It's been a sinister week in football. A ‘career' coach has been sacked. The parameters of sledging have been irrevocably changed. Players and administrators continue to haggle over their exorbitant kitty. So what better time to wax lyrical about the virtues of the game?

If we judge the great jazz drummers by the notes they don't play, then surely we are entitled to judge our beloved game by its intangibles; those seemingly superfluous yarns which echo among the fishmongers.

When I started university I found it virtually impossible to find anyone to talk footy with. I met Luke Holcombe in a second-year scriptwriting tutorial. He was six feet six inches tall, bore a striking resemblance to Fraser Gehrig and was commonly known as ‘Hulk' around campus.

Hulk had been on St Kilda's supplementary list in the early '90s. I recognised his name from old football records. He was a brave, bullocking ruckman. There was only one problem. He was competing for a spot in the side with another young ruckman called Peter Everitt.

He eventually found himself seated on a dental chair prior to the final reserves match of the season. He writhed in agony as the dentist removed the corrective wiring which had been holding his jaw together. He played terribly, had the wiring restored and was delisted.

"Was it worth the pain?" I asked.

"Of course it was," growled Hulk. "I needed to know."

Hulk later played professional basketball in Norway, served a brief prison sentence in America and returned to Australia to play Amateur Football with Ormond.

The Amateurs is the perfect football competition. Ten teams in each division. Two go up. Two go down. No dead rubbers. No tanking. I follow the Fitzroy Reds in C-Section. It's great to see the old Fitzroy jumper still in action.

A good friend of mine - a criminal lawyer - ended his 17-year retirement to play for the Reds this season. He was 32 years old, had defective groins and an abundance of silver hairs.

I watched his second game at the Brunswick Street Oval, expecting him to succumb to cardiac arrest. He was stationed in defence. Early in the match the ball spilled towards him and his opponent. He hit the contest hard, read the bounce perfectly and distributed the ball to a teammate in space on the wing.

It was a moment of triumph for the would-be Podsiadly; probably the pinnacle of his sporting career. His brother and I let out a roar of approval from the upper echelons of the old grandstand.

Brunswick Street Oval has always held a special place in my heart. Two decades ago, Fitzroy briefly returned to training at their spiritual home. One night after school I met up with my friend Ben Rotenberg to watch the Roy Boys go through their paces.

After a while we built up the nerve to jump the fence. We stationed ourselves in the forward pocket and proceeded to play kick-to-kick. Darren Wheildon noticed us and didn't seem particularly pleased by our intrusion upon his territory.

He grabbed Ben by the waist and held him above his shoulders. The ‘Doc' had a maniacal glint in his eyes. There was a collective groan from the crowd. No one quite knew whether Wheildon was going to drop the squirming child flat on his head or spare him. All great villainy involves a delicate suspension of the overlap between jocularity and lunacy.

On the topic of wild men, I used to frequent the meat court at the Queen Victoria Market every Saturday morning. I adored the dead trout resting on beds of ice, the revolving carcasses, the blood stains on the butcher's aprons, the refuse on the ground and the forlorn eyes of the fishmongers.

My favourite fishmonger was a thickset man with a lopsided nose and faded blue tattoos draped over his biceps. He always seemed to be critiquing the performances of Brendan Fevola. When the Blues lost it was because Fevola had a cancerous effect upon the playing group. When they won it was because Fevola was the most gifted player in the competition.

What I liked the most about the fishmonger was that he wore his disloyalty towards Fev as a badge of honour. He knew that his flagrant hypocrisy lay at the very centre of his Saturday morning performances.

If the fishmonger was disloyal, it is worth offering an example of his antithesis. At the height of St. Kilda's misery in 2002, two fanatical supporters established the Moorabbin Wing on level three at Telstra Dome. They chose aisle 35 in honour of Robert Harvey.

The two supporters - Steve and Ben - have spent the past decade conducting sainsational chants and roaming the aisles to impel the masses to steer the Saints to victory.

They exercise an unconditional love for their team; strength through loyalty. If every husband loved their wife like Steve and Ben love St Kilda, there wouldn't be any adultery in this world.

I recently took five of my Somali students to a twilight fixture at Etihad Stadium. We sat on the Moorabbin Wing. It was a cagey match. The crowd around us became exasperated with the umpires during the second quarter. The profanities were flying left, right and centre, which was great for the students' ESL skills.

After the match we dispersed along Bourke Street, weaving in and out of the traffic whilst kicking a rubber football. It was dark and raining. We got drenched. None of us cared. I admonished one of the boys because he couldn't kick on his left foot. The others laughed and said that it was the most animated they had ever seen me.

We continued to lark through the dark city streets, sidestepping, tackling, smothering, shepherding, taking outlandish marks on each other's shoulders, kicking bananas into the tram cables; an unlikely ensemble of footballers, enjoying the fruits of our national game.