By Joffa - 11 Mar 2014 10:01 PM
The Maleficent Seven. These are our least lovable sports teams
News.com.au Sports Editor Anthony Sharwood describes the rationale behind his picks for the most despised sporting teams, which saw Collingwood head the list.
BEING a sports fan is about passion. It’s about loyalty and sticking with your team on a rainy afternoon when the pies are cold and your team’s form even colder.
There is beauty and passion in being a sports fan. But there is also hate.
Not a hate that manifests itself as violence, but a simmering, resentful kind of hate that sustains you and even nourishes you when your own team is playing like hell.
Here are seven teams not even a mother could love.
1. Collingwood
You knew they’d be here before you clicked, and while we’ve tried to include a few surprises on this list, there’s no point overthinking things too much. Collingwood is the very definition of loathsomeness. Like a dumb, ugly rich kid who thinks himself superior to his peers while in truth they snigger behind his back, Collingwood has no friends, no class and not a single worthy trait. Don’t be fooled by the fact that in terms of both members and match day crowds, this is Australia’s most popular sporting club. There’s no official measure of unpopularity but if there was, you’d need about ten thousand MCGs to hold all the haters.
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL... is that line in the club song that goes “Oh, the premiership’s a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood”. The arrogance, the sheer arrogance. The delicious irony is that Collingwood do indeed often play like a bunch of loafers poncing around eating cake, especially after reaching one of those grand finals they’re so adept at not winning.
2. The Brisbane Broncos
Brisbane likes to think of itself as a mature, global city these days, a fact supported by the city being chosen to host the G20 summit later this year. Brisbane is also the rugby league capital of the world – perhaps the only city on the face of the earth which truly lives and breathes for the sport. Yet Brisbane has just one NRL team. That team, with its mystifyingly American name, is the Broncos. The Broncos are like a giant vacuum cleaner for Brisbane sporting talent. Each year, while the 10 Sydney clubs battle it out for scraps, the Broncos unearth a local superstar or several who just happened to end up in the club’s hideously ugly maroon-and-gold strip.
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL... is the whingeing and hair pulling-out that occurs when the Broncos don’t make the finals. It’s like they’ve got some sort of birth-right to be there. For the record, they have missed finals footy just three times since their first year 1988. And they’re currently lamenting their longest premiership drought… a whopping seven seasons. Drought schmought. There are towns in Queensland which haven’t seen rain for longer than that.
3. The Adelaide Crows
From day one, when they adopted the South Australian State colours, the Crows stamped themselves as arrogance and egotism personified. Their cross-town rivals, the Power, might once have been the malevolent, evil force of South Australian state footy, but there’s something gutsy and admirable about the Power these days. Not so the Crows, who have become chronic under-achievers on the field, and
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… are the fans, who don’t have an ounce of sportsmanship in their delicate bones , and who routinely walk out of matches early when their little darlings are behind on the scoreboard, so they can scurry off to the nearest wine bar.
4. The NSW Waratahs
No sporting team should be named after flowers, and this particular bunch of pansies is like one of those overpriced bouquets you buy at a fancy schmancy florist, a bouquet which wilts and dies about 20 minutes after you bought it. How many times have the delicate petals in this Sydney-based Super 15 rugby outfit looked good yet failed to bloom? How many flower analogies can we fit in one piece?
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is the fact that they’re looking so good again this year. Indeed they’ve won their two matches in free-flowing style yet have the best defence in the competition. That’s a sure sign that it’ll go wrong in about six weeks. It always does.
5. Team Waterhouse
They’re an unofficial “team” in the true sporting sense of the word, but the trainer of last year’s Melbourne Cup winner Fiorente and her high profile bookie son are quite the unlovable duo of the Australian racing scene. To be fair to Gai, her effervescent nature and sharp tongue can be entertaining, such as when she bagged out her old mate Singo at the More Joyous inquiry. But for the most part, she comes across as narcissistic and endlessly verbose on her favourite subject – herself. As for Tom, let’s just say that if he really knew what punters want, as he claims in his ads, he’d bugger off and get a real job.
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is when Waterhouse invites punters to bet on his mother’s horses, all of which is perfectly above aboard and legal but which always seems, shall we say, a little at odds with many people’s expectations of the racing industry.
6. The Australian Swimming Team
They’ve given Australia no less than 58 gold medals over the course of our Olympic history but in recent times they’ve also given us all sorts of reasons to tune out. The blokes played up like spoilt brats in London, while half the girls were too busy updating their Facebook profiles to worry about winning medals. Unlike, say, Collingwood, this is a sporting outfit no-one actually wants to hate. But our swimmers have still got plenty to do before (and during) the Rio Olympics to convince Australians that they’re a mature bunch of young champions who are worth cheering for no matter how they perform.
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is their nickname the “Dolphins”. It’s pointless having a team nickname for what is effectively a large group of individuals competing in solo or relay events. In fact, you’d probably have to call it porpoiseless.
7. Any team of drug cheats
Do we have to name names? In the past 12 months, there’s been enough written about teams in both the NRL and AFL who drag all of sport down with cutting-edge tactics taken from the Lance Armstrong playbook.
MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is the fact that you just know we’ve not heard the last of it, and probably never will.
http://www.news.com.au/sport/the-maleficent-seven-these-are-our-least-lovable-sports-teams/story-fnaqgujp-1226850856983
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By jlm8695 - 14 Mar 2014 11:20 PM
Benjo wrote:Captain Haddock wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVJPRBNMw0
Can somebody explain the Burnley hate to me? I'm a Blackburn fan. Burnley are our bitter rivals. Up until last weekend, they hadn't beaten us in the league for 34 years. Not saying Rovers fans don't do this as well, but the majority of time i've had people "attempting" to troll me by calling me "dickwad", "c***", "f*****", on Twitter, without any provocation, it's been burnley fans. Also, last year when they conceded a last minute goal to us at Ewood Park, they smashed up the toilets at our ground. This year, when they won, they sang songs about our dead, ex-owner Jack Walker and destroyed some of the seats in the away section.
[youtube]sT-tflctLPw[/youtube]
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