Browsing All Posts By Athas Zafiris
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Football
REVEALED: 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 ...
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Football
The 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 ...
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Australian Rules 10
The 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 ...
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Australian Rules
CARN: 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 ...
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Football
Oracle 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 ...
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Football
The 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. ...
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Australian Rules 7
REVEALED: The forgotten first match between a VFL team and an Aboriginal football team
On Tuesday, September 16, 1913, something occurred that should be commemorated within the annals of Australian Rules football, but has instead been completely forgotten. The first ever match ...
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Football 3
“Fake News” media hid Donald Trump’s spectacular football career
A dastardly cabal made up of dishonest media and Marxist football historians have for decades hidden the truth on Donald Trump’s spectacularly successful football career. I have bad ...
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Football
Yoshi Battles the Evil Sokkah Haters (with help from The Flaming Lips)
Hello Yoshi, Meet your long lost sister, Yoshimi. While you’ve been busy travelling around the country in your quest to find an A-League team to support, your bigger ...
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Football
Games Goals Glory: Eleven seasons of A-League as cause for celebration
In 1977, my mother took me on a journey. We walked down to our little high street, with its two small supermarkets, the modest Woolworths general store, the ...
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Football 3
Tom Rogic is…. A found poem to the man from the fan
Midday in sunny Glasgow on September 10, 2016. Tom Rogic strolls on to the perfectly manicured pitch at Celtic Park. The occasion is the Old Firm derby. The ...
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Australian Rules
Football: The Great Deradicaliser
Paris is no stranger to terror attacks. In recent memory we have had the awful events of the “Charlie Hebdo Shooting” and the “Paris Attacks” which included the ...
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Australian Rules 6
Cummeragunja: The Aboriginal football team that opened the eyes of White Australia
In the 1930s, Sir Doug Nicholls was one of only two Indigenous player plying his trade in top flight football in Melbourne. But he did not come out ...
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Football
Two seasons of Melbourne City: Still a pupa, but not as poop
When Melbourne City made their debut in October 2014 I took the David Attenborough route and described them as Melbourne Pupa FC. For those of you who didn’t ...
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Australian Rules
“Who do you barrack for, Tony?” A Timeless Tale of Australian Naturalisation
Station Pier in Port Melbourne was the first point of entry for hundreds of thousands of Australian immigrants seeking a better life in the The Lucky Country. One ...
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Football
Stop The Flares! FFA proposes to swap children detained in Nauru with A-League troublemakers
Shoot Farken can exclusively reveal that Football Federation Australia (FFA) has approached the Federal Government, namely the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, in a desperate bid to ...
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Football
A Season at Le Havre: The Story of Harry Novillo the Hare and Riyad Mahrez the Tortoise
Harry Novillo woke up bleary-eyed on a fine, early summer morning in Melbourne. He switched on the television, then walked into the kitchen to make his bowl of ...
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Australian Rules 2
The Shoot Farken Guide to naming and shaming Australia’s Sporting Hooligans
On September 12, 1885, the Fitzroy Football Club (merged with the Brisbane Bears to become Brisbane Lions in 1997) hosted the South Melbourne Football Club (Sydney Swans since ...
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Football
The Red and Black Bloc Massacre
The big day had arrived. It was stinkingly hot. The mercury had brushed 40c earlier in the day in Sydney’s West. RBB (Red and Black Bloc) stalwart, Rob, ...
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Football
The song your A-League club should walk out to this season
Last week, Perth Glory CEO Peter Filopoulos jumped on social media and asked fans to suggest a tune for the team to walk out to on home match ...
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Football
How Melbourne Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Soccer (well almost)
“Perhaps only in Melbourne does a brooding, hidebound and monolithic structure of feeling dominate, where other codes are sometimes humoured and usually dismissed as inferior.” – Dr Ian Syson, academic ...
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Australian Rules
Blacks and “Blacked-Up Whites” v Whites: The story of the strangest game of footy ever played
On Monday, June 11, 1900, Melbourne’s The Argus newspaper reported that a charity match was “played between 20 representatives of the Healesville Aboriginal Station and a team selected ...
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Football
Notes on an “Ultra” spectacular A-League Grand Final
The Game The game was no classic. Finals rarely are. Like waiting in the dark room in pre-digital days for a print to develop, we waited for a ...
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Football
10 Anti-Racist Songs for the A-League’s #EraseRacism Round
This weekend, Round 22 of the Hyundai A-League will be played. It has also been named the ‘Erase Racism Round’. According to the media release from All Together ...
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Football 20
How a Coyote explains the defective logic of a Football Bitter
Diving into the world of social media has its positives and its negatives. For every pithy comment of genuine wisdom or link to an illuminating piece, where you ...
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Australian Rules
EXCLUSIVE: Essendon FC’s search for a ‘Capo’ interview tapes
Last week, Essendon Football Club announced the launch of a new product, a first for the AFL, the ‘Active Area’. According to Essendon FC: This exclusive membership area ...
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Football 2
How Melbourne’s newspapers ignored the Asian Cup and let down the Muslim community
A few days ago, on Australia Day, I read this letter in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. I, too, was lucky enough to have experienced “all the fun and ...
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Pop Culture 2
Never mind the Bublé: 12 Songs for the 12 Days of Christmas
Christmas and popular music, oil and water. Almost every popular music artist, in every genre, under the sun (or in this case the Star of Bethlehem) has a ...
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Football
Socceroos Haiku: Ange Postecoglou Lost in Translation
In a plush hotel room in Osaka, in a steam filled bathroom, a hand reached out and turned off the super jet powered shower. For 30 minutes Ange ...
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Football 1
Fan division after derby demolition: The early evolution of Melbourne City FC
Last weekend’s Melbourne Derby, the first between Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City, had AFL media types creaming their pants over the atmosphere, Victory fans gushing like Yosemite geysers ...
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