KEY POINTS:
Step out of the arrivals hall at Tullamarine Airport and straight away you know there's an end-of-season playoff game in Melbourne this weekend.
"The Finals Series. The Game That Made Australia," the flags attached to all light poles declare.
It's the Aussie Rules wind-up, and most of the
talk in Melbourne, almost all of the flags on cars and the jerseys of the football fans declaring allegiance to either Collingwood or St Kilda.
The taxi driver would know the Storm face our New Zealand Warriors in the finals of the NRL competition, surely. "The Storm already won the final didn't they, I heard that on the radio." A Greek, he proudly tells me Australia has beaten Uzbekistan in a World Cup qualifier and gives 10 minutes of running play, no problem.
"The Victory play Adelaide this weekend. There's a rugby game too isn't there. There's too much sport now," he said.
The three morning papers have an average eight pages of AFL coverage to one page of league. That's good. Usually it's just one column.
The hotel receptionist has to look the Storm up to find which suburb its HQ is in before giving directions.
At the club, the management is chuffed with a third minor premiership and high on the octane of beating off French rugby's million-dollar offers for their star Greg Inglis, who on Wednesday negotiated an extension of his contract through to 2012. He joins stalwarts Jeff Lima, Dallas Johnson, Cooper Cronk and Billy Slater on long-term commitment. Already, that's a good balance of ground-gainers, a kicker, a line-breaker and a kick-returner and broken play runner, all among the best in the game.
So the Storm seem set to continue their run of finals appearances in 2009 and beyond. But will anyone down here notice? The Storm is 1000km to the south of league's heartland in Sydney but it might as well be at the South Pole for all the locals care.
Ticket sales by yesterday were no better than for a good round play game, the average turnout around 13,000.
At the central Victoria Market there is just one guy in a Melbourne Storm jersey. He's a Maori, Billy Blakely from Tauranga, who has been on building sites in Melbourne for 20-odd years. "Youse jokers have got Buckley's, eh mate?" he says, mixing his colonial colloquialisms.
Storm lock Dallas Johnson has Buckley's chance of playing on Sunday after suffering what has now been diagnosed as a grade two medial ligament tear last weekend. The club says he will be given every chance to pass a fitness test but word here is, he's a goner, with Ryan Hoffman likely to go to lock and Jeremy Smith shifting up from the bench.
Their wing Steve Turner is confident he will be able to start after being named to play just 13 days after knee arthroscopic surgery. The Warriors have no injury concerns and travel today with the 17 listed early in the week, plus Epalahame Lauaki on a five-man bench.
The weather in Melbourne is very Auckland-like, overcast with gusty winds. Showers and some longer rain periods are predicted on Sunday, the sort of miserable weather in which the Warriors have prospered lately against top-ranked sides including Brisbane, the Sharks and Melbourne six weeks ago in Auckland.