I'm interested to see Port and just how good they really are, but we won't find out when they take on what I consider to be the shit of the competition.
North Melbourne. There are few teams I hate more. But I don't hate North with a passion, I just despise their shitness.
The suburb of North Melbourne, at least in my day, was shit. Just an empty industrial wasteland and nothing happening there at all.
The colours couldn't be blander, that budget bright blue and white colour scheme that screams discount shopping, vertical stripes, a ******* kangaroo for gods sake. North Melbourne. The club are even trying to drop the name and just have them known as the Kangaroos. The lack of imagination is palpable. They might as well have called themselves the Australian Dogs or the Enter Location Somethings and used grey and white as the default colours.
Their Golden Era Dynasty was a meagre two flags, not even consecutive. They had the champion of the league and he was possibly the least unremarkable thing about the club, and even he was an abusive disloyal sorry excuse for a human. The coach of that period was a miserable dour old prune with an 80s haircut.
Since then their level in the league has ranged from "surprisingly OK" to "irredeemably shit" and their natural habitat is just under the top 8. Predictably, just when we thought they were going to continue being shit, going into 2018, they scrubbed up and got themselves up enough to sideswipe us and derail us for the season, before predictably returning to their natural course of shittiness for this season.
Think of their stars: Ben Brown, an inflated gronk that kids would naturally run away from, not idolise. Ziebell, Cunningham, all the rest; I can't even remember the names of the campaigners they are that irrelevant. Their big trades were from the second most unfashionable club after them, Port. Polec and Shittard, one a star of the comp in the same way that Alan Arkin is a Hollywood star. Who's Alan Arkin? Exactly. LDU and Jy Simpkin will no doubt end up being extremely bland and/or average.
There is nothing about them that excites. Nothing that is even bad enough to be interesting, they are just nothing; the default setting on your phone, the chicken salad on your menu, the Ford Fiesta in your showroom, the City of Adelaide on your Map of Australia, they are a muted blue and grey office with 80s school furniture. They should have been boxed up and sent to the Gold Coast at the dawn of the expansion era, but they wouldn't have suited the sunshine and happiness. They are Anti-Toursim. They are an industrial park, not a theme park. They are an irrelevance, no matter if they are performing strongly or heading for a spoon; they are not even a Black Hole, that's too exciting and exotic, they are a grey hallway, an Inertia Zone.
Get Stuffed North Melbourne Kangaroos.