The Serve

The mating call of the Queensland journalist

This column is dedicated to Mike Colman. Mike is a long time journalist with The Courier-Mail, Brisbane’s daily newspaper. A career built on his Queensland versus the world mentality, where anything remotely south of the border must be bad.

Has to be.

This was the sterling effort from Mike in this morning’s edition. We will run through the bullet points in a moment, but if you want to read in full what Mr. Colman wrote about Channel Nine’s apparently clearly biased origin coverage, click here.

Unfortunately the Maroons winning the series wasn’t enough for our dear friend. In a nutshell, anything from a New South Wales commentator was bad and anything from a Queensland was stupendous and Goddam it there wasn’t nearly enough of it.

Chris ‘Choppy’ Close was an inspirational player. One for the trenches. His voice and diction though are not of the highest order, yet our friend Mike “could have listened to him all night”. Close and Paul Vautin, neither of whom are part of Nine’s regular commentary team, “Disappeared, never to be seen again”.

Wow, that’s a conspiracy.

Rabs was apparently far too glowing of Brett Stewart. Um, Mike, the bloke was called into the squad a day before the game, forced to make his debut against perhaps the most lethal kicking team Origin has seen. Stewart not only handled everything thrown at him with aplomb, he scored in the ninth minute.

Not good enough for you, Mike?

I seem to recall that same commentator whistling Dixie at Billy Slater’s chip and chase try in 2004. Origin legend. The play and the call. That commentator knew Slater was probably offside, but didn’t want to spoil the moment.

Thank goodness Slater wasn’t in a Blues jumper, eh Mike?

Rabs was also ‘guilty’ of mentioning the fact the Stewart was a diabetes sufferer and was a leader for those who suffer from that affliction.

Oh dear. Perhaps Stewart should be getting his sugar fix from Queensland bananas instead of jelly snakes.

The topper was the count of Ben Ikin’s contribution to the call. “(He) got to make one comment after 35 minutes and that was it”.

That’s pretty detailed Mike, where you doing stats on the commentary, too?

To be a ‘proper’ journalist takes great work ethic and a strong constitution. Qualities Mike certainly possesses. It isn’t really a challenge though to play the little guy, who continually riles up the masses and points at big bad Goliath.

It is people with this sort of inferiority complex that stay where they are while they watch the world go by.