I don’t like people in their fifties with personal trainers.  

In fact if they are only twenty to forty something and I see them grunting and sweating on the kikuyu as they shadow box in my local park with some bloke called Travis or Kent my first instinct is to go the knuckle.  However being a mild-mannered chap I just go to the claret blanket for comfort.  They drive me to drink these people who have abrogated personal responsibility for getting fit as they struggle against the natural order of life.  It beats me why these bumblers cannot accept the fact that getting fat and useless is a part of growing up. What’s wrong with a brisk walk in your Volleys to the TAB or the bottle shop to sharpen up your nether regions?

It’s the same with hair.  I cast a very keen almost suspicious eye over some bloke with a surfeit of hair who has hit the forty mark and still allows curls to bother the collar.  If he has in his fashion arsenal a pink body shirt then I mark him down even further with a very, very large black question mark.

And so like a cream bun to a Fatty Finn we come to James Hird.  Now I’m not sure if this Roi de Merde has a pink shirt but judging on his performance over the last two years or so he should have a closet full.  If he’d been around in the sixties Hirdy would have been running around in paisley pinks, platform clogs doing a nice line in jumping juice and mushrooms.

I declare now I have never liked the cut of Hird’s jib.  To me there has been something different about him ever since he became coach of the Bombers in 2011.  Occasionally imperious but mostly haughty, Windy Hill’s favourite son was given the keys to the family’s black and red Kingswood at a far too early age for mine. It was only a matter of time before he would be caught speeding or going through a school zone talking on his mobile.

There has been a rising odeur de merde about this golden boy since he became Coach ‘Roi’ Hird.  He was far too perfect and we know what that means don’t we?  All of us imperfect creatures that go to parties with our fly undone and dribble on our chins.  Yes we can detect a bloke who is hiding stuff.  No one on the planet is clean in our books. That’s where we imperfect creatures start from – the presumption of guilt and then we tunnel relentlessly down for the brown.

One of the problems with perfect people is that they do not accept imperfection (or failure) easily.   ‘Roi’ obviously needed whatever edge he could get in whatever form so his team could get to the top.  This is not a problem for us imperfect creatures – if we stumble across failure again, we simply get pissed or blame someone else.

‘Roi’s’ ability as player is not questioned here. Two hundred and fifty-three games of ‘bounce’ must count for something.  But as the outrage generated by the injection of ball-catching hormones into AFL players continues this character has been a justifiable free kick for every semi-colon cowboy who wants to ride the drug clean horse.  ‘Roi’ will most likely return to the game and Essendon after he has served his time. A mere year seems lettuce leaf light in my book. Hird says “I should have done more and I’m very disappointed that I didn’t but it’s now time to move on”.

I also think ‘Roi’ should move on too.  He should move on a long way.  In fact I think he should move to California or possibly Las Vegas because that’s where shallow people go to wallow in their conceited self-belief. Perhap’s he could do his Cert IV in Personal Training, clogging up the parks of LA as he works with other perfect people like Sarah Palin or Donald Duck. I don’t think it is appropriate for him to return to AFL in any capacity.

Some months ago I wrote in a post titled “Boneheads Overdose in an Orgy of Self-Pity” about the reaction from certain NRL clubs to the AAC Report;

“But now if they get it right we can avoid going back to the black days of the lightly framed bulking up mysteriously in the “off” season under the instructions of chemists and charlatans who have as their only consideration a fat fee. Now we can hopefully see clubs think less about untried chemistry and more about the welfare of young blokes who just want to get onto the paddock and ‘go hard and straight’.

To me this quest for perfection and success is killing sport as we once knew it.  We need new heroes.  We need your average Joe and Janet who work two jobs to get to Badminton finals overseas knowing they are still ranked 230th in the world and have about as much chance as a bubble through a mincer of making the finals. We don’t need any more golden boys or girls and we need to punish appropriately those who go against the natural laws of life and sport.