Latest Posts
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FootballÇa plane pour moi: Ange Postecoglou and the wisdom of Plastic Bertrand
Belgium. Hate the place. Full of smartarses, especially their journos. “You lost your five last games and you play against the fifth best team in the world. Are you afraid to play against Belgium? “Yeah…terrified.” “It could be a sixth.” “That’s very true, but it could be one. It could be the first (win) couldn’t it?” Who am I fuckin’ kidding. I ...
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Football“Un dia muy importante”: Costa Rica basks in its World Cup afterglow
A transexual prostitute saunters into a seedy bar in San Jose, Costa Rica’s buzzing capital. She has a Joel Campbell badge fashionably pinned to her knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag. No, this isn’t a bit. There’s no priest or Irishman or a horse with a long face. This is happening, right here, right now, through the foamy bottom of my empty beer glass. ...
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Australian Rules 2Priced out, scheduled out: How the AFL lost 500,000 bums on seats in Melbourne
You’re the biggest act in town, so you’re entitled to a bit of hubris. Your policy of ground rationalisation at the end of the 20th century transformed a game that was primarily played in the suburbs into a two-ringed circus played in the bright lights of the city. Why go to the pictures, or a musical, when you can go to the ...
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Pop Culture 4Vale Tumbleweed’s Jay Curley: The Big, Bad Fuzz from the ‘Gong
OK, so this is what you do. Seal all the doors and duct tape all the windows. Take the phone off the hook, lock up the kids and tie down the dog. Clamp down all loose objects. Next, get yourself a copy of Tumbleweed’s monster single “Stoned” and whack it on the stereo. Now, using all your audio engineering nous, isolate Jay Curley’s bass ...
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FootballHow to make time-wasting in football a thing of the past
Football has a time-wasting problem. I make this judgement on the basis that coaches, players and fans complain about both time-wasting and ineffective time-keeping in football (just Google “football time wasting”, and see how many articles you find, especially compared to, say, “basketball, AFL, gridiron time wasting). But when the issue is brought up, such as in this article, you get a barrage ...
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FootballEXCLUSIVE: 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” franchise club into the A-League. The leaking of the report comes amid heated debate in the football community about the place of ethnic-affiliated clubs in the sport and, especially, in the A-League. The consultant ...
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Australian RulesHow to turn a buck from sport in the World’s Most Liveable City
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but if someone else pays for it, it’s close enough. I managed to score a free* ticket to Victoria University’s ‘Sport in Victoria – Who’s really winning?‘ forum, which is a good thing because the cost of a ticket to the entire thing would have set me back over $300. Movers and shakers from ...
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Pop CultureLaughing 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: mops, buckets, vacuum cleaner, sprays, rags, garbage bags, feather duster. By 8pm we had to be finished with the first block – carpets vacuumed, bins emptied, phones spayed and wiped, toilets cleaned – and ...
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Australian Rules 1Australia, it’s time to take a GHLAO (good hard look at ourselves)
Having migrated to this country in 1994, I saw many of Australia’s great sporting deeds. In 1996, during class in Grade 5, I watched Kieren Perkins win gold in the 1500m freestyle at the Atlanta Olympics. Throughout the 1990s, some of Australia’s cricketing legends (Warne, the Waugh twins, McGrath, etc) came to the fore as I became familiar with the sport and ...
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Pop CultureThe Overnighters and 2 Days, 1 Night: How I couldn’t escape the common people at MIFF
Arriving back in Melbourne from the significant distraction and vacation of a World Cup trip to Brazil is akin to standing under a shower with only one tap and that tap has a letter C on it. I spent five weeks away. Almost long enough for the current nasty political climate in Australia to evaporate in my mind, but alas, only to ...
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Pop Culture 1William Friedkin’s Sorcerer: The perfect 70’s film
Perfect films usually only ever appear so in retrospect. A case in point is Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s 1977 reimagining of the Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 classic, The Wages of Fear. The gloriously remastered print of Sorcerer, showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festivals ‘Masters and Restorations’ program, is an incredible tale of failed masculinity, predatory capitalism and madness. It was a ...
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FootballHow the World Cup led me to Miss Trans Star 2010 and rekindled my passion for the Socceroos
What do I, the Socceroos, and Miss Trans Star 2010 all have in common? Apart from similar reproductive organs, perhaps not much. However, we all made an appearance at this year’s World Cup in some capacity, and in an obscure way we now share that particular connection. And it all began with Tinder. After Josh Kennedy nodded in that goal against Iraq to ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Brazil v Netherlands, Germany v Argentina
Brazil 0 Netherlands 3 I wake up at 3:00am in a foreign city in a foreign country – you’d perhaps call it Sydney, New South Wales – and make preparations to leave, knowing that if I stay here in my hotel room to watch the 3rd vs 4th place game, the most pointless of any and all matches in world football, I ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Brazil v Germany, Netherlands v Argentina
Brazil 1 Germany 7 It’s only on a Saturday morning, now three or four days after the event that I can make sense of the whole affair, my refusal or inability to write, or perhaps another bout of writers block, or the fear even that I will not do this justice, or worse that I have run out of things to say, ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Argentina v Belgium, Netherlands v Costa Rica
Argentina 1 Belgium 0 Dear Mr Tyler, proselytising does not suit you, especially at 2:15 in the morning our time or whenever it was you decided to have a go at I think it was Javier Mascherano who was having a go at the ref, bullying him from early on, and I had meant to pick you up on this issue from ...
