Beer Blokes NRL Grand Final review

Melbourne Storm (4th) vs Parramatta Eels (8th)
Clear blue skies, top temperature of around 17c, light winds.

3 Trial games, 26 Home & Away games, 2 Finals Matches and it all comes down to this one day. Eighty minutes of determination, concentration and, for the winners, a lifetime of jubilation.

Pre-game preparation and the warm-up.

They say that the key to a good finish is good preparation and this is no more evident than in the case of a Grand Final. You need to be focussed on your goal and committed to doing whatever it takes. Don’t change a preparation that has worked for you up till now and most importantly, “Don’t leave anything in the tank when the final siren sounds”.

So I went with a James Squire Pilsner. Tried and true, a great example of the style and locally brewed. The original James Squire had a hotel and brewery in Parramatta so I figured his would be an appropriate nod to history.

First Half.

Another James Squire Pilsner. If it’s working for you, don’t change the game plan. At the five minute mark Melbourne break the line to put first points on the board. I celebrate with restraint – it’s early – and go with a Matilda Bay Fat Yak as I had planned.

24 minute mark and Cooper Cronk throws a terrific dummy to break the line and put Adam Blair away for Melbourne’s second try. Professor Pilsner opens the fridge for his second Fat Yak. The Storm look like they may make the Prof pay for his pre-game promise to toast each try with a fresh beer.

Half time.

The Storm waste a few scoring opportunities and Parramatta’s lack of big stage experience and Melbourne’s pressure sees the Storm go to the half time break 10 -0 up. The Prof breathes a sigh of relief and enjoys a Bridge Road Pale Ale.

Second Half.

45th minute. Parra get themselves on the scoreboard with a try to Eric Goethe Jnr to make the difference just 4 points. No beer there. 4 minutes later and Greg Inglis takes a high bomb uncontested and strolls under the dot to score. To celebrate such a no-fuss, consistent and pack-leading team effort, a Mountain Goat Pale Ale makes its first appearance. 16-6.

6 minutes later ... Billy Slater latches onto a perfectly executed Adam Blair offload to score the Storms’ fourth try and with a reputation for taking a big lead and then going right on with the business, The Prof is starting to worry that he won’t see the end of this contest. 22-6.

70th minute, ten minutes to go ... Parramatta score twice in consecutive sets to put the frighteners up both the Storm and the Prof and narrow the gap to just 6 points with five minutes to play.

76th minute. Another Mountain Goat Pale fills the glass as Greg Inglis slots a wobbly field goal to take the score to 23-16 to secure the clubs’ third premiership in just a twelve year history. As Channel Nong shows a total lack of common sense and respect for its viewers and cuts to the news as the siren sounds, I am forced to crack a celebratory Little Creatures Pale Ale, close my eyes and imagine seeing the trophy being handed to Melbourne captain, Cam Smith.

The empties are removed from The Stadium and The Prof retires, happy, proud and just a little bit wobbly but looking forward to next season already. Well done Melbourne. Premiers 2009.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Plenty of US vs THEM

Here I am, sitting at home, beer in hand waiting for 5.30 and the NRL Grand Final to begin. My Melbourne Storm has achieved the rare feat of contesting their fourth decider in as many years and I will have to watch it all from a thousand k’s away.

In 2006 we were very unlucky to lose the big one to the Brisbane Broncos, the following year we gave the ‘Silvertails’ from Manly a good ol’ Victorian hiding only to follow up last year with a forgettable effort against he same team. In those three years we received an element of support from Sydneysiders who hated Brisbane and detested Manly and Sydney wasn’t too bad a place to hang out for the weekend. This year is very, very different.

The Parramatta Eels represent the western suburbs of Sydney, a Rugby League heartland and home to more Rugby League shops per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth. It is where we usually stay when we go north for the Grand Final and it is one of the few places I have found in Sydney that embraces the week leading up to the games’ showpiece. It’s the only place outside the stadium itself that flies team flags, hangs team posters in shop windows and hangs team scarves from its’ cars windows. Even when Parra are not playing. But this year, they are.

And all of a sudden everything is all about us versus them. Sydney has finally shown some spirit and some interest in a game that they claim to be their own. 74,000 fans turned out to see the Eels fight for a spot in the GF against traditional Sydney rivals, the Bulldogs, which made all Victorian sport supporters wonder – where were you all every other game of every other year for the past ten? Crowds of six, seven and as many as 11,000 would regularly trudge through the turnstiles at traditional suburban venues and state-of-the-art modern stadia alike, but if the weather was a bit iffy, the team lost the previous week or there was something decent on the telly, it was not unusual to see that crowd figure halved. Fair weather friends are no help to the team.

