Latest Posts
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Football 1Craig Foster was the gateway drug to my football addiction: Getting ripped off by yet another streaming service and loving it
Maybe it was sleep deprivation. Maybe it was lockdown melancholy. Or perhaps it was wistful, sentimental nostalgia. But watching the post-game show after that breathless Liverpool – AC Milan tie, I found myself feeling inexplicably emotional. I didn’t grow up in a football household. Unlike many of my peers, it’s not an intergenerational love that’s been passed down, parent to child. My ...
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FootballREVEALED: The earliest confirmed game of Association Football in NSW was played 1878, not 1880.
History is not fixed. It is ever shifting. The past will always reveal something new and then another history will be rewritten only for it to be rewritten again and again until the end of time. Yesterday, Garry McKenzie, one of Australia’s finest sporting history detectives, made one of the most significant discoveries in Australian sporting history. A confirmed game of Association ...
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Football 2The ties that bind: Ange, Ferenc and their Celtic connection
In the corner of a park near the banks of the Yarra River in Melbourne, Australia, is a statue of a nuggety, muscular man born on the 1st of April, 1927, in Budapest, Hungary. Walk by the park on some days, and you can watch Melbourne Victory going through their training drills in Gosch’s Paddock. Not too far away stands the benevolent ...
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FootballThe story of the “Soccer” Anzac from Minmi who became a hero on the way to war (and never made it back)
Soccer has trouble remembering itself. This failing leaves it open to accusations of foreignness and unbelonging, accusations levelled from without and often complacently accepted from within. One of the more curious moments of amnesia in the game is its failure to acknowledge the soccer Anzacs – the soccer players who fought in both World Wars.” – Ian Syson, Soccer and Anzac: Forgetting ...
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Pop Culture444 Songs that mention the Ramones
Many moons ago, Laozi Ramone posted something that went viral. Even very long journeys, he noted, begin with a single step. The same goes for lists. This one, for instance, started innocently enough in the summer of 2011, when I was daily commuting across the city of Dortmund, Germany. One morning I noticed that my journey had begun and ended with a ...
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Australian RulesRemembering the Maryborough marvel, Frank Ivory: The extraordinary life and times of the first Indigenous star of two football codes
Maryborough Railway Station, 30 August 1893 He stood on the platform, a suitcase in his hand and a dream in his head. Of course he’d been here before. And every test he had passed without a blemish. Everyone but the selector knew what he was capable of. Yet each time he’d been disappointed. This time, surely, it was different. Queensland had been ...
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Pop CultureDefunct Yugo bands you should listen to in order to beat the Covid blues
All right, reader, what better way to fleetingly forget about the dumpster fire of the world when in isolation, or for that matter even in a post-iso world, than by listening to music from a country that…no longer exists? And the following goes without saying: you may not understand Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian, et al, but we all know that doesn’t matter, nor has it ...
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Australian Rules 10The forgotten story of the first ever game of Australian Rules football played in England
On Tuesday April 17, 1888, courtesy of that great innovation the electrical telegraph service, Australian newspapers including Melbourne’s The Age broke the news of a game of Australian Rules football being played in the mother country. Of course, the newspaper made sure to remind readers of the true origin of the local game: VICTORIAN FOOTBALL MATCH IN LONDON.LONDON, 16th April.A football match ...
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Football 3Finding Eadie Fraser: The story of how one of Scotland’s earliest football stars ended up buried in the Australian bush
Twenty thousand souls were crammed into Hampden Park. Five times they leapt to their feet in wild delight as England crumbled under Scotland’s second half hammer blows. How those Scottish throats would roar! Nobody there on that windy afternoon in Glasgow would forget this glorious moment in Scottish football history. The final score was emphatic: Scotland 5 England 1. He was there. ...
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Football 2They call him Judy: The day an Australian coal miner challenged English football supremacy
Sydney, 1925… They call him Judy. Dressed in a football jersey the colour of the pale blue sky outside, he is nervously pacing the dressing room under the grandstand of the Sydney Showground. Nearby his New South Wales teammates chatter quietly amongst themselves, all bar one in the unmistakeable accent marking them as Australian born and raised. They understand the task in ...
