Browsing All Posts By Engel Schmidl
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Football 2
The 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 ...
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Football
Angela 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 ...
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Football 2
Soccer is small, football is big: The cultural dissonance of promotion-relegation in Australia
AFL franchise club Greater Western Sydney won the “wooden spoon” in its inaugural season of 2012 and then again in 2013. A few years before that, in the ...
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Pop Culture
RIP Lemmy: Last of the Wildmen
One of the last wildmen of the rock ‘n’ roll frontier is gone. He packed up his four-stringed axe, smoked a final fag, downed a quart of poison ...
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Football
The Sincere and Sexy Football of Eduard Malofeev’s Dinamo Minsk
As a child, some things leave a bigger impression on you than others. These things often go on to become a template for how you measure and view other ...
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Football
No Pyro, No Party! My journey into the secret world of flaming hot smoking orange chuckable things
Tribune of Troof journalist Peter Rofl with a Shoot Farken EXCLUSIVE. “Stop the boats!” We hear you cry. But alas there is a greater menace lurking in the ...
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Pop Culture
Beat the Champ: Unmasking the connection between Rock ‘n’ Roll and Wrestling
In his autobiography, Bob Dylan told a story about how professional wrestler Gorgeous George once came through his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, and happened to see the young Robert Zimmerman playing a show. It was a revelatory moment ...
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Football 2
Everybody hates the Pines: How Frankston’s football underdogs have survived 50 years
The 2011 season had been a disaster. In fact, so had the previous three. The club’s senior team had now been relegated four seasons in a row, going from the ...
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Football
Sheilas, wogs and poofters, Anzacs and Scott McIntyre
“Could you imagine Bruce McAvaney saying that?” “No, I couldn’t,” I said in response to my brother’s semi-rhetorical question about the senior AFL commentator. The sacking of SBS ...
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Pop Culture
Record Store Day: Learning to love Swedish electroacoustic music while staring into the vinyl abyss
Most ears only hear a succession of disconnected blips, bleeps and whooshes. Occasionally, a disembodied voice floats in reciting an apparently random piece of text in a foreign language. Swedish maybe? ...
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Football 4
A Magyar homecoming at Melbourne’s Greek Derby
Just as we’re moving from one side of the ground to the other, South Melbourne score. For the 20 seconds or so we lose sight of the pitch, ...
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Pop Culture 1
Who killed the Gods of Rock?
My first exposure to the Gods of Rock was the Robert Plant poster in my stepbrother’s bedroom. It must have been about 1980, my brother was 16 or ...
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Football 1
How Israel became the lost tribe of Asian football
There’s some scratchy black and white archival footage on YouTube of Israel playing Iran in the 1968 Asian Cup Final. The match was played in Tehran and Iran beat defending ...
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Pop Culture 5
John, Paul, George, Ringo and … Kanye
A survey conducted in 2009 by the Institution of Engineering and Technology found that up to a quarter of the people asked had no idea who first walked ...
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Football
A Death in the Football Family: John Drynan’s Slice of Heaven
Watch out for the alpaca poo when you play football in the Drynan family’s idyllic backyard – especially if you play in bare feet. Four alpacas look on ...
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Pop Culture
How a Teenage Sharpie Girl found Rock ‘n’ Roll Salvation in the Church of the Coloured Balls
There were plenty of pop stars around in the early 1970s to keep a teenage girl entertained: dreamy Partridge Family beau David Cassidy, the clean-cut Mormon charms of ...
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Football
Down, down, FIFA rankings are down: The New Socceroos Status Quo
The new FIFA rankings are out and, as usual, it’s only a slightly more reliable measure of quality than the top 40 music charts. When I started writing ...
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Football
A little anchor to childhood memories: A tribute to James Alexander Gordon
Certain memories act as anchors to your childhood. Little boats bobbing up and down in a harbour, the sea rising and falling with the tides, the anchors keeping ...
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Pop Culture
The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Schlager and Situationists
Do you ever get the feeling that today’s big pop stars could still be pop stars even if they didn’t bother making music anymore? Do pop stars still ...
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Football
EXCLUSIVE: Leaked FFA report considers potential for ‘ethnic-style’ A-League club
A highly confidential Football Federation Australia marketing report obtained by Shoot Farken reveals the sport’s governing body has been actively investigating the possibility of allowing a new “ethnic-flavoured” ...
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Pop Culture
Laughing Hyenas and the Teen Toilet Cleaning Blues
Like most menial jobs, routine was part of the package. At 7pm, our little crew would pull up to the first office block, unload the van, and take what we needed to get the job done: ...
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Football 1
All Quiet on the Eastern Front: What happened to Eastern Europe at Brazil 2014?
Most people probably haven’t noticed, but something’s been missing from the second round stage of these World Cup finals. Those of us who grew up watching the World ...
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Football
Der Beißende Luis: Shocking Stories from the Life of Luis Suarez
Struwwelpeter is a book of moral tales and lessons familiar to many children in German-speaking countries. Inspired by Heinrich Hoffman’s book, Shoot Farken presents Der Beißende Luis (The Biting Luis), ...
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Football
Arrivederci Andrea Pirlo: Italy’s improv master exits on a blue note
The World Cup has lost one of its great craftsman with the exit of Italy and Andrea Pirlo from the group stage. “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s ...
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Pop Culture 2
EuroFarken: 10 Artists Shoot Farken would like to see at Eurovision 2014
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m as big a fan of the annual Eurovision Song Contest as any kitsch-loving hipster doofus around. I get the attraction of the ...
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Pop Culture
Record Store Day: An Ode to a Racist, Old Drunk, Record Store Owner
He liked Hank Snow, smelt of cigarettes and sherry, and had a souvenir Minutemen licence plate on the wall. His shop, Russell’s Golden Records, was in a pokey ...
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Pop Culture
Kesha and the Big, Bad Eyeball of Freedom
Ke$ha recently went into rehab for an eating disorder and came out as Kesha. Notice the difference? Yes, she’s dropped the dollar sign. She’s no longer part of ...
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Pop Culture
Ukulele Dreams: Tiny Tim, Vance Joy and the Sound of Hawaii
He walked onto the set of a national TV show looking like a man who would be derelict were his mother to die. Watching Tiny Tim perform his ...
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Football
Snap, Kaká, Pop: Jack Lang’s Brazilian Football Adventure
It’s a big year for football and for Brazil, with the World Cup being held in the country that many view as the spiritual home of football. Of ...
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Football
How I Learned to Love the Offside Trap
I was schooled in the beauty of a well-sprung offside trap from an early age. My childhood memories are scant, but those that seemed to have left a ...
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