on his ability to win over guest judge, Craig Foster, with his British accent and agricultural style of football. Hoof!!
And there are suggestions, although possibly from every other A-league team, that Matty “one paced” Kemp should be handed a contract.
But no! In a dramatic turn of events, it’s an amazing double eviction!! Jean Carlos Solorzano and Carlos Hernandez are both sent packing back to Costa Rica! It’s an unbelievable outcome that absolutely has nothing to do with the program makers cutting their budget for I’maMelbourneVictoryBigWipeoutSurvivorCelebrityBrotherIdol 2: Fear of the Unknown.
Coming up next week:
Having navigated the INSURMOUNTABLE WALL (of visa issues),Julius Davies has his eye firmly on the prize. Plus, we have an exclusive preview of next year’s newest contestant! Now that he’s wiped the dribble off of his bib, we have an exclusive chat with former Clive Parmigiana’s nursery contestant, Adama Troare! All this and more, as Victory try to address the alarming trend of actually winning games! Don’t miss it!
Everything Must Go
The Monday morning to-do list at Ancelottery HQ: locate panadol, locate coffee, locate breakfast, wipe breakfast off t-shirt, wipe breakfast off keyboard, call IT support, maintain appearance of collectedness, check news outlets, check what Clive Palmer’s been up to over the weekend. Insults? Slogans? New companies? Fly-bys? Cake? More cake? Redundancies? If only Miron was still around to tell us.
But he isn’t, and so instead we’re forced to focus on the absolute shower that go by the name of Melbourne Victory.
Unfortunately for us, Victory’s trip to Bling FC (sic) and fortress Allianz proved without doubt that (a) Victory aren’t very good, and; (b) there are no more synonyms of the word ‘inept’ that we have to draw upon. Surely a new low for us all?
Whilst we thought being snubbed by Jon Bon Jovi was the lowest point in the club’s history, Victory managed to succumb to even lower depths with a performance so devoid of passion and emotion that Neighbours casting agents have been queuing up at the change room desperate for their signature.
The most prominent offenders were Victory’s ‘defenders’, who are lucky not to be under investigation by the ACCC this morning for falsely representing themselves. Matty Foschini gave the kind of inept performance that had us yearning for the return of Seb Ryall. Whilst eBay Luzardo gave a good old fashioned display of inept donkeyism that will make Jim consider the folly of making a purchase from someone who isn’t a High Volume Trusted Powerseller.
It was such an inept non-performance that Mark Bosnich described it as “the worst by an A-league club in three years.” Bozza didn’t stop there though, failing to see the irony in asking “how Victory’s players can look at themselves in the mirror?”
And whilst here at Ancelottery HQ we are all too familiar with the concept of hitting rock bottom, we were left asking ourselves where it all went wrong? Some might try and talk it up by describing it as a roller-coaster ride of a season, but that would imply that enjoyment was involved along the way.
Despite Magilton’s managerial record putting the dire in diabolical, the common conception from those in the know (and those not) is that he’s impressed Antony Di Pietro with a spinning top, a card trick and will be committing bodily harm in the dressing room next season. If so, he’s not going to sit on his hands! Speaking post-game, Magilton reasoned that he’d like to see “a change in personnel, a different mindset and …it needs to be done sooner rather than later.”
We completely concur. By our reckoning fourteen squad players should be perusing this wishlist and fine-tuning their farewell speech. Only time will tell if this is just a shallow, crowd-pleasing gesture that’s more transparent than some op-shop undies, or whether Jim is serious about offloading the inept likes of Tom Pondeljak, Leigh Broxham and Matty Kemp. Get the pricing gun ready and start discounting.
~ Fin ~
Finally, the season has ended. The prolonged nightmare is over.
What’s that? It hasn’t? Well, you could have fooled us.
You see, we came to that conclusion after Melbourne Victory served up the crowning undeniable piece of evidence that they’re simply, well… not very good.
On a moist Saturday afternoon at AAMI Park, Victory showed that this current team is not, and never were, anywhere close to title favourites. As Ed Rooney might say, “Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s a fool’s paradise, and Victory have been leading us down the primrose path.”
As ‘expert’ analysts (and Craig Foster) sit on their leatherette couches and backtrack on their initial asinine viewpoint that this Victory squad is better than nine other A-league teams, the fans are left to rue a season of staggering ineptness. Saturday was just the creme fondant icing on a family size A-league cake.
The game itself followed the usual blueprint. Despite a bright start, the humiliation started soon enough when schoolboy Petar Franjic gave a lesson in schoolboy defending. Franjic wasn’t to steal the limelight though! Hot on the heels of his last brainfreeze in Perth, Matty ‘one-paced’ Kemp, 48, gave a textbook lesson in comically inept defending, proving without doubt that Leigh Broxham isn’t the worst player to ever get a Socceroos cap.
And in case you were doubting this spurious fact, Kemp then threw his toys out of the pram and had a bit of a sulk when he was hauled off shortly before the half time whistle; for Leigh Broxham.
But wait… we know what you’re thinking… surely there would be an obligatory late lunge by an overcommitted, yet tired Victory player which will result in subsequent red card?
Of course there would. The Leaping Esky the offending player this time.
One thing is for certain: there was nothing for even the most ardent Eureka flag waving Victory fan to cheer about. While Jim and Harry optimistically say they’ll pick themselves up and “go to Sydney and get a result”, there is absolutely no doubt about it, this season is over.