So now, Sydney has a team to support – and another to hate. Radio, net forums, newspapers and bars across Sydney and suburbs are abuzz with vitriolic talk of ‘those bastard Mexicans’ these infiltrators from the South who have had the bare-faced cheek to pinch two of our trophies in the short history of their club and who have the audacity to seek to pinch another this afternoon. Insults have been traded, word games played by players and officials of Parramatta and commentators and past greats of the game have had their say.

But, as any Victorian sport fan knows, there are only two places for talk. One is on the field of battle when the whistle blows and all arguments are settled. The other is on the podium after the final siren when you hold the trophy aloft, congratulate your team and commiserate the losers. And then, maybe a third – over a shared beer late in the day. And into Monday. And maybe some more on Tuesday. And a quiet one on Wednesday. And then ....

Good Luck Stormers. I will ride every bump, hit every gap, share every hit-up and celebrate every try with you from my couch. And I’ll do my best to go beer-for-beer with you as well.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Priorities

My recent trip with the eldest Pilsner to Canberra coincided with a Melbourne Storm home game. As a Premium member with reserved seats under the coaches box it is always tough to miss a game but attending the ANZAC Day dawn service at the Australian War Memorial was a worthy substitute.



The Saturday night game was against traditional rivals the New Zealand Warriors – a nice ANZAC celebration match – and recent clashes have been close and exciting affairs regardless of the teams ladder positions. Our room sat right above the very comfortable lounge and bar which held a few hundred drinkers and around eight big screen tellies.


The bar was packed with ANZAC Day revellers and the courtyard raged all day with the raucous shouting and cheering of another hundred or so at the two-up ring. I fronted the bar in the early afternoon and chatted briefly with the bloke behind the jump as soldiers, sailors and various suits poured into the place in a constant stream. “Busiest day of the year by a long shot”, he said as he chain-poured lagers with one hand, sorted change with the other and organised another bloke to change the Carlton Draught keg with a nod in that tap’s direction at the same time.

I noticed that the biggest of the big screen TVs was showing the NRL game between St George Illawarra and the Sydney Roosters with regular promos for the Storm/Warriors clash flashing across the bottom of the screen.

“Coming up next – the ANZAC clash between Melbourne and New Zealand!!” “Stay Tuned!!!” “Right after this match, we go straight to Melbourne – Storm and the Warriors!!” “They were mates on the battlefield, now they face off in a clash for bragging rights on the footy field!!” “Get a Crazy Frog ringtone for your mobile!! Your mates will think you ROCK!!!”

The first game finished and I whipped back upstairs with the eldest Pilsner’s dinner, wished myself luck for the boys and raced back downstairs to hook a good spot in front of the TV closest to the bar. The last station promo before the Big Game wound up and I decided on my first beer. I turned back to see NOT the Melbourne Storm, but a RUGBY UNION game. Rugby Union?!? That’s the game in which three blokes try to push two blokes up one bloke’s arse!!! What happened? Where’s the Storm!?!

I turned to the bloke at the bar to forcefully – but fairly – register my disappointment, with a small attachment regarding the reversal of the aforementioned channel-change when my eye caught a wide-screen view of the whole bar. The game showing was the Super 14 game between the New Zealand based Crusaders and the Canberra based Brumbies and there must have been close to three hundred blokes all glued to every screen in the joint.

And there was not a single neck to be seen among them.

I tucked my Storm hat under my coat and quietly went back upstairs.

The Storm and the Warriors drew 14 all after one of the most exciting clashes between the two teams in their 12 year history after two periods of extra time. The Brumbies managed to just get out of first gear to be handed their own arses 56 to 10. If there really is a God, he doesn’t live in Canberra.

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

Beer for drowning disappointment

As you probably remember I spent the weekend in Sydney for the NRL Grand Final to see my Melbourne Storm take on the Manly Sea Eagles for the 2008 premiership.

It’s fair to say that, while we went in as underdogs with most of the critics (particularly the Sydney media) and the bookies, it was still hoped that this GF would be the closest and toughest for some time.

It’s fair to say that despite the loss to suspension of our captain and key playmaker, Cam Smith, and injury to representative back rower, Ryan Hoffman, the Storm were still confident of bettering the team that they had smashed 34 – 8 in last year’s decider and had beaten twice in the regular season since then.

It is fair to say that the Rugby League folk in New South Wales have had fun putting the Storm down all week as a result of the club’s criticism of the League’s weak and backward thinking administration and that their were plenty of people north of the Murray hoping to see the Storm fall.

It’s fair to say that Sunday’s effort what not our best work.

In fact saying that it was not our best work is an understatement akin to saying that beer is an ‘OK drink’ or that Paris Hilton is a talentless slapper or that a dozen beautiful girls wanting to show me their boobies ‘would be kinda nice, I guess’. We did not play well.

