CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Just a week before Wests Tigers battle it out for the wooden spoon against the Eels, and there’s once again rumblings of a de-merger between the two foundation clubs that form this mutant losing machine.
The Balmain board is set to call a crisis meeting as it considers a shock split from the Western Suburbs Magpies, a less-appreciated powerhouse of grassroots recruitment and revenue.
It is believed Balmain directors are preparing to call a vote on their involvement after growing frustrated by a lack of support and lack of involvement in the decisions made by the club’s majority owner, the Holman Barnes Group (HBG) and their friends at the Magpies.
It is not yet known how the fuck the Balmain Tigers think they are going to be able to sustain an NRL team in the modern era.
Especially when considering the fact that this former working class harbourside suburb, that once provided the club with a conveyor belt of premiership winning factory fodder from the wharves and warehouses, is now nothing but an uptown yuppie utopia full of fuckwit Sydney Swans fans and shit pubs full of poorly-trained designer dogs.
However, the napalm-liked scorched earth of gentrification that has taken place in Balmain does not seem to be issue for the Tigers Board – neither does the fact their modern residents think that supporting rugby league makes them look like uncouth climate deniers.
Aside from the occasional Lebanese builder’s son who grew up playing soccer at the local Catholic school, Balmain and the greater inner-west has not produced one young bloke who was willing to get his hands dirty since Neville Wran.
There still seems to be a delusion that the ‘if you re-build it, they will come’ amongst the powers that be – and they are willing to severe the golden handcuffs of the Western Suburbs that has kept them stacked with cash and young Polynesian talent.
With a trashed leagues club that has sat derelict on Victoria road for two decades, as the only parcel land in the inner-west that has not been overvalued to fuck with poorly-built luxury apartments, Balmain Tigers don’t even have the means to harvest the pensions of their elderly club members. That’s if their elderly club members haven’t already been priced out to the Central Coast and Lithgow.
MORE TO COME.
