MATTY'S MAULING

Matty Lamington spits out the latest crumbs from his overcooked paasion for the game of association football. Never one to back down Matty is happy to throw his opinions into the mix.

#3: Standing up to Bullies

19 Feb 2009

Bully:

• A blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.
• To intimidate; domineer.
• To be loudly arrogant and overbearing.

Bully is a term that fits very well with the AFL - after the events of the last few days (or decades for those who have followed football before the 2006 World Cup). Like an overdeveloped, insecure 12- year-old in a school yard surrounded by a group of intimidated hanger-ons, the VFL led by its dictator, Demetri-who, demanded that a glorified practice game played by the world’s biggest failure of a professional sport should take precedence over a football grand final at the Telstra Dome. The intimidated hanger-ons (Herald Sun) jumped on the case and put it as its lead item in the sport’s section.

The bullying technique only works when the so-called weaker being does not fight back, which has been football’s downfall for 50+ years. The tide has been turning over the last decade and fans of the sleeping giant have become restless since the advent of the A-League. This restlessness turned into a tide of passion and fury as the bully finally went too far.

Demetri-who, his puppets at VFL House and the Melbourne media were taken aback by the ferocity of football fans in their demands to play the final at their current home ground. The trait of a bully is to keep pushing and pushing until someone stands up to him, then the true colours are revealed. Deep down Demetri-who and the VFL are bullies, just cowards who try to mask what is essentially an inferior product.

Each time we, as football fans, stand up to them, we demoralize the bully and the hanger-ons who depend on the bully for an identity will look for a newer, stronger kid to hang around the monkey bars with…

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