The Moreland has been a staple punting venue for a few years now.  It has, in many ways provided a benchmark against which other inner suburban pub tabs can be measured.

On a Saturday afternoon, the streets around it can double as the cab rank for Rod Laver Arena after a Fleetwood Mac gig.  It serves the most powdery free snags ever produced (no doubt a complete disgrace to any of the local ethnic Sydney Road population).  The only woman present most Saturday is the peroxide blond barmaid with a haircut that was discovered in the eighties and has stood the test of time.  There is a regular feeling of having been the wrong side of lung disease.  If it wasn’t carpeted, there is one bloke there who sports a pair of trackies so low you’d guess he’d been employed to polish the floors.  And he tops this off with a comb over of unique distinction, which if not plastered onto his bald noggin, would be blowing in the wind generated by his 5 minutes runs to the ticket machines.

But what about the bad bits?  Well it’s attached to possibly 2 of the most hideous things in the world - a pokies venue on one side and a family bistro on the other.  It is run by a bloke affectionately dubbed the Grey Ghost.  They push themselves as a sporting bar but the shutdown half way through a footy game because the last dogs races at Hobart were cancelled because the bunny’s broken down (How does this happen, by the way?).  They tried to shut down half way through the FA Cup final (which we’d tacked on to a footy game last year) - we eventually convined them to let us keep watching it in the smoking room beside the pokies venue.

So Arrivaderci Moreland.   I’m off to punt somewhere else.