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Australian RulesCARN: The rollicking story of the football league that swallowed an entire code
In 1896, football in the colony of Victoria was in crisis. Australian Rules football as played in Melbourne had become unwatchable and turned into box office poison. A decade old law which allowed for “little marks” to be awarded for kicks travelling a distance of two yards was being abused by teams keen to gain a winning advantage. Long kicking was in ...
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FootballAngela Iannotta’s historic, unseen goal: the story of Australia’s first ever World Cup goalscorer in her own words
Like people, no two goals are alike. Each is unique, with its own characteristics and meaning. One of the characteristics of the goal Angela Iannotta scored against China was that it was beautiful. Angela says so herself. It was also a special goal. Momentous. No other Australian player had scored a goal like this before. But we don’t know that much about ...
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FootballReliving the last days of Yugoslavia with The Last Yugoslavian Team
“Hey, did you guys ever watch The Last Yugoslav Soccer Team? Now THERE’S a tearjerker…!” I ask my brother, his wife and my husband in a group chat. My brother and sister-in-law live in London, and have just told us how they were at the Southeast European Future Fest, a festival that “brings post-Yugoslav culture, music and architecture to Shoreditch for a ...
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Football 2The Heavy Sleeper’s 2018 World Cup Diary
Friday, June 15, 1.00am Russia 5 Saudi Arabia 0 My excitement levels are muted for this tournament for all sorts of petty reasons. Most petty of all, I’m thinking of 2014 and what was meant to be a half-arsed series of match reports to pad out my South Melbourne blog, which somehow became a standalone series beloved by dozens and resolutely ignored ...
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FootballOracle of Delphi says France will win 2018 FIFA World Cup
On a recent trip to Delphi, aka the navel of the world, Shoot Farken gained exclusive access to Pythia, the legendary Oracle of Delphi and asked her to prognosticate on the 2018 FIFA World Cup. This is how it went down with Pythia at the Temple of Apollo. Shoot Farken: Greetings Pythia, Great Oracle of Delphi. A momentous event in the sporting ...
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FootballThe incredible tale of the Newcastle Anzac who was offered a contract after scoring a hat-trick for Chelsea
On Tuesday, July 16, 1918, Newcastle’s football community opened their local paper, The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, to catch up on the latest news and gossip. A sense of dread would usually accompany the rustle of the freshly printed paper. They had grown weary of the unrelenting stream of bad news coming from the battlefields of World War 1. Weary ...
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Pop CultureWhat happens when you go and see “The Beatles of Yugoslavia” but there’s no Yugoslavia?
I can spot a Balkanite a mile away. Now, sure, this may not be a veritable life skill by any means, but I have a knack for seeing someone on the street and going, “Yep, thaaaat one’s from the old country.” There’s just something about the countenance, the visage. And last Melbourne Cup Eve it was easy because, well, they were all ...
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FootballAndie Peci of the Bonek: The hard life and dangerous times of an Indonesian football ultra
The re-launch of the Go-jek Traveloka Indonesian Football League saw the return of Persebaya from several years in non-playing wilderness. This was a struggle played out on the increasingly orderly streets of the port city of Surabaya, and of course through social media campaigns, where fans strengthened their attacks and resolve against the PSSI (Persatuan Sepakbola Seluruh Indonesia, aka Indonesian Football Federation). ...
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FootballImagining Romelu Lukaku: The black athlete as invented by white people
As a society, we have certain imaginations of the black body. It is perpetually big, strong, dominant. We have expectations of how it will move, walk, gesture and act. It is Serena Williams dancing after winning a Grand Slam and Piers Morgan questioning her “crip walking”. I wonder: do we have language that describes other bodies with real specificity? When I ‘walk ...
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FootballGoodbye Les Murray, from one refugee to another
On the evenings when I happen to get home from work before my husband, Igor, one of the first things I do – and I wager I’m not the only one – is switch on the TV, which I’ve habitually been doing since I was a kid. Now, it’s not because I want to “bask in television’s warm, glowing warming glow,” but because ...
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