Lateralist Commentary - A Critique

It's been a great year thus far for supporters of the West Coast Eagles. I'm not saying we're going to win the flag, but given that we are the current holders of the wooden spoon, the fact that finals are a realistic proposition is nothing short of incredible.

If only the commentary was as good.

I'd find it so much easier to enjoy the success of the Eagles if Brian f*cking Naylor was barred from calling Eagles games. He is a colossally annoying wind bag, whose girth is in inverse proportion to his wit. If I hear him refer to the f*cling vortex pocket or call Glen Jakovich the King of the West one more time, I'm going to feel more than justified in throwing a pie at him next time I see him. And to make sure he doesn't mistake it for a gift and scoff it down as would a pelican with a chip, I'll be sure to lob it at the back of his head.

Not that there are many better options out there. Robert Walls is a joke, intoning inanely obvious details like a man who thinks reading Wittgenstein. I shit you not, last year I distinctly remember him saying - with extraordinary self satisfaction - that from a position of being ten goals down, Richmond were really going to have to lift their work rate. You think, Wallsy? I know that the AFL isn't exactly the most neuron-rich environment in which to work, but to sound like a bloke who's just cracked Fermat's Last Theorem, one honestly should feel the need to offer something a bit more insightful than that.

But Wallsy's hardly the bottom of the barrel. Take a bloke like Alastair Lynch, who, regardless of what he's actually saying, says it in a voice so torturously rasped, that he sounds like a Dalek on crack. Even Bruce McAvaney, for all of his enthusiasm, describes the players like an obsessive (and rather delicate) man professing love for each and every member of his porcelain doll collection. Mind you, he travels less than Collingwood, so it hardly matters.

Which leaves only Cometti, and he can hardly be asked to call eight games every weekend. Admittedly, Gerard Healy is quite good, but he's no Cometti. In all seriousness, it shouldn't be that hard to get people who can call the game with the following caveats:

a) They can speak English;

b) They understand the game;

c) They do not call the game from a criminally biased Victorian perspective; and

d) They can present their views from a position other than deep inside their own arse.

Brian Naylor, I'm sorry to say, is zero for four.

Still, at least we're winning. And that's something.