NRL Thoughts: State of Origin I

Watch out Queensland, Blues on their way!

It was another titanic clash, but this time, for once, despite so many 50-50 calls coming up Queensland's way, New South Wales have managed to take themselves into the lion's den of Suncorp Stadium and come away with a superb victory!

It was a magnificent second half effort in defence that proved the decisive factor, although NSW will surely regret some missed opportunities when they were on top to extend the lead. Dragon superstar winger Brett Morris was superb in defence in the 2nd half despite hurting his shoulder when scoring in the first half! His effort to prevent Darius Boyd from tying the game up could be long remembered - if NSW win the series.

There was no question that the key for NSW was Jarryd Hayne, a constant menace in attack, very heavily involved, while also defusing numerous Queensland raids with aplomb. How good is this man?!

Queensland played well, although they probably lost some of their fluency in attack due to Cronk's injury. Cherry-Evans looked far from overawed though and will only be better for the run. I can't imagine too many NSW fans thinking anything other than this is going to be a tough task to get that second win and clinch the series

I was thinking in the first 20 minutes that maybe the intensity of this game wasn't that far above that of an ordinary game, but it just got tougher and tougher as the game went on. Josh Reynolds, who performed capably in his first game as a starting five-eighth, seemed a little awestruck when commenting immediately after the game about just how tough it was, how he'd never played a game like it. Reynolds has played a grand final, he's played big games, but even so this was something else.NSW haven't been good enough to win very often this last 10 years, but very few of those losses have been thrashings. So often they've given us hope.

Origin provides a level of the game that is simply unmatched, as is perhaps reflected in how many players get injured, there was no shortage of walking wounded among those who didn't end up in hospital. I thought the Bulldogs players in the NSW side were superb, with the partial exception of Tony Williams, a player that one is always expecting to destroy an opposition with his obvious pace and power, only to be disappointed by how rarely it actually happens. I do wonder though, what price will the Bulldogs pay for the obvious intensity that their players brought to this contest. In 2011 St George were going swimmingly into Origin, half our team got picked and after the series our season imploded.  And that's hardly a rare event for teams that are heavily involved in Origin.

Well, we're onto Sydney, it's been 11 years since NSW took Game 1 in Brisbane, and we won that year. Could this be a turning point in our long period of inferiority to the Cane Toads? Go the Blues!

Lindsay's Movie of the Week: Field of Dreams: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective.

 Field of Dreams was my brother Peter's favourite film. Peter is notorious amongst the brothers for being a sucker for any film that has a boat or plane in it and consequently his opinion of films doesn't always get a lot of respect from his 3 younger brothers. Thus his high opinion of Field of Dreams didn't exactly have me rushing to borrow the VCR off him. It was baseball and I didn't really like baseball, and I certainly didn't like Kevin Costner. Several years later, possibly many years later, in a period of extreme boredom in those pre-Internet days, I finally decided to borrow the VCR off him.

It turned out that I was enchanted.  Kevin Costner was engaging and charming, ideal for the role, Amy Madigan was superb, James Earl Jones was strong and dynamic, Burt Lancaster's brief appearance was a show-stealer, the acting was flawless, the music accompanied the story so beautifully. What really enchanted me wasn't the acting, it was the quality of the story and the film. This was a film that was willing to take chances, that was willing to treat the journey of the heart seriously. A film that was prepared to say that dreams matter, and that those dreams can be very personal and not world shattering. As someone who didn't have a great relationship with his own father, the ending held  special power for me.

Watching it again, I found the movie was, if anything, even more powerful. Burt Lancaster's scenes strike home to an older man,  I can look at moments in my own life where I didn't realise that it was one of the "most significant moments of my life" that was happening. Kristy's first RSVP contact with me, waiting for the results of the pregnancy test, my life has changed and Field of Dreams is very honest about change.

 I look at the relationship the couple had in the film and identify with it - I think Kristy would let me build that field, her support of me is strong, even when she may not agree with me. I'd always wanted to be a good father. Now that I am one, that desire to get it right, to have a better relationship with my children than I had with my father is even more pervasive.

My copy of the DVD includes a wonderful documentary about the making of the film and I have found the documentary to be almost as watchable as the film itself. Discovering that the director and script adapter Phil Alden Robinson found the whole process of making the film to be incredibly stressful and that despite its success, he's carefully avoided making films subsequently adds nuance to the tale being told.

