The football season might be over, but comedian Damian Callinan is hoping punters will flock to his footy comedy The Merger when it tours Bendigo next week.The one-man play tells the story of the Bodgy Creek Football Club, a struggling small-town club in desperate need of players that recruits from the local asylum seeker refuge centre.The show is the sequel to Mr Callinan’s award-winning The Sportsman’s Night, also set at the dysfunctional Bodgy Creek Footy Club and loosely based on the Hepburn Football and Netball Club which was banned for on-field violence in 2000.In The Merger Mr Callinan plays eight characters, including the club’s star refugee player Saeed and the redneck club president Bull Barlow.“The main refugee character I play is a Hazara ethnic. His story was based on a real guy who spent ten months on Manus Island on his own,” he said.The comedian imagined what a newcomer’s knowledge of Australia would be like if the only material he had to read were footballers’ autobiographies.“So his vernacular is pretty steamy,” Mr Callinan joked. Mr Callinan has spent time playing country footy in Toowoomba and has long had an interest in asylum seeker issues, but was careful not to beat audiences around the head with “a message”.“The show’s actually really funny. It’s comedy first and if people go away with a story with empathy then that’s good,” he said.The Merger will be performed in Bendigo at the Old Fire Station on October 19 and will tour Heathcote, Pyramid Hill, Elmore and Castlemaine.