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Surrey Park Lacrosse Club – August 11th 2018 – Round 14

Our final away game of the season took place a short hike down Darebin rd, right onto the Chandler, across the Eastern, right on to Elgars and then right again on to another road that I never knew the name of. It was dark when we reached Mont Albert Reserve. In the distance, ominous grey thunderheads argued like old men over the Dandenongs. I couldn’t shake a dark sense of foreboding that had settled just above my right butt cheek. The ground seemed damp, and the pair of juvenile otters I spied playing cheekily just above the Goal Line Extended seemed to back this up.

We’d gone into the game with the slightest hope of finals just lingering. But it wasn’t to be. We were dealing with more soft tissue injuries than the St. John’s ambulance first aid tent at the over 65s Tough Mudder event. We battled hard but Surrey were too good and we went down by a handful.

To add to the humiliation of the loss, Surrey had their annual ladies day going on and it was busier down there than the Bourke St Body Shop on Boxing day. I’m not sure how many gallons of champagne they had gone through but there was a sense of giddiness to the proceedings in the clubhouse that couldn’t solely be put down to the witnessing of a high grade lacrosse game played by pseudo-professionals. The sound of glass breaking eschoed across the fields. I trudged off the field trying to shake the sense of foreboding, hoping it wasn’t a sign of the dimmies to come…

Service – They were operating some sort of three burner set up here that seemed to draw inspiration from the triple launcher of the Parker Solar Probe recently set forth to explore our sun. That probe is going to reach speeds of up to 690,000km/h as it cruises around the solar system and the bloke serving at Surrey wasn’t too far off that velocity. In fact I suspect some sort of Minority Report foreknowledge device as he was in motion towards the burners before I had barely mumbled the D. Impressive. I think at one point he even used the orbit of one of the other volunteers in there to swing back around and gather momentum for one final run at the fridge to collect a VB. One downside was the price, two fitty (AUD). It didn’t quite reach the $1.5billion of the probe, but then again I’m not quite as rich as NASA.
- 8/10

Container – A pure white chip cup. Fantastic soy trickle down, recyclable but not quite reusable. Soy stained like white playing shorts in the August mud. The plastic fork was still an issue.
- 7/10

Sauce – An ambiguous murky squirter here. Since the giddy heights of the triple kikkoman mid season we’ve had a bit of a decline over the past few rounds. It’s not that I’m a stickler for brands. The other day I even walked within a 20m radius of the gaping maw of a K-mart and didn’t even dry retch. What I will not back down on though is the quality of the brown stuff, and this just wasn’t quite there. A bit watery and not quite with the salt content necessary (99.8g/100g at a minimum). I’m guessing a Coles brand set up. With a population of 27.6% of the Box Hill area being born in China, the lack of quality in this department seemed like a subtle insult to the local culture.
- 5/10

Consistency – Mushy. These bad boys must have been put on the steamer during Surrey’s golden years of the late 1980s.
- 4/10

Flavour – The sense of foreboding that had been lurking at the base of my spine all day reared its ugly head with one bite of the dim. A tough loss and an average dim. I was shattered. Luckily I am a professional so I pushed aside my chagrin and got on with the job. There was a marshiness to this flavour that I couldn’t shake, and I don’t think it could be solely put down to the pre-workout or tough loss. I decided to delve into the ancient art of numerology to help solve this mystery. It turns out that Mont Albert North (home of the Surrey Park Lacrosse Club), is 13km from the Melbourne CBD. This is 8 miles in the old language, or 42,240 feet. If we removed the zero we get 4224, which is a nice little palindrome. Shift these numbers up by a couple and we get 6446. 6 + 4 + 4 + 6 = 20, un-coincidentally the playing number of GWS Giant Adam Tomlinson (native of Mont Albert North). Tomlinson played his junior footy just down the hill at Canterbury, which was the abode of former Liberal Party leader Andrew Peacock. Andrew Peacock lost two elections to the legendary Bob Hawke, who was an alumni of Oxford College in England. Another famous alumni of Oxford was the author and philosopher C.S Lewis, author of the famous Narnia series. The sixth book of the series, The Silver Chair, follows the adventures of one Eustace Scrubb and his encounter with the morose Puddleglum. Puddle glum is a marsh-wiggle, a race of people who live entirely in and around fragrant marshland. Mystery solved.
- 4/10

Final Score: 28/50
Well you could put this down to my cumulative dimmie fatigue, but I’m going to call this a pretty average finish to the dim sim season. Overall, I think the state of the dimmies around the leagues of Lacrosse Victoria is promising. The service was generally fantastic, which tells me that the heart of the people is in the right place. Unfortunately, until we can get some funding in place to properly educate the blue collar dimmie servers and cookers, I fear we may keep living in a world of plastic forks, cheap soy and over cooked mush bags.