Round 2: Like last week only better.

Despite the false start we're off. Last year's wooden spooner Trobby has taken advantage of the total bedlam over at footy.com.au and stolen a one point lead over the pack.
It was an intersting couple of weeks on the Tip, upsets galore, though any ground that was gained was immediately lost, as noted above. And for the icing on the cake probably the first ever battle for the Wooden Spoon run and decided in round 1.

And who are those Celebrity Heads? After a pairing that was half picked at best last week, we've gone for a couple of easy ones this week. Even Tony Abbott would approve of these two.
Send answers where? How? Here. And like this.

See ball. Get ball. Find ball first.
Send your answers where? How? Here. And like this.

All the answers:

 

The first celebrity head for a few years is nod to a couple of gents who spent much of the past couple of seasons floating around the back pages of the dailies, usually on opposing sides of justice.

Andrew 'What I Say Is True Because I Say It' Demetriou, and Dean 'Bails' Bailey.

Sadly Bails has departed, and happily The Fat Controller will be gone by season's end, bringing a brand new era, and quite a few blank pages to fill.

YOUR ANSWERS:

SAMMY SAYS: Dale Weightman, Andrew Demetriou - 1 POINT

HARV SAYS: Demitriou and Weightman - 1 POINT

RICHO SAYS: I’m going for young Tigers Brian (“turn the sound down”) Taylor and Dale (“biting hopping thing”) Weightman. - 0 POINTS

YOUR ANSWERS:

Brenton: A8 - 1 POINT

Coxy: B8

Tafa:10 B

Sammy: Benign B9

Grant: D9

Richo: I’m guessing he’s in the process of dropping the ball, the others are not tracking it as closely as they could be and it’s just below his hands at C10.

Round One: The jackpot is off the table

Under the circumstances (false 4/4's for all) I reckon the only dignified thing to do is shelve the jackpot for Round 1. It's only 20 bucks I know, but it's the principle of the thing.

Lets try that again...

Well the first half of Round 1 was pretty much a shaky waste of time. Shaky tipping shakier infrastructure.

I would be totally irate had I picked 4/4. Luckily I didn't. I was in the mix with the rest of you pundits, the best of whom managed 2, most 1 and many 0.

I'm sure you all realise, by now at least, the footytips site went into total melt-down friday eve. And I do mean total, it wasn't slow, they turned the bugger off! I reckon you could claim there were 3 upsets (by varying degrees) without getting into an all-out bar-brawl, not the time to steal tips from the canny or tin-arsed tipster who pulled a good score from somewhere.

Those among us who partake in the AFL-run Fantasy thing (the erstwhile DreamTeam) are well used to this kind of uselessness to kick off each season, and they too didn't disappoint, by putting on an under-par performance due to being over-whelmed with traffic. Pretty unimpressive given the AFL's partner in this online adventure is Telstra.

Anyway, there are still some upsets and coin-toss results to be had in the next 4 games I'm sure, so here's your chance to gain some advantage, and maybe keep it this time.

A day late, a few pennies short, but here it is: GrandSunBall#1.

If you've forgotten what you need to do, it's really quite simple. Send us the co-ordinates of where the ball was before it was expertly expunged.
Send through where? How? Here. And like this.

And while you're at it have a go at Celebrity Head. Let us know whose are the 2 heads banged together in the header and send through your answer.

We're off.

Welcome, please put your keys in the bowl and your shoes over there...

We're minutes from the first bounce, and are we organised? Nup. Not quite.

Having said that, we're not quite as poorly organised as either footytips.com.au, or the AFL/Telstra combination responsible for the Dreamteam/AFLFantasy site, as anyone who attempted to access either, tonight and last night respectively, would have discovered.
Get used to it, you people voted for more of the same (it wasn't me, Tas or Stavros, so it must have been you). Slow Internet. A Point of Difference, Not Necessarily Better.

Ahem... and so PunchDrunk 2014.

