No time to dally, Em

Billy Slater was robbed. Robbed, I tell yuz! How dare he be rubbed out of a best-and-fairest competition on the basis of a couple of lazy uppercuts and a few weeks' holiday? Meanwhile, Rugby League is safe from cheese-eating surrender monkey rugby types with big chequebooks, because Greg Inglis, Queensland's favourite New South Welshmen since AB, has re-signed with Melbourne for the next 15 minutes (never mind about Benji, Sonny Bill and the Fire-Up Bitch merchant.) And Melbourne's attractive and engaging style of play - flop the entire scrum onto blokes in the tackle and try to remove their head like a twist-top stubby - is the greatest thing to revolutionise the game since Jack Gibson came back from his NFL study trip with a clipboard of wacky ideas in the '70s. Craig Bellamy is a genius, and everyone is just jealous.

Or so I understand from reading the News Limited papers. Amazing how much good press your team gets when you're owned by the publishers, yeah?

I hate the Melbourne Storm. I always have, and so should you. They are a venal, disreputable, unethical post-modern invention of money and greed which speaks directly to the soullessness, the corporatization and the disgusting cancerous avarice of modern sport. The Melbourne Storm are everything that is wrong with the world. Let's be unequivocal, and get to the crux of the matter: I would rather Manly won the comp. And that's not just because the jelly-wrestlers put 42 points on my Bunnies last week, whereas we gave the Seagles a touch-up last time we saw 'em, meaning we can claim prior precedence if they win (i.e. they won, we beat them, therefore we're champions. Worked in the schoolyard, can work again.)

The Storm owe their existence to Super League, Lachlan Murdoch, John Ribot and a host of other pestilences foist upon the world by Uncle Rupert and News Limited. They are the reason that the North Sydney Bears were chained to a rock and beaten to death, that the Magpies were eaten by the Tigers, that the Steelers were left to rust before St George sold the carcass for scrap, that the Rabbitohs went south - if only for a few years, and only ILLEGALLY. If it wasn't for the Storm, there wouldn't have needed to be ten years without a Gold Coast team in the NRL. The Gold Coast Giants, Seagulls and/or Chargers gave us Preston Campbell, Wally beating the Broncos after Benny had given him the arse, and most significantly of all, the great Peter Gill. The Melbourne Storm gave us Brett Kimmorley and the grapple tackle. They have no soul, no heart, no fanbase (certainly not one that would stick around if a Super 14 team rocked into town - count the number of Kiwi faces in the crowd at the Dome this weekend, they're the munty ones) and no reason for existing, other than to make money for their media magnate overlords. Melbourne needs rugby league like a fish needs a bicycle, which you don't need Bono to tell you is NOT VERY FUCKING MUCH SONNY.

In conclusion, the Storm are arse, and I hope they die in a ditch like the scrotal fungus that they are. Go the Warriors on the weekend.

The Doctor is OUT.