Discovering that it took years to make because most studios were understandably concerned that a film of this nature wouldn't work at the box office, that the part of Terrence Mann was specifically written for James Earl Jones, that tourists have visited the movie site in Iowa from 1990 to this day, that all the cast members seemed to remember the film with much greater affection than an ordinary film simply adds to one's affections for this great film.

The coup de grace was was the revelation that the character of Moonlight Graham was closely based on the real Moonlight Graham, who truly only played one innings of 1 Major League Baseball game before retiring to become a beloved doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota. Would that man have ever imagined, when taking time out to watch a Burt Lancaster film, that he was watching a man who would one day portray him?!

Field of Dreams continues to be a film that moves me and I can only agree with Timothy Busfield who pointed out that there are very few films that move men in the way that this film does. The Shawshank Redemption comes to mind, but it's a rare thing. It's that ability to tug my heartstrings that has made Field of Dreams one of my favourite films of all time.10/10. 

NRL Thoughts - Steve Price - This is the end.

This time it's my club that's pulled the pin on a coach and fired him. After 6 losses in 7 games, with the last three being absolute thrashings characterised by shoddy ball control and feeble defence, St George Illawarra sacked head coach Steve Price this morning, effective immediately, with assistant coach Paul McGregor stepping into the head coach position for the remainder of the season.

This wasn't an unexpected decision, despite St George's history of not sacking coaches mid season - they haven't done it before. Ever. They've sacked premiership winning coaches at the end of a season, but they normally do it at the end.  It's been clear for a long time that they weren't happy with what Steve Price had to offer, having made a huge offer to Craig Bellamy last year in a bid to entice him to sign. Price was only given this season after Bellamy knocked them back. I read stories last year stating the most of the recruitment decisions for this year were made by Peter Doust and Craig Young with Price having minimal input into those decisions. Nevertheless, as is usual in professional sports, he's the one who gets the axe.

As an interested but not obsessed fan, there's hasn't been a lot to indicate that Price had the makings of a top class coach, he didn't seem to know how to use Jamie Soward and there wasn't a lot of imagination in attack over his first two seasons. Whilst we now have a Rolls Royce backline, the forwards are weak, and the overall package isn't working. Consequently I don't have any major issues with the decision, the last 3 games indicated that we were a long way off being competitive and I think that the side should be competitive with that roster. There was a lot of talk in Price's first season about maintaining our defensive culture, but it was obvious even then that it had gone and wasn't coming back.

I always feel sympathy for the fallen in these situations. By all accounts, Steve Price is a hard worker and a very good, kind, man. I have no doubt that he's poured his heart and soul into the job these last 2 and a bit years and that the lack of success has hurt him as much as anyone. Failure is always hard to deal with and being declared a failure in such a blunt manner has to hurt. I hope that he finds his way back into an assistant coaching position at another club, it may well be that he is more suited to those at this stage of his coaching career. He probably won't get another NRL position, but he's young enough to develop more skills and hope that luck comes his way.

Looking forward, I'm hoping that Saints can find an experienced coach to take them forward and that they can develop a long term recruiting plan, there's been little evidence of a plan in recruitment decisions in recent years. I'd be happy with Bennett returning or Bellamy changing his mind. I probably wouldn't be that keen on Paul McGregor getting the job as he's not experienced at head coach level, and we've tended to struggle with inexperienced coaches. That said, if results turned around, he'd have to be a chance of getting the job. Nathan Brown's record wasn't too bad actually, but he may have managed to win premierships had he possessed the experience he has subsequently acquired. If the Tigers don't want Michael Potter, I'd love to have him back.

Somewhat unusually for a sports fan, the long awaited premiership in 2010 really did sate my appetite, and the fact we've taken a big tumble hasn't particularly bothered me, it's a tough competition to win and if you have to risk subsequent seasons to get that win, well it's worth it. Steve Price was unlucky and hopefully his successors will have better opportunities to achieve NRL success!

How to make a website less useful and fun: The PGA Tour website revamp.

One of the sites I have followed faithfully for the last 14 years is  the US PGA Tour website. I first hooked into following the Pga Tour carefully after reading John Feinstein's magnificent A Good Walk Spoiled which is one of the finest sports books I have ever read.

