Brownlow Medal Night 2008 – Die Hard Footy Diary

Another year, another Brownlow Medal night done and dusted. This year, it was the sauced dome of Adam Cooney from the Doggies who took home the Chas in a typical night of Brownlow fashion, theatre, and blunders.

With the night kicking off with Kate Cebrano doing her best Robbie Williams impression (don’t ask), I bring to you the Die Hard Footy Diary of Brownlow Medal Night 2008…

The night kicked off with a late change of the remote, and an absolute BLASTING greeted us with Let Me Entertain You coming loud in a fair dinkum confusing way to start the night as Cebrano pranced and puffed her way around the stage. The texts were running hot early and it was all around one theme – and it wasn’t complimenting the opening. Calls for Barnsey, Farnesy, Nollsy, Braithwaite-sy or even a bit of White Noise were being bandied around – things even went so far as to call for Russell Robertson (although that was from a private number). Whichever way you looked at it, it was Strike One.

We didn’t have to wait long for Strike Two. If we were harsh, we could also have counted it as Strike Three, Four, Five and Six as big Andy D had possibly the biggest Barry in Brownlow history by reading out the Round 2 votes instead of Round 1. He got about 5 games through the round until someone could tell him the error of his ways … maybe if he wasn’t reading the votes as fast as the Bristle Man runs through a fast moving passage of play someone would have picked up on it earlier.

With the early rounds read at such a rapid rate, our Die Hard Footy stats men were in over drive trying to keep up with:

• The AFL.com Phantom Brownlow… while I can’t remember the last time they actually picked the winner, we were still slaves to their formguide,
• The liftout Herald Sun chart, which copped an inevitable amount of creases, tears and spills as guest columnist Pokey Moore tried to keep a tab on a flurry of bets in all sorts of exotic markets,
• The in play betting available both via the TAB’s prehistoric joke of a website and the relatively stable Betfair market, who seemed to avoid the incredible swings from round to round of the TAB prices.

As the night rolled on, here were the main highlights (and lowlights) for us:

• Adam Goodes notching up 2 votes in round 5 sent us scurrying for the form to try and work out why, when super sleuth SB came up with this:
  

  “Goodesy has struggled again and that’s a massive concern,” Roos said.

  “You get 35 (touches) and three goals from Gary Ablett and probably our key player, our best player, has a really bad day. It makes it really difficult on the other players.”

  All this did was to reconfirm our suspicions that Goodes simply has to turn up sometimes to get amongst the votes.

• With SB and Pokey Moore barracking for their hard earned at every opportunity, regular commenter Edge and myself took great pleasure in a gambling-free viewing of the big event. We were also quick to bring up the Michael Voss debacle of 2003 in quick defence after questioning of our Australian citizenship for not having a punt.
• While the original Michael Voss Debacle (also referred to as the 2003 Great Brownlow Robbery) was not of Voss’ doing, he did himself no favours at all with a much-too-long tribute to Robert Harvey halfway through the night. The texts again ran hot in DHF HQ with comments like ‘Is this really still going’ and ‘Lions will definitely get fined next year for being late onto the ground after Vossy’s speech’, but the harshest was clearly ‘Just *$%$ off red nut’. Pokey used the time to quote form guides and make umpire death threats to express his displeasure at Bartel’s tally of 6 votes thus far.

We could tell things were getting close as Andy D persisted with his dramatic pauses before announcing the votes – even in games where the leaders were injured or no hope for a vote – ie Ablett, RichoMan. The final round seemed almost surreal – with Cooney in front, and Ablett, Black and Richo all not polling, it was clear Cooooon had won the medal. However, an eerie silence remained until a few finally caught on the count was over – in stark contrast to the violent swearing of a still fired up Pokey Moore.

So congratulations to Cooney on his win, and to the lucky punter on Betfair who cleaned up Pokey’s insignificant sums. We’ll leave you with our own 3,2,1 from Brownlow night. Notice we couldn’t find a place in the votes for the Channel 10 coverage … maybe thats just best left for Heffernan’s Spray…

3 votes to the Coooon on a sensational victory speech, filled with romance, history and anything else that popped into his well-lubricated mind.

2 votes to the official Cobden tracksuit for being the most pictured outfit of the night in the video case study on Marie Oborne’s volunteer work for the footy club.

And 1 vote goes to Richo, for just being Richo and somehow being genuinely entertaining even though he spent the whole night at his table and generally shying away from the cameras.