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Football 1The Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Germany v France, Brazil v Colombia
France 0 Germany 1 Because I somehow got roped into watching two episodes of the 1997 adventure series Conan the Adventurer – think Hercules or Xena, but with about 1/10th of the budget, awful plots and the guy who played Mickey on Seinfeld as comic relief – I leave it a bit late to go to bed, and make it worse by turning on the radio just quickly to get ...
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Football 1All 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 Cup tournaments of the ’80s and ’90s will fondly recall names like Zbigniew Boniek, Igor Belanov, Gheorghe Hagi and Hristo Stoichkov bringing their craft and flair to football’s biggest stage. Going back even further, before the great Bulgarian team of Stoichkov, Letchkov and Kostadinov which made the semi-finals ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Germany v Algeria, Argentina v Switzerland, Belgium v USA
Germany 2 Algeria 1 Who knows what the problem was, but I only managed to get up at about 7:00, so I completely missed the first half of this game. The Algerians wanted revenge for 1982, but more than that it seemed like the rest of the world wanted revenge for them. The Germans tried their best to accommodate Algeria and the ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Brazil v Chile, Colombia v Uruguay, Costa Rica v Greece
Brazil 1 Chile 1 – Brazil win on penalties In the Elizabethan ‘Great Chain of Being’, there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. God rules above all; Kings rule the rest of humanity, having being placed there by God; then it’s the Church, the rest of the nobility, the merchants and finally the peasantry; the lion is the ...
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FootballDer 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), five moral tales from the life of Luis Suarez. Just look at him! there he stands, With his nasty teeth and hands. See! his teeth are bared; They are filed as sharp as knives; ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Italy v Uruguay, Greece v Côte d’Ivoire, France v Ecuador, Algeria v Russia
Italy 0 Uruguay 1 How do we decide on whose terms any given match is played? If the match is played between two sides of considerable stylistic variance, the verdict is easy to make, especially if we have the benefit of hindsight thanks to the result. But what about when two teams with the same or similar or similar looking styles come ...
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FootballWorld Cup Farken: The USA doesn’t need to win the World Cup, they have already won
The match was over. Team USA had lost to Germany 1-0 but had also won qualification for the knockout phase of the 2014 FIFA World Cup courtesy of a result in another match in another far flung place in Brazil. As a result there were no losers filing out of the Arena Pernambuco in the outskirts of Recife, just winners. Especially American ...
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FootballWorld Cup Farken: Screw the pseudo-football intellectuals, I’m jumping on the Uruguayan Magic Bus
‘I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now; entertain us’ Kurt Cobain Fuck, it must be hard. Fuck, it must be so hard staying up to watch a game of football at two in the morning. Make that a cold winter morning. But this is the World Cup and this is Italy versus Uruguay, Balotelli versus Suarez. And don’t forget the ...
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FootballArrivederci 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 not there.” – Miles Davis In his seminal coaching treatise Teambuilding: the Road to Success, legendary Dutch coach Rinus Michels talks about the team functioning as an orchestra, with the players as the musicians and the coach as the conductor. He ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Australia v Spain, Croatia v Mexico
Australia 0 Spain 3 I woke up at what would have been half time and considered the options – stay in bed, or find some courage and go find out how well or, more likely, how badly we were doing. It was only 1-0 to Spain, but the second half soon showed up the Socceroos’ deficiencies for all to see, taking the sheen ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Germany v Ghana, Nigeria v BiH, S Korea v Algeria, USA v Portugal
Germany 2 Ghana 2 Martin Tyler is the king of English language commentators for all sorts of different reasons; his professionalism, his wide-ranging knowledge, the way he reads the play, and the modulation and tone of his voice which he adjusts so smoothly from quiet murmurings to genuine excitement without needing to go all ‘Rabbits’ Warren by blasting his voice into the microphone at ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Italy v Costa Rica, France v Switzerland, Honduras v Ecuador
Italy 0 Costa Rica 1 Get up at 2:53am, and one choc ripple biscuit later I feel that I’m getting better at this business. I find that Costa Rica are 1-0 up against Italy and this serves to reinforce the fact that no one knows what’s going to happen even if we have a reasonable idea of what we think should happen; but the ...
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FootballWorld Cup Farken: The Guide to surviving Brazilian TV Reporters, U.S. Soccer Fans and the rare dull game
This piece was supposed to be about the Japan v Greece match I attended at the Arena das Dunas in Natal last Thursday night. I really can’t be bothered writing about what happened on the pitch because it was predictable and uninspiring compared to the veritable constellation of sensational matches being staged around Brazil. What I will describe, however, is the action ...
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FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Spain v Chile, Cameroon v Croatia, Uruguay v England, Japan v Greece
Spain 0 Chile 2 After comfortably surviving the early game, fatigue sets in during the one hour wait until the next game. TV is more moribund than usual at this hour: ads for vacuum cleaners, ads for better abs, ads for the Army without any evidence of guns – are they going to engage the enemy armed only with library books and ...
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Football 3Oops! Wrong Country: How I Ended Up Watching the Socceroos in a Bolivian Jungle Town
It’s a disturbingly unsettling 35 degrees. 100% humidity. Sweat seeps from every crack and orifice. There isn’t even a hint of an inkling of a gentle breeze to perhaps suggest a tease of a slight cool relief. It’s bloody hot. Both sides of the street are lined with open sewers. No safety rail, grates or planks of wood. Just an astonishingly infinite ...
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