Feinstein gave me a taste for following the lesser players who are battling to make it in golf and it's a habit I still have today, with my favourite player being the little known Australian, Gavin Coles, who has won several times on the secondary tours over there, but has never managed to keep his playing privileges when he's played the main tour. Gavin's only 5 foot 5 and wears glasses more befitting a university academic than a professional athlete, which only adds to his appeal for me!

My primary method of following these players has been via the PGA Tour website, which provided articles, video clips and live leaderboards! It's a habit of mine on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday mornings to check the scores on the varying tours.

The site was well laid out and provided a simpler leaderboard if you had trouble with the main leaderboard that had a few more bells and whistles. Both leaderboards usually loaded quickly. The mobile leaderboard was actually better as that provided the full record of the player's round with 1 click, you could read through every shot the player had made, on every hole, as just the player's scores don't give you a great picture of the sort of round that they had. Was it a par where they missed a 3 foot birdie putt? Or a par where they hold out from a bunker? Same result, but a very different path to it. I never quite understood why that wasn't added to the main site but enjoyed it as a perk when I was reading the site on my smartphone, which I usually do as checking the sites is largely a morning thing due to the time difference between USA and Australia.

The layout had been much the same for a long time now, so it wasn't a total surprise to log on to a new site one morning. It was a surprise to find just how much functionality was sacrificed with the upgrade. The new leaderboards are far slower to load, they're also gigantic compared to the others, so the amount of scrolling required is considerable, so it's very time consuming. Finding articles and videos is much harder as the the site has also been made considerably larger, which means seeing things at a glance is much harder as there's less to see.

The latest 'improvement' is that they make the bells and whistles load for whoever is leading. I can make my own damn decision about whose details I want to see! And the bells and whistles are quite clunky and sloooooow so I rarely use them even though the information is good. It was such a shock yesterday to click on the Senior PGA Championship leaderboard and have it all up in a second or 2, with only a small touch required to view the leaderboard from top to bottom!

The bottom line is that I'm not visiting the site as often, nor am I clicking on the leaderboards as often and I'm reading less articles than I used to. This has become a permanent shift. Most website upgrades do take a little while to get used to. This revamp involved so large a loss of functionality that I can't adapt to it without a  frontal lobotomy to remove my memory of when the site was quick, simple and easy to use!

Are there any website upgrades that have pissed you off? Let me know in the comments

A considered assessment of the 2014 Budget

My response to this Budget has been a real slow burn. It was the deceit that got me going initially, but a Budget could be totally deceitful and still be good. So I've taken my time to read up on it, to get different perspectives about what it's done, to understand it better, to consider what the underlying philosophy is. Having done so, I've been able to come to a considered conclusion about it:

This Budget is about taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich. That's the underlying philosophy, pure, plain and simple. If there's a better rationale for what they've done, I'd like to see the evidence for it. They aren't serious about cutting spending or else they wouldn't be carrying out a whole lot of additional, new, spending, most of which is of little benefit to the country and is certainly not critical!

I have common ground with the desire to reduce the Budget deficit. While it's not a huge percentage of GDP and we don't have much government debt, it doesn't take long for these things to spiral out of control, especially given we haven't had a recession in 21 years and we currently have quite a few economic clouds on the horizon. Also, there's common ground that the previous government's Budgets were going to blow out big time to accommodate additional spending for education and health. We also have a growing problem with welfare payments due to the ageing population. More people are needing welfare but a smaller proportion of people are going to be earning the revenue that pays for it.

The Rudd-Gillard governments actually did cut government spending in several of their Budgets. The primary cause of the deficits was their insane decision to match the Howard income tax cuts, it shattered the revenue base as taxation fell from 25% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product - the total value of all the paid for goods and services produced in a country over a year) when they came in to 21.5% of GDP in 2010-11, which was the lowest level of taxation since the Whitlam government! No wonder we had deficits!

The majority of the planned return to surplus is the Abbott government re-building the tax base back up to 25% of GDP. Most of  the money obtained by the spending cuts are being re-allocated to extra spending such as the health research fund so we can spend money on curing conditions we don't know about instead of spending it to treat people with conditions we do know or on preventative strategies that we know work. It's also being spent on 58 brand new, untried, unproven, fighter planes so we can go and bomb anyone who gives us trouble, like asylum seekers.

The government is also going to set up an additional Paid Parental Leave system so families earning 100 000 dollars or more a year can get 50 thousand dollars extra for having a baby and poor people having a baby can get stuff all because it's important to  make sure that wealthier people get more money for their children.

