We rang the ground in the afternoon, to discover that we had a bench
with power. Great! Except that it was on the boundary line, in the
forward pocket/forward flank. Not great.

But it had power! Good.

But we got ourselves moved to the top level of the grandstand. Great!

Except it had no power. Not great. All the radios and TVs, etc had
power, but not us dumb print jockeys. Oh well, I’ve got a good
battery.

Oh, and we could only see 60% of the ground! Also not great. Because of the way the grandstand was designed, we weren’t out the front, we were on a setback wing, which meant the middle/front section did a great job of blocking out our view. (See the red circle? THat’s where we were.) Draw a line from the centre-wing on our side of the ground across to the half-forward-flank on the other, and we couldn’t see forward of that.

Oh, and no phone lines. “No worries, there’s one in the office
downstairs, you can file from it.”

Fortunately there were three of us there from Perth, so we split the
duties up. One wasn’t filing Friday night, so he did the main running
around to see what was happening off to the blindside on our right, I
did the super-detail keeping with my brilliant spreadsheet, and the
other did the matchups, etc.

The ground had a clock - it was a digital one in the corner of the
scoreboard with numbers about 6 inches high. Good thing we had
binoculars…

And then at 7pm, game time, the breeze died, so it was pretty muggy
from then on. Oh well.

We got through the game, and as soon as it finished, I raced
downstairs to file. “Here’s the line,” they said, pointing me at a
network cable. Which wasn’t distributing IP numbers, so no use. And no
phones! Well, I finally got someone to let me use one in the office,
but it wouldn’t give me a line, either with or without a ‘0′ at the
front. No, I’m not overly surprised.

So I rang AAP, (because I was filing for them as well as the AFL
site), to explain that I couldn’t file from the ground, as I raced
back upstairs for the press conferences. Only to find that they had
been moved downstairs, after being arranged for upstairs. No, I wasn’t
overly surprised.

So we raced downstairs, and waited for about 15 minutes. Finally got
to talk to Woosha, then Neil Craig.

But an interesting sidelight while we were waiting for the second
presser - I was complaining to one of the local urns about the
complete lack of organisation, and how I couldn’t file. “Well, at
least AAP has copy,” he says. “No, I couldn’t file,” I say. “No, I
filed to them,” he says. And yes, he’d been doing the
quarter-by-quarter scores, same as I had, etc. Nobody at AAP had told
either of us that it was being doubled up. Unreal!

After the second presser, I raced back to the hotel to file, and rang
AAP and happened to talk to a good mate, who was very unhappy to
discover that I’d been there and was filing, as the other match report
was pretty terrible, apparently

So frustrating

But I did get an SMS from my boss on Saturday AM saying I’d done a
‘fantastic job’, which was nice. I rang him to tell him of the events,
and he was PHSL

And on Saturday arvo I got some really nice photos around Alice.