What a GREAT banner

[bornadog]

[chef]

Got a heap of laughs. Excellent.

[LostDoggy]

gold !!!!

[Greystache]

A number of people around me commented on this week's banner. It was a good mix of funny and childish.

[bornadog]

Comedian Danny McGinlay brings something to new to Bulldogs banners: humour




"It didn't even rhyme," says Danny McGinlay, a local comedian, whose droll wit has turned a very Melbourne ritual – football's run-through banner – on its head.
No place for humour in a corporate game? Think again.

Halfway through last year and with his team, the Bulldogs, on a losing streak, the message on his club's banner was so banal that McGinlay took a photograph and posted it on social media.
It read: WE ARE HERE TO DO OUR BEST / SO VICTORY WILL BE OURS.
Playing the Brisbane Lions at home on a Saturday night, the Doggies lost – again.
By Monday morning, McGinlay had called Whitten Oval to spruik his wares. He had worked as a writer and the warm-up guy for a TV comedy panel show, Before the Game. He loved footy and his business was funny lines.

The Western Bulldogs were to play Port Adelaide, for the first time at Adelaide Oval, and over the phone he was asked for his best throwaway line.
"Undefeated at Adelaide Oval," he replied. "Be afraid, Port Adelaide."
Two weeks later, his two-liner was raised in Adelaide before 34,258 spectators in large red and blue capitalised letters on white fabric, and a new chapter in the parochial history of the run-through was written. The visitors lost by 73 points, but their opening quip won over the crowd.

Fast forward to last Saturday night, when the Bulldogs defeated North's old shinboners, and McGinlay pre-game quip put the idea of "osso bucco" on the game's centre stage.
Earlier this year against Greater Western Sydney, his banner bon mot posed the most fundamental of football questions: what rhymes with orange?

"The banners get more social media traction than any joke or gig I've ever done," McGinlay says.
As seasons now turn, with the spring blossom perfume in the air and football's regular calendar coming to an end, the Bulldogs this afternoon again play Brisbane and a football fairy tale beckons. From blue collar battlers, they've become the competition's great entertainers.

Most neutral barrackers hope their story has the happiest of endings in early October, just as McGinlay's banner gags have each week given fans the happiest of beginnings.
"It took a while for us to get his humour," says Sue Dyson, 59, a retired teacher from Pakenham and a Bulldogs' cheer squad regular.

Each Thursday night during the football season, you'll find Dyson in a sports hall at Footscray North Primary School, among the dedicated few, affixing his lines to a fabric banner to the chorus of pulled sticky tape rolls.
"It creates a lot of discussion. Some of the elderly ladies who sit near me don't get his wit, so we do have to explain what it means."
Certainly, McGinlay has reinterpreted the role of the run-through in a city's home-grown game, and its possibilities.
"There's an old adage in comedy: Don't just make the comedians up the back laugh. You've got to make the whole room laugh," he says.

That is, he plays to the crowd – the many tens of thousands in the stalls – rather than the 22 footballers running onto the stage.
His banner jokes have more than a cult following and have reinvigorated a local arts and craft custom that's been part of the game since at least the 1939 Grand Final between Collingwood and Melbourne.

As the Sporting Globe of the day reported: "The respective races were decorated with club colours" [in a paper lattice so low] "umpire Coward on visiting the Collingwood room had to crawl on his hands and knees for fear of breaking [the art work]."
Rob Hess, a sports historian at Victoria University, says banners ever since have measured grassroots participation in a game made popular initially by inner-suburban rivalries in late 19th century Melbourne.

"The occasionally controversial nature of the pithy messages on run-throughs has often been a barometer of the contested social terrain that's always been part of spectator culture in Australian Rules football."
Next week, McGinlay, who was born in Preston to migrant parents, will turn words for his footy club which, in their high flying ways, now find themselves at the season's business end. This is no laughing matter. Or is it?
Bob Murphy, the Western Bulldogs captain, for one, says since McGinlay has written their banners, he now reads them before running through them: "They make me grin."

For both the barracker and the footballer, in a raised banner there is a succinct moment when both are as one: on the grass together, experiencing a flurry of emotions before a game and the naked truth of its contest.
"When you're coming up that race to the banner, it's the best and worst thing about football," Murphy says. "You're in fight or flight mode. There's an incredible loneliness, but in the same breath there's also a profound togetherness, a physical release for the battle about to begin."

[Scraggers]

image.jpg

This week's banner

[craigsahibee]

The response from the Lions was first class

Chad.JPG

[chef]

Matt and Alex just had Danny on the J's. What a legend and a very funny man.

[NoName]

I wonder what the banner will be for this weeks match - hopefully there is no mention of 97 / 98....

[Twodogs]

I just heard Danny on 774 and he is genuinly funny. I pretty much hate everybody but this guy is good!

[bornadog]

Dan's Banner suggestions for tonight



For Freo:


TWO FLIGHTS TO PERTH
WHAT A TIRING TRIP!
IT STILL DOESN'T EXPLAIN WHY
YOU WEAR THAT *!*!*!*!ED AWAY STRIP


For Hawthorn:


WE MUST STOP THE DOCKERS
SEND THEIR FANS HOME CRYIN
TO PREVENT ANOTHER GRAND FINAL
FEATURING ROSS LYON

[Throughandthrough]

Good news. Danny McGinlay is writing the banners again this season.

[Murphy'sLore]

Yesssss!
Love Danny's banners.

[dadsgirl16]

Good news! I spoke to him at Social Club function...nice guy and I love dry wit

[Greystache]

Good news. Even opposition supporters like them.