The government is also spending billions on new roads because brand new roads are the best way to get more traffic on the roads and create bigger traffic jams. A government that was serious about spending cuts would not be introducing so much new spending, spending that wipes out most of those cuts.

The cuts force the bottom 20% of people to lose about 5% of their incomes, and ask the top 20% to lose 0.3% of theirs, with that 0.3% to be removed in 3 years and to be totally eradicated if you happen to be having a baby in that time! This is not fair, just or moral! If this is "sharing the burden" I'd hate to see what not sharing it looks like.

As for the utter disgrace that is introducing co-payments to visit the doctor I would like to point out that I make a contribution to going to the doctor, it's called tax. If the tax isn't enough, raise the tax! But don't penalise people for doing what they're supposed to do if they're sick, which is going to the doctor and finding out before they get very sick. Co-payments don't even save money - they're  expensive to administer and some of the people discouraged from going to the doctor will get much sicker and treating them will be far more expensive than it would have been.

This isn't a Budget designed to reduce spending and balance the Budget, it's a Budget designed to reduce the income of people who the government doesn't approve of. I'm wary of that, for I was a child raised in a single parent family. I went to university and paid cheap, accessible fees, with financial support from the government due to my mother's low income and subsequently endured a period of unemployment, where I received unemployment benefits that assisted me whilst I waited to re-do a failed subject in my course. Without that support, my life would have been considerably more difficult. The government is now going to make life considerably more difficult for people in situations I was once in, and they seem to be keen on making it tough for people in situations I may find myself in down the track! There's very little being done to make life more difficult for those have a lot easier than the poor, however, and that's at the core of my disapproval.

I am, you are, we are Australian. That means we need to look out for all Australians, not just those who can make huge donations to our political party!

NRL Thoughts

Well, this wasn't a good week for Saints fans, it's one thing getting thumped by the defending premiers and competition leaders in consecutive games, it's another conceding 36 unanswered points to the reigning wooden spooners! A title we may well be putting in an application for if this form continues.

I thought Benji Marshall did OK for his first week, his involvement was good and he made some solid moves in defence, if his effort and commitment are there, I think he'll find some form. But it's very hard to win games when the ball control is so weak. Even harder when defence is non-existent. One wonders how long Steve Price has with this sort of form.

And gee, well, Canberra finally manage to at least get close to their opponents whilst still managing to add another loss to their cupboard full of them so naturally Ricky Stuart goes off on a tear and blames the referee. Yes, Mr Stuart, I'm sure that Canberra's Dragon like defence and dreadful completion rates are all the fault of the referee. How can you expect your players to take responsibility for their mistakes or to think that they have control over their results when you so consistently allow them to lay the blame somewhere else?!

I seem to recall that St George Illawarra suffered a close loss to Melbourne the other week  partly due to some questionable refereeing at the end and my response was to point out that we'd led by 14 points with 14 minutes to go so we might want to look in the mirror before we started blaming anyone else for our problems!

Book of the Week: The Racket - How Abortion Became Legal in Australia by Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh is best known as the premier cricket writer in the world, but his interests and skills stretch far beyond cricket, as his absorbing and confronting account of abortion in Australia demonstrates.

The Racket is a history of abortion practices in Melbourne prior to decriminalisation. Haigh explores the relationship between the police and abortion and demonstrates how it wasn't a law that the police regularly enforced due to a mix of  heftty, payoffs, difficulties in obtaining convictions and a feeling that it wasn't as important as some of their other duties.

The books greatest strength is Haigh's trenchant exploration of the reality of abortion when it was banned. A piece of paper declaring it illegal wasn't going to stop women who did not want the baby from not having the baby. What it did very well was force them to abort themselves in dangerous, unhygenic manner or work with abortionists who would do the job for them, often in a dangerous, unhygenic, manner for a great deal of money. Many abortionists charged according to how expensive your car was.

I did find it difficult to identify with any of the characters from the book, possibly because the major characters were largely dead when Haigh wrote the book and a great deal of their motivations and concerns could only be inferred. Consequently the book was slow going at times and it wasn't an easy book to read in any case due to the subject matter. Nevertheless, it comes highly recommended as an account of what illegal abortion looks like in practice.

At time of writing, the book could be found on sale here