I reckon we're all back (except maybe that New York kid Ben, who's hopefully just dealing with time-warp factors)

We even have a returnee. Phil 'Taffa' Taffs just couldn't keep away any longer. He just may be experiencing a Malthouse-invigorated footy life. Not sure why.

Celebrity Head is back this year... If you're new to this kinda thing, just unravel the blended heads within the masthead, send me your answers and win. You'll have to beat Harv though. And more than that, there'll also be GrandSunBall back after a couple of years in rehab. You know you want it.

We have a few entries already for  the Vault time-capsule too. I've got some up, but there'll be more in a few minutes.

We are ahead of the curve in PunchDrink organisation however. Just over there to the right there are dates for, 3 get-togethers, and who doesn't love a drunk date. Wack 'em in your diary and book the hairdresser. First date Thursday April 10, changed from the night before Good Friday, to the week before. Chances are it'll be the Union Club again.

Go Drunks.

Thick and fast.

That split-round thing has caught PunchDrunk HQ napping again. Here I was thinking we kicked off in about 10 days, but NO, it's THIS friday.

Barely has there been time to get our heads around the pre-season entertainment: the Fat Controller's 'imminent' departure, the naming and shaming at Essadon, the Festival of NAB, and now sadly the passing of Dean Bailey. And now BANG it's serious fingers-out time.

I guess we have a full year to lay tributes at the feet of Demetriou, but less time for some clerical matters at the Drunk. You will experience short-term inundation for which I apologise.

At this stage the oddities of the footytips.com.au system mean I don't even know who's in/back in for this season. I'm unsure as to whether there's an auto-renewal in place, whether only those of you who have logged in since sending invites are 'active', or what.

Dean Bailey

Bails by Harv

Sadly Dean Bailey has left us. Again. He was a dignified man, a positive man and a players' coach, whose senior coaching career, it seems, was ultimately undone by his players' commitment to him.

Apart from vague memories held by some of a nuggety and spectacularly unspectacular small man running around for the Dons a decade or so earlier, most had never heard of Bails when he was thrust head-long into the hot-seat at the Dees. He quickly made himself known and popular throughout the club, the playing group and the whole League. A TV panel favourite, open and hopeful.

There's no doubt he bore the brunt, wore the finger, of both the Melbourne Footy Club's self-distructive impulses, and the AFL's confused and schizophrenic attempt to put paid to the notion of tanking - both through the days of those dubious games, and the whole questionable denouement cheer-led by the conveniently myopic Caro Wilson and some other media attack-dogs.

He had a job to do and he set about doing it. His role was to develop a team from a rabble. In his final, rudely shortened, season he managed to pull 8 wins out of that team and have them arguably on the doorstep of the top 8. That is until they were crushed by 186 points by Geelong in what, if you believe what you hear, was the players' attempt to get the Club to sack then CEO Cam Schwab and protect Bailey from Schwab's meddling micromanagement. The irony, of course, is that the Club had just sacked Schwab but, in the light of that result, then reinstated him and sacked Bailey instead.

Bailey accepted this decision with a rare dignity. As he did his suspension for being found NOT guilty of tanking (Wilson et al constantly untruthfully push a historical rewrite of that decision to read 'guilty').

Dean Bailey was diagnosed with lung cancer in December, he passed away this morning. He was 47. His warmth, positivity and dignity will be sorely missed.

Thanks to PunchDrunk's one and only Harv for the fine pencil portrait of Bails.

Fantasy/Life

They may have knocked the Dreamteam monicker on the head this season, but the fantasy continues. And we're in it cos we're as fantastic as anybody.
We've got 9 teams joined up so far and that means there are 9 spots left.
It costs you nothing but time and emotion and surely you have heaps of both to spare.

The League of Extraordinary Drunks:
https://fantasy.afl.com.au/landing/index.html#/landing invite code RX76LFFS.

Let me know if that doesn't work for any reason.