SO, THE big day has finally arrived and I'm about as excited and as tense as can be. Geelong and Port Melbourne — sorry, Port Adelaide … that's how tense I am — are about to slug it out in what should be … hell, what will be, the most nail-biting, hotly contested footy grand final in centuries.

I've got my Jack and Coke, I've got the phone off the hook and there on the wall is my big, fat 50-inch plasma screen — and it's the most beautiful thing in the world because it's going to give me great pictures of what shall be the mother-in-law of all grand finals! (Also, it's totally tax-deductible.)

Anyone who cares about our great game is a defacto Cats fan today. We want the cup to return here and not be carted off to some smelly interstate city that is best known for its churches.

The anticipation has been swelling all week. The Cats haven't won a grand final in 400 years, so they'll be itching for a win. But it won't be easy because Port Adelaide … ahh, who cares? It's Port Adelaide, for chrissakes. They're not even from the proper Adelaide. So these interstate losers are going down big time.

And — bounce — the ball's in play. It's on! Geelong and Port are scrambling after the ball with the ferocity of a bachelor on a blind date with a divorcee. And guess what? The game really, truly, is absolutely every bit as goddam nail-biting and hotly contested as all the pundits said it was going to be! For about seven minutes.

Now, of course I want Geelong to win. The poor bastards have come so close so many times. But what you need to make a game watchable is a bit of fight. It's like when Matt Damon fights that guy in the bathroom in The Bourne Ultimatum. The guy fights back hard. That's what makes it exciting. If Matt was fighting Daisy Duck it'd be boring.

Well, that's what we had on Saturday. Geelong was Matt Damon and Port Adelaide was Daisy Duck. After all the build up, by half-time the game was about as exciting as a 170-minute SBS documentary on the history of silk farming. You know when you let the air out of inflatable furniture and there's that light, farting sound? That pretty much sums up the 2007 grand final.

And Port wasn't just being beaten — it was being slaughtered. And it wasn't just being slaughtered … by the end of the first quarter. The game got so dull the ice in my drink went into another room and began watching a Sound of Music DVD.

At first I thought, this can't just be lousy play. Port is in the grand final, for Pete's sake! There's got to be some ingenious strategy behind this. It's all part of a plan. It's going to pull some rabbit out of the hat to take Geelong by surprise and then we're going to see the biggest can of whoop-ass ever unleashed at a grand final.

But, no. It was just lousy play. The Port players' lack of enthusiasm was so obvious I began wondering exactly what it was that was distracting them so. Had they left the heater on? Were they worried about global warming? Or were they just looking forward to that free room service back at the hotel?

Whatever the case, I couldn't take it any more. About 15 minutes into the third quarter I turned the plasma off and went upstairs to read some Kafka. In wrestling, when an opponent has had enough he taps the mat and the match is over. They should have the equivalent in football. It'd save us all some time.

And, to be perfectly honest, I still don't know what the final score was. Geelong won by 230 points or something, yeah?