Some of you may be old enough to remember this timeless classic. Some of you might be cursing me under your breath for daring to bring it up and planting such an annoying earworm. Some of you are probably thinking this is a story about Dan Parker.

Yes, the title is a reference to the 1989 hit "Infinity" by Guru Josh but I'm not here to talk about old school British acid house music. I'm talking about kids. Very, very young kids.

This year saw the first crop of kiddies born in the 1990's be drafted onto senior lists of AFL clubs. Tom McNamara* was drafted by Melbourne with their fifth round pick number 66. His birthdate is 29 April 1990. He is the youngest player on an AFL senior list. For God's sake, he's younger than West Coast.

So what? I hear you ask. Well, so plenty. Firstly, I'd say he doesn't remember the days when people had proper conversations with each other. Face to face. Without a keyboard. He wouldn't even know the correct way to spell "CU 2MORROW LOL."

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  I'm sick of hearing about how tough the pre-season is on the players.  What about us supporters?  I mean real supporters of teams too, not the powdered mind and hair of the theatre going footy public.  I mean those of us from all teams who know more than our coach or captain's nickname.  We are forced to live on scraps of information like Kepler isn't hitting targets or that Chad Cornes hair has receded to the back of his neck.  Really, it's just not right and it's just not enough.

The scientifically gifted amongst you will know what happens if a vacuum gets created.  Those of us without those gifts need only know that when you get a vacuum, stuff happens to fill it.  And the footy off-season simply doesn't have enough stuff of any value to fill the vacuum that is created when there are no games.  And so silliness festers in us all.

All we have to subsist on are the Mock Drafts of someone called Boogertron or those from self-appointed guru's who believe seeing an odd U/18 game makes them an expert.  But the real fun starts when the draft happens and there is the subsequent hand-wringing from supporters if we got someone the Mockers thought would go at a lower pick.  Or, as happened this year, all the bleatings about picking up Mark Johnson &/or Big Kepler. 

Now both these moves were entirely defensible, perhaps even shrewd, but even if they were blunders (and they weren't), the absence of anything else to talk about means they came under much more scrutiny than was warranted.  These were picks 56 and 72 in the weakest draft in memory if you listen to any of the pundits.  Freo knows what we got with both of them, and if they don't work out, they're gone.  No mess, no fuss, just "Seeya", and we get to use 2 new picks next year when some of the later kids may even know how to play. 

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And thank God for that. No, not the media whitewash about the 'dawn of a new era' down at Club Med Subi, otherwise masquarding as WA's second football team, that guff will be going on til well into this season...I'm talking about Christmas of course.

If you think  there's nothing better than watching children devour christmas wrapping and develop boredom with the contents in 0.75 seconds, and spending time with rellies that live on the other side of the continent for very good reasons, than good on ya pal, send me some of that yuletide contraband quicksmart. Apart from that, you wouldn't want the Christmas I had.

Christmas Eve I was fighting with the missus for control of the bathroom, as we jostled for the toilet, bucket in hand, as our backsides and stomaches fought it out to see which could expel the greatest amount of body fluid in the least amount of time. Simultaenously. Then the 4yo started. Then the bub.

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I'll level with you all.

I'm a sweaty, large framed individual who last saw daylight when the pizza man dropped the dinner off at the front gate because he thought Rufus would tear him apart. The fact that Rufus couldn't tear off a healthy fart without dislocating his arthritic left rear leg is neither here nor there and has very little to do with what I have to say to you today.

The fact is, without Dockerland to keep me company over Yuletide, I was looking down the barrel of another lonely Christmas relieved only by the sight of a turkey cooling off in the kitchen sink and a couple of leg hams sweating it out, like me, under the ceiling fan in front of the cricket. It wasn't looking too good, as you can imagine.

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It's a new day, a new season and new era at Fremantle and with that comes the new Dockerland. When Shane told me just before the end of last year that we're giving Dockerland a new look and all round face lift over the off season I wasn't happy.

I was looking forward to the break and now I was going to be stuck on the computer all summer. But then I thought, "As if he is going to want my help because what the hell do I know what goes on behind the fancy buttons and colours of Dockerland." Up until about twelve months ago I thought the internet was just a poor tennis shot and a website was nothing more than where Charlotte made her home.

