Browsing Tag AFL
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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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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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Australian Rules
The small, strange canon of Aussie Rules songs just got bigger with “Bob Chitty’s Blues”
FOR all that Australian Rules football is played, watched, discussed, argued over and thought about, it resonates surprisingly little in the wider culture. There are some poems by ...
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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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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 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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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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Australian Rules
Adam Goodes: (Black) Pride and (White) Prejudice
And so Adam Goodes will make his return to the Swans in their game against Geelong this weekend. Football might return to being about the result. Goodes might ...
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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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Australian Rules
The AFL Coach’s Guide to Better Parenting
As a first time father, I’ve noticed the older generation’s fondness for imparting old-fashioned advice on how to care for a newborn. When told such moves are out ...
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Australian Rules 2
EXCLUSIVE: The crazy match day experience ideas of AFL clubs
Port Adelaide’s approximation of a passionate ‘soccer’ crowd in their pre-game build up (sing iconic song loudly, hold scarf proudly above head) has the AFL in a lather. ...
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Australian Rules 2
Priced 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 ...
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Australian Rules
How 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 ...
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Australian Rules 1
Australia, 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 ...
