The statisticians may be yet to record their first marks, kicks and dreaded free kicks against in season 2008, but don´t be fooled: the months of January and February can be crucial periods for die-hard Dream Team coaches. The AFL rumour mill is already being cranked up by newspapers like the Herald Sun, message boards like BigFooty, blogs like this one and other ¨reliable sources¨, like the bloke across the road whose cousin has a girlfriend who works in the gift shop at Punt Rd. By the time the season proper begins, you´ll have heard over and over which players are ¨guaranteed¨ to finally deliver on their rich potential, which players ate all the pies at Christmas, and which rookies already miss their mums.

Some of these news bites are helpful. Knowing that someone has missed half the preseason through injury, for example, will be a deciding factor come Dream Team draft time. Most of it, though, is bullshit that will have absolutely no bearing on your team selection. You can try to ignore it, but the bloke across the road who´s been banging on about Hamish McIntosh all summer knows where you live. Taking a leaf out of the book of Vin Vin, who took the extreme step of escaping to the US to ensure that only critical AFL info reached him, I pissed off to Peru for three weeks in January.

Here, no one has heard of Chris Judd, let alone whether his girlfriend is enjoying the improved shopping conditions in Melbourne. Amazingly, the Ben Cousins drug scandal was completely overlooked by the Peruvian media. In Australia we´ll enjoy a steak and sausage barbecue followed by a gung-ho game of Aussie Rules. In Peru it´s guinea pig and alpacca before the soccer. The closest Peruvians can get to the AFL is watching NFL on cable TV, which isn´t very close at all considering 55% of them live below the poverty line and can´t afford cable.

So, how will this self-imposed exile from all things AFL help my DT chances this year? Well, for one, I´m going to listen to the rumours less and go with my gut a lot more this season. The gut says that guinea pig needed more salt. It also says that the Juddernaut just might be as good as the Carlton faithful hope he will be, but not as quickly as they expect him to be. I´ll reserve judgement until after the pre-season, but I reckon he´ll be ripe for the picking around round 4 or 5.

Other than that, this South American sojourn made me realise that crap players are too easily tolerated in Australia. Here they trash the houses and burn effigies of poorly performed players. Sounds awesome! We´re going to need a lot of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of Kepler Bradley, though.