Getting me to help build a website is probably on a par with asking Ben Cousins to lecture Schoolies on the dangers of drugs. We're both going to hinder more than we'd help. But regardless, I thought I'd lend my limited knowledge and distinct lack of ability to Shane so I chipped in anyway. It's safe to say, and its hardly surprising, there wasn't a great deal of substance to my chip and as it turned out I should have went with my initial instinct which was to do the ordering from the Angry Almond and just alert Richmond when a wicket was taken. If you read the Dockerland front page story you'll notice there was an incident involving a delete key which set us back quite a bit. There are no prizes for guessing that debacle revolved around my input which, given how much I wiped out, turned out to be a great deal of output.

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I saw a bloke, I think it was on Boxing Day, in the middle of the day, with the temperature about to crack the 37.778, going for a run in his footy jumper. Port Adelaide I believe.

Which got me thinking. Not that long ago, running in a football jumper in that sort of heat would be considered a suicide attempt but with this new sports wool stuff on the cutting edge of science, he was actually cooler running around in the hot sun than most people laying back on their vinyl beanbags watching the cricket.

You can forget your fancy air conditioners and swimming pools nowadays. Thanks to the boys at the CSIR, you can just put the kids in a footy jumper each and send them for a run. It could be the solution to global warming but it's ruining football.

Now, Dennis Commetti and his funboys have been pushing pretty hard over the last couple of years to have some sort of modified interchange rule limiting the number of changes you're allowed to make of keeping the bench down to 2 players. The theory is that if the players get less time to rest then they won't run as much, the game will slow down and there will be less flodding.

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You know football; it's now BigBusiness.

We all know that football has changed over the past few decades; after all, we have been told of its evolution often enough by the players, ex-players, officials and administrators. But has the change to BigBusiness been beneficial?

Well the big wigs have proclaimed that the game has never been better. So what metrics were used to identify this wonderful success?

• Record attendance figures?
• Record income from TV deals?
• Record salaries for the AFL and Club executives?
• Increasing salary caps?

Inasmuch as the AFL's glorifies its successes with these rudimentary measurements, does its business model provide succour for those who have built the game and industry that is football? The AFL's treatment of the North Melbourne Football Club doesn't suggest so. Following the Victorian club's refusal to move north, the AFL has wished it well and left it to the fate of 'market forces' whilst it pursues the creation of a new club on the Gold Coast. The implication being that the Roos will wither away and die. Good-bye. Farewell.

To further muddy the waters, Eyebrows has talked about the possibility of an eighteen team competition operating on a two conference model. You have to be kidding me. This as nothing more that a furphy that is designed to distract the pliant media from their brutal handling of North Melbourne. What the AFL should have done is to recognise the right of all the current North members to attend their home games every fortnight and, given North's parlous state, facilitated a merge with another Victorian club.

A merger, although initially distasteful to the two merging clubs, would at least enable the two memberships to continue to attend the fortnightly home game and support their club. If the AFL cuts off its financial support from North and watches while it succumbs to market forces, it is destroying the good people at North who have paid their membership fees year in, year out; and ignored the club volunteers such as the Club Mothers who have taken string-bean 18 year olds under their wings and into their hearts and homes.

Apart from the rank and file membership, clubs of all varieties are reliant upon the good-natured and whole-hearted support of a small but key group of volunteers. These people give of their free time and have no legal rights. But they deserve a fair go and they deserve not be left to be overcome by market forces. They and their clubs deserve succour. They do not deserve to be dismissed, ignored and left to wither away.

BigBusiness has the capacity to, and can, do better.

Greetings fellow Dockerlanders!

In the last few weeks, I have celebrated a personal milestone by reaching my 25th birthday. Whilst I have full confidence that I will possess my own teeth and hair for quite some time yet, in the life of a footballer the age of 25 usually represents the midpoint of a professional career. You're not a creaking veteran yet, but neither are you a freshly drafted rookie with a decade ahead of you.

You become more aware that time is passing - especially if you've yet to taste genuine success in this great game of ours. Many of the Fremantle regulars who were the young brigade when I turned 20 have either reached this milestone, passed it or are nearing it - Pavlich, Hasleby, McPharlin, the Carr brothers, Headland, Grover, Hayden, Crowley, Peake, Sandilands, Webster, Thornton, Dodd.

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