40 – 0. That’s forty points to blot. Duck egg. Donut. Failed to fire a shot. Eight tries to ‘Didn’t Even Get Close’. Saved our worst for last. All credit to Manly for plotting and executing a plan that ran us off our feet, sapped our energy and kept us scoreless all at the same time. We stayed with them for the first half and even at 18 – 0 after an hour were a chance but their last twenty minutes was all party tricks and flick passes and blew the scoreline and the Storm off the park.

So, if last year’s beers tasted all the sweeter for being shared with the victors, what does a losing beer taste like? Well, the first thing that I have to point out is that we had a lot of beer. Sadly it was thrown at us and not sipped quietly as planned so we had to leave the stadium after the final siren. If we thought that Manly supporters were poor losers after last year’s efforts, we were unpleasantly surprised to find that they were even worse as winners. I can promise you all that last year as winners, the crowd as one applauded our team and clapped as the vanquished were presented with their runners-up medals and commiserated with the very few Manly folk who bothered to stay past the ten minute mark of the second half. This year they all stayed and showed a feral grasp of the concept of supporting your team and being gracious in triumph.

But enough of the negatives.

What this blog has tried to convey over the years is that beer is not just a drink for which to get drunk with. I love my beer, but what I really like is that it can be a different brew in different circumstances. For many at events like the Grand Final it is all about volume and bravado. For others it is the social lubricant that makes cheering on your team a more communal and shared experience. Last year I was drinking Heineken that was not as cold as it could have been but the buzz in the winners rooms after the game made it all the more sweeter. A sense of oneness and that we were all their holding up the trophy and a real part of its winning as the players body surfed the crowd and members young and old high-fived and back slapped.

This year we felt it wise to leave the ground and the precinct fairly quickly and the train ride home was slower, longer and quieter. Dinner was pizzas on the bed at the hotel and the beer just didn’t taste the same. I thought to myself that it might be interesting to see if the same bad beer which tasted so sweet this time a year ago could taste the same this year. Or would it be better by some twist of the cosmic beer world? After all, it was still shared with friends gathered for a common cause? It didn’t. It was much worse. And I am a good loser!

After the flight back to Melbourne I had time to reflect on the year my team had and realised that, while losing the big one, we had still finished ahead of 14 other teams. We had claimed our third straight minor premiership and the cheque for $100,000 that comes with it. We had provided ten players for representative games during the year as well as a dozen or so for international teams and had travelled to a rainy and gloomy England in February to compete for the World Club Challenge. Not bad for a team many tipped to sink after losing a few big names in 2005.

So when I got back home and armed with these thoughts, I capped a Weihenstephaner Pilsner and took a long deep sniff ... could this beer make everything seem normal again? Yep! After a few sips the world was as it was. I was still upright and breathing and my team was still going to turn up next season to do it all again. Plus one. A soft drink or a spirit just wouldn’t do that. Isn’t beer a wonderful drink?

Cheers,

Prof. Pilsner

Two More Words

A while back I retold he tale of two blokes sitting in a pub and looking up at the silent screen of an old flickering TV in the corner. A face appeared and a comment was made. The comment was understood, reciprocated and accepted. The bloke on the telly was a shit bloke and nothing more need be said. This is the story of another.

Last Saturday saw my NRL team, the all conquering Melbourne Storm claim a place in their third consecutive Grand Final. They lost the big one in 06 and then whipped the Sea Eagles last year. This comes on top of their finishing top of the ladder for the third successive year as well. It follows years of building a strong team from young but promising talent coupled with giving second chances to unwanted, discarded and ‘has-been’ players from other clubs. For those who don’t know, the National Rugby League is a primarily northern states based code born in northern England at the turn of the century as a working man’s alternative to the private school, big business sponsored Rugby Union.

In Queensland and New South Wales the game is king – although the ‘fans’ are fickle, the crowds parochial and small and the game run by old men with too much self interest and not nearly enough forethought – and they are very protective of their patch. In Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania the AFL rules. To the point where a parade of the Grand Final teams on the Friday before the game in Melbourne attracted over 100,000 people – that’s something like 5 times the number of fans who turned up to the NRL Preliminary final in Sydney the following night.

To put it simply, the League-Heads hate us. They envy our success, they are embarrassed by the support their own game gets in the enemy territory and they can’t get over the fact that the players of their own game love living and playing down here out of the Sydney media spotlight. In the last few years, as the Storm’s success has grown, so too has the campaign by the Sydney clubs and the Rugby League media to undermine and counteract it. In short it began after we won their precious trophy in just our second year and they accused us of unfairly using the interchange system – unfair in that we kept beating them. The rule was changed and a limited interchange introduced.

