Blog #12 - We Could Use Some Mr Matey In Here

I'm amazed the reserves managed to win last week against South after the pre-game preparation they had. Reserves supercoach Craig Brooks was strolling around the rooms before the match and trying to gauge the mood as coaches often do before games. He tried talking to them and tried razzing them up a little, but it was having little effect. It was time to take a different tack.

Brooksy marched upstairs to our weights room, got the iPod player, brought it back downstairs, cranked the volume, and blindly pressed play with a clear vision of what was instantly going to occur. He pictured a rock'n'roll montage from any testosterone-driven Hollywood sport flick; rippling, focussed men all mentally psyching themselves, chanting war cries with chests pumping. Unfortunately, what instantly filled every corner of the room (along with 42 players' match-ready ears) was the song ‘Absolutely Everybody' by Vanessa Amorosi. Most of them didn't know whether to laugh or find a room full of lasers and dance against a wall.

Moving on, the club's new facility has an ice bath (seen below filled with Kym Edwards, Matt Schmidt, ZacMakins and Johnny Boras).

As you can hopefully see, it's about a 2m x 4m spa full of shallow, swirling, ice-cold water. And my favourite thing about it is not the fact that studies suggest that prolonged periods of submersing your ‘special areas' in exceptionally cold conditions might lead to lowered fertility. No, my favourite thing about it is the first rule in the ice baths protocol: ‘No diving into ice baths.

I know sometimes people might suggest that footballers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, but I don't think any of them are stupid enough to jump from the slippery, thin, plastic edge of a spa into a metre of water, face first. Although, when you think about it, I suppose if for some reason you did have to hurtle headlong into a hard surface, you could do worse - at least an ice bath would immediately reduce the swelling.

This will be my last blog for the season, so make sure you get around the boys for the Centrals clash on Saturday. A few things need to go our way to progress, but any support out Elizabeth/Ponderosa way would go a country mile in helping us get there.

So, I'll finish with the inaccurate, but nonetheless inspiring and wonderful pre-game words of Cain Ackland: "Cocks fly together".

Gilly #25

Nick's blogs from 2011