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wrote thids for the club but they don't look like using it (something about not wanting to make a big deal of it I think) so here 'tis.
Or maybe they are just sick of the Ghost's style.
Is it true? Has a grand old name returned? While Optus has been a great sponsor of this club (and hey this Ghost has everything named Optus running around in cables or waves/particles – bloody Einstein threw a spanner in the works with that little idea!) I have always mourned the loss of the grounds true name. Yet now I see it printed on the club page. So I ask, is it true?
As a child I remember that walk from Royal Park railway station around the roaring walls of the zoo, across roads and parklands, a gathering flood of people all hurrying as the 10 past 2 time drew near, brother Pat telling me about this player and that as we scurried with the rest of the crowd and pushed through the clicking turn-styles into the ground, that ground, the only ground. As a teenager and young man it was the tram down Lygon, a stop at The Rising for a couple and then the bolt through the streets and barking dogs of Carlton before seeing the ground settled, calmly, amongst the leafy trees of Princes Park.
Princes Park! Oh how that names conjures! It calls to mind Brian Kekovich kicking goals, the peanut man tossing well aimed bags, the gagging smell from those always flooded toilets, the clock that was once almost as famous as Flinders Street’s far bigger but less important timepiece, the eternal lying cry of ‘hot pies’ and the teeth of Barass lying in the mud when as a playing coach he yelled at a player or umpire (did he even lose them at Princes park?). I think of gathered cans used as a wobbly standing platform, the concrete steps that were made for men and the cause of more lost boys than Peter Pan’s inane antics, and the shouts and cries of a million bluebagger supporters.
So I ask again, is it true? Has the changed nature of the Optus arrangement meant that the name of my youth has returned at last? Is the ground now Princes Park again?
I remember shedding a quiet tear when the move was announced. The mind understood the reasons, could see the need but the heart, oh how the heart pined for that great ground where once Ragsy ran the lines and drop kicked his way into my boyhood heart: Princes Park, where Big Nick’s name and Bruce Doull’s fame are forever etched; where the Heatley Stand sang us home game and game again.
Oh tell me the name is returned to us all. Tell me I can take the lad along to training and point to the sign and say. ‘That’s the name lad, that’s the name as Carlton as Carlton, as big as Big Nick as famous as a Jezza mark! The name I remember calling this ground from the time I could first understand that it was football and nothing else that mattered, a name I used repeatedly until money and sponsorship stole it away from our lips but never our hearts’.
For it was at Princes Park that we began the great climb back to the top of Everest and won that flag in ‘68 and then in ‘70 etched ourselves into GF folklore and repeated the dose again in ’72 kicking a score so high even dad laughed his way through that game. It was with the name Princes Park ringing in our ears that this great club became in deeds as well as in our hearts, what it will again be, the greatest club in the land.
So tell me that name has returned and I’ll begin to hope and dream again of better days, of sunshine in September and a club, a proud colossus rising up off the deck, staring its own George Foreman in the eyes and screaming with a single proud Bluebagger force ‘let’s rumble!!!!
Carlton bombaye! Carlton bombaye!
Is this club on the rise again? Have we set in place the things necessary to finally turn this ship around. Will Marc and Tex, with Adam, Simmo and The Fish, with Fev, Skinny and Lance, with T-Bird, Saddo, Frenchy and Mclaren and others like Butch’s son and young Kennedy and Hartlett, finally mean we are moving back towards the heady days I remember?
It’s been dark days for far too long, the memories of Southby and SOS, of Wallsy and Maclure, of Gags and Ashman grow dim, appear fragile under the harsh glare of recent seasons. We need to believe again. We need a Kenny Hunter suicidal mark, a Braddles run around the wing, a Harry Madden laugh or Mike Fitzpatrick stare. Could the famous name returning to the ground be a sign that things are going to change, finally?
So is it true? Do we once again train at Princes Park? Has the wheel turned and have we turned that liner Collo spoke about. Are we heading home and though we may be far from home is it there, in the distance, shining sweetly like a long lost memory, is that September action I see, the sun, the training while other teams rest, the grand ground Princes Park proud as punch as the lads are put through their paces again in preparation for the tilt at the 17th?
Upon that soft grass of Princes Park!
And welcome back Princes Park.
Bury me not in some quiet cemetery
Toss my ashes from the Heatley
To land where they may
Go Blues
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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!
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