Approach with Caution
Following a football team, seriously and committedly, so often feels like a fruitless endeavour. For years, fans suffer in ignominy as their team under-performs and follows one losing season with another. Coaches get sacked on a presidential whim; promising players leave for better-run clubs; injuries strike down established stars. And then, when the good times, […]
Footy Places
How a Stadium Looks So many of the suburban stadia of South Australia and Victoria have since passed into occasional use or have become training facilities for big clubs which play their home games elsewhere. Their amenities are diminished; the paint is peeling and they are marked by a relative emptiness and silence. Gone are […]
Football, Violence and Politics
*Recently published in Inside Indonesia (7 March, 2016) Football is the most popular spectator sport in Indonesia with second division games regularly attracting crowds of 30,000 spectators. Massive dance choreography and chanting are usually performed for the full duration of games, creating enormous spectacles. Yet, the passionate and creative fan culture also has an ugly […]
Ultras in Indonesia
Indonesia occupies a curious place in global football culture. Football is everywhere in Indonesia: in the streets, in bars, in narrow alleys, in grand and packed stadiums, and in the shabby empty lots of urban decay. The game is a cultural product open to endless varieties of meanings, uses and articulations. Football, as the world’s […]
The Comfort of Stadia
*What role do football clubs play in promoting healthy lifestyles? Can identification with a football club encourage participation in sport and being more critical about what one eats? Can stadia be places in which we find comfort? Football is an integral part of communal life in The Netherlands. The country has the world’s highest participation […]
Hello, Dutch Football
Oh Holland: home of wonderful splendid Total Football. Johann Cruyff architect of the beautiful game at Barcelona. And now, Holland: struggling against lesser ranked nations, and well, not qualifying for Euro 2016. Holland’s most famous football figure is currently not a Bergkamp, Cruyff, van Bronckhorst or a van Persie (at his volleying, heading best), but […]
I Went to the Football Today
& about a 4.4km x4 race /1/ I went to the football today. In Katwijk. A queue of some 40 people before buying our tickets, 8euros standing. Staan. It rained. The wind blew it horizontally. Katwijk, top of the table, playing Rijnsburgse Boys, some way down the table, but not quite at the bottom. Katwijk […]
Aboriginal Rules: A Bibliography
*Some time last year I participated in a conference on ‘sport and discrimination’ held by the University of Sunderland at their London campus. ‘Discrimination’ evoked ideas of ‘racism’, ‘prejudice’, ‘abuse’ and also a resistance to, a mediating of, and also an avoidance of. In my paper I wanted to stress not the act of discriminating […]
Fandom and Magazine Making
*I found The Football Pink – through a re-tweet. And I started to follow the account. I contacted the editor, Mark Godfrey and asked him some questions about being a life-long Everton fan and how his magazine, The Football Pink (TFP), came to be. Issue No.11, is some 50pages of pure footballing history and curiosities. […]
Shane Edwards Playing Footy
(above photo from Korin Gamadji Institute.) The AFL has aligned itself closely with the cause of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. It regards itself as being a progressive agent of change in promoting Indigenous rights and well-being. There is much infrastructure in place to show the work of the AFL with Aboriginal Australia: the […]