[Neil Pickup]

Well, they've finally got round to getting off their backsides and giving us the phone calls for this weekend's traning camp on the Gold Coast just the two days before it starts.

Nineteen of us made the 10:00am meeting today, however we were kept waiting until almost half past eleven when Marc staggered through the door mumbling something. I say something, because the only words we managed to work out between us were "Rik", "dropped" and "budgerigar", before he collapsed unconscious onto Cloete's lap, and was carried out to see the team physician, Dr Edvard de Vilduck.

However, by now, Mr Ponting had lost interest and was chasing several farmyard creatures around outside, with a butcher knife, whilst Reuben was desperately trying to protect one of the sheep, apparently called "Rosanna".

By 13:30, following a buffet lunch, the coaching team were finally able to outline the plans for the weekend's warm-up matches against Brisbane Grade sides alongside some intense fitness training and net practice.

As we prepared for a 5km run, the whole day was thrown into chaos as Mr Ponting collapsed and was rushed to hospital where he spent the evening being stomach pumped. The reason? Most of the buffet lunch appears to have been Rosanna. As I write this, it's 22:11pm, I'm sitting in the concrete monstrosity that is the Royal Brisbane Hospital, trying to avoid watching the nurses deal with large-scale bodily fluid dispersion from more orifices than I knew existed.

We play Sandgate-Redcliffe tomorrow, but as things stand we have three fit players - PY and I have spent the last seven weeks on University food, and our stomachs actually benefitted from Rosanna's gall bladder, and Top_Cat, because he's damn hard. Marc should be conscious by around 1am, and so will have to play.

I'm not liking the looks of this...