Buckley's Chance, Tsunamis, Bad Luck and the Siren?

Losing 2018 AFL Grand Final coach Nathan Buckley

In Australia to say that someone has Buckley's chance (or just plain Buckley's) is to imply that they have little to no chance of winning.
Chris Knowles has been writing about the name Buckley for most of the year on his blog 'The Secret Sun'.

To look at Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley's football track record you would think that he is a personification of that curse playing out in real life.
Being a Brisbane Lions supporter myself I used to find it amusing watching Nathan's footballing dreams crumble, especially when as a player he left the Lions to join Collingwood, because he felt his prospects of being in a winning grand final team would be better with Collingwood.
The irony being that the Brisbane Lions won three grand finals in a row after Buckley left the Lions, with two being against Buckley's Collingwood team.
In his first season with Collingwood, the Magpies were eliminated by the West Coast Eagles by two points in Perth.

In the 2018 season, despite another injury crisis, Buckley still managed to coach Collingwood to their first Grand Final since 2011.

Unfortunately, Collingwood lost that Grand Final to the West Coast Eagles by 5 points.

Even I felt sorry for Nathan on the day watching the WC Eagles snatch the final from his team pretty much on the final siren.

Even though I was cheering for the Eagles on the day.

Nathan Charles Buckley

But even the non-superstitious would be thinking twice after watching Collingwood's banner fall apart before the team had the chance to run through it, before the game started.

It literally wasn't a good sign on the day and I'm sure it will go down in AFL folklore ... pardon the pun:-)

Gavin Buckley from Perth Western Australia

Although when it comes to somebody who gave the middle finger to the old Buckley's curse, Gavin Buckley would be the man.

I wrote about Gavin last year in this post linked below -

Buckley's Chance?!

Gavin Buckley in front of his Tsunami restaurant

Tim Buckley, born February 14
 (Valentine's Day), 1947

I've also been writing about another pair named Buckley who seemed to be cursed by an archetypal siren who Tim made famous in his 'Song to the Siren' -
A Tragic Love Story/Song That Had Buckley's Chance From the Get Go?

Timothy Charles Buckley III

In last year's post I wrote about Gavin being co-owner of a restaurant named 'Tsunami', "Gavin BUCKLEY is the co-owner of Tsunami restaurant, which I found out about in this news story where he was being taken to court over a mural painted out front - Tsunami mural retroactively approved."

A triangle formed between Perth, Melbourne
and where the tsunami hit

On the Friday before the 2018 AFL Grand Final (the day before) a tsunami struck Indonesia killing hundreds of people.

"On 28 September 2018, a shallow, large earthquake struck in the neck of the Minahasa Peninsula, Indonesia, with its epicentre located in the mountainous Donggala Regency, Central Sulawesi.

The magnitude 7.5 quake was located 77 km (48 mi) away from the provincial capital Palu and was felt as far away as Samarinda on East Kalimantan and also in Tawau, Malaysia.

This event was preceded by a sequence of foreshocks, the largest of which was a magnitude 6.1 tremor that occurred earlier that day.
Following the mainshock, a tsunami alert was issued for the nearby Makassar Strait, but was called off half an hour later.

A localised tsunami struck Palu, sweeping shore-lying houses and buildings on its way.

The combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami led to the deaths of at least 2,100 people.

This makes it the deadliest earthquake to strike the country since the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, as well as the deadliest earthquake worldwide so far in 2018, surpassing the previous earthquake that struck Lombok a few months earlier, killing more than 600.

The Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics (BMKG) confirmed that a tsunami had been triggered, with its height reaching an estimated maximum of 4 to 7 metres (13 to 23 ft), striking the settlements of Palu, Donggala and Mamuju along its path."

This story above about a wave pool was featured on page 13 of the same Sunday newspaper I read all of the football newspaper stories featured in this post ironically enough.

2018 and that Sinking/Synching Feeling?

And looking at that old '2018 and that Sinking/Synching Feeling?' post, I just realized that the 'Riverfire' 2018 fireworks were held on the Saturday night of the AFL Grand Final.

Kind of eerily synchy and spooky I would say.

What are the odds of such bad luck striking on Grand Final weekend?
Buckley's I'd say but wait until I write my post up for the NRL Grand Final that was played on the Sunday of the same weekend.

It didn't involve the name Buckley though, as far as I know, but it seemed to be cursed in some ways, too.
Oh ... and the poor bloke who was hit and killed by lightning just outside Dubbo, who I wrote about in a recent post - 

Man Killed by Lightning Near Dubbo the Same Week the Royal's Visit Brings Rain?

Turns out that he worked for Armitage & Buckley Livestock.

What's a name got to do with anything, right?

I'd say Buckley's and none:-)