Flamenco guitarists. Micro-surgeons. Radioparts component installers. Little old ladies hand crafting doilies.

Enormously skilled and precise fields of undertaking requiring precise and intuitive connection to movement of hand.

How does one train otherwise dormant digits to spring to life with the dexterity and poise of Nijinsky gracing the finest stages of Europe?
How is this mercurial freedom of fingers engendered and encouraged in the modern age, and how is The League responsible?

Or more to the point, how was it responsible?

Because that is the sad fact.
What The League once held in its hand has been cut off to spite the nose on its face.

Floggers.

Yes, floggers.

Once upon a softer line hundreds of youngsters would busy themselves in the days and weeks prior to a game with the fantastically colourful and creative construction of floggers.
To the uninitiated just cellotape, crepe and a stick, but to the kids in the church halls, loungerooms and change sheds it was a valid form of expression requiring patience, skill, command of movement, and imagination.

There has been no documentation, no University tests to prove conclusively, not even folklore to suggest this now outlawed practice has given this great land a slew of gifted heroes of the hands on.

But we know it don't we.

The intricate dance of scissors/tape /crepe must have led to an awesome digital awakening in the hands of these youngsters..
youngsters whose passion for their clubs may now be matched by carving out new frontiers in medicine, technology, puppetry with the same unbridled passion.

For shame League.
You banned the floggers.

In the era of coloured communication you robbed the game of flamboyance behind the flags.
And you raised a symbolic scythe and brought it down hard on the fingers and hands of the gifted in whose hands, we now seek comfort and enlightenment.

Come on Andrew!

Free the flogger!!
Crank up the crepe!!
And make friend.

I'm Billy and I'm boiling.