Fast forward a few years and with the Storm on the verge of new era of dominance the rival coaches, through their friends in the media, launched a series of attacks on the fact that the Storm were becoming too dominant in the ruck through the use of wrestling tactics. The fact that these were within the rules and nobody else was doing it half as well had nothing to do with their angst. Not. So the ‘Grapple Tackle’ controversy was born and while the league and its judiciary did nothing to stop the trend, the attacks on the team continued.

Last week the coach of the Storms opponent in the Grand Final qualifying game came out after the Storm’s captain and last year’s world’s best player was charged with a grapple tackle and called for him to be rubbed out by the tribunal. How you can pre-empt and influence a judiciary decision before it is handed down is beyond me. How the League’s head honchos and power brokers could allow him to get away with it is beyond any thinking person. Accusing the Melbourne coaching staff and football manager and CEO of being out of touch with the games ‘culture’ was just puerile and embarrassing for him.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, Ricky Stuart got his wish; Cam Smith became the first player to be made an example of and was suspended for two games – including the Grand Final. Stuart’s Sharks were installed as favourites to defeat the battered and judiciary crippled Storm and make it through to the Grand Final. The Melbourne Storm came out and handed the Sharks – and Stuart – their own arses on a platter to the tune of a 28 to nil shellacking. Stuart came out and attacked the Storm for being ‘flips’, ‘wallys’ and other childish names after his opposite number dared to criticise the comments he had made through the week. Stuart’s team, which has waited for all of its 41 years in the comp to win a flag would have to settle for a shit sandwich yet again and the Storm got to travel to Sydney again to battle the Sea Eagles again for the 2008 title.

Beer Karma strikes again. Ricky Stuart; shit bloke, no trophy.

Go Storm. See you all in Sydney on Sunday.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Birthday Beers

When I woke up this morning I didn’t feel any different. I felt flat, but that was more a case of being disappointed that my top place finishing Rugby League team had been beaten in the biggest upset of the year by the eighth placed underdogs in the first round of the finals series.

As the system goes, the only difference is that we now play next week instead of having the weeks rest and forego a home preliminary final. A hand full of cold beers took the edge off the disappointment and life goes on. The Melbourne Storm are still more than capable of whipping any of the remaining finalists and in the AFL my Hawks are still a red hot chance of winning their prelim this week and advancing to the Grand Final on the last Saturday in September.

Which brings me back to the original reason for my post. September is something of a celebration month in the Pilsner house with three of the five members having a birthday as well as Father’s Day, Dr Lager’s birthday and a full month of sporting commitments. And, of course, the accompanying beers.

The ‘Week of Candles, Cake & Kegs’ began on Thursday with the middle ‘little’ Pilsner reaching her fifth birthday. I counted off the beers in the fridge and the fifth was a new/old brew Platinum Blonde from Six Star Breweries. Old because it is one of these low-carb beers that want you to think are health tonics of sorts. In reality, they are as low in taste as they are in carbs and I’ll pick this theme back up in a follow up post.

Sunday was prepping the place for the onslaught of a dozen four and five year olds for the party before heading out to Olympic Park to see the Storm outplayed by the New Zealand Warriors. Standing out on the ground to hoist the players’ run-through banner, I had the feeling that this wasn’t going to be our day. The beers I had pre-game were like summer and winter – opposites, not one hot and one cold – one was ‘ice cream’ and the other ‘tide out’. And this despite the fact that it took THREE servers to get it wrong! Sanjeet, Ardip and Sharmi managed to take the order, the money and the pour and because I didn’t speak Urdhu we didn’t chat much. And, to top it off, the Kiwi’s got their national anthem in but then the sound system packed it in before the Aussie shiela could warble ours and the good natured crowd sang it instead – a Capella and out of tune. Badly. Should have seen the omen then.

Sunday was also the good Dr’s birthday and I raised a glass of St Arnou Premium Blond – because it is a nice low carb beer for those pretending to be health conscious and lead a good clean lifestyle. Much as Dr Lager does. Pretend.

And today I manage to put yet another year behind me and the girls made sure I had a lovely breakfast and plenty of presents this morning. A tradition in our house is that the birthday person gets to choose dinner and have it made for them but as I tap away here the forecast nasty weather is just beginning to break. As I am a volunteer with the local State Emergency Service unit I expect that tonight might be interrupted by a few call outs from the public and dinner may have to wait for another day. Plus, I don’t fancy driving in this weather if I don’t absolutely have to and so it might just be left over party pies and ‘little boys’ from the party for us.

I’ll just have to make up for this with a special beer from the ‘beer crisper’ when the storms die down and the pager stops beeping. So, wish me luck, happy birthday to me and cheers!

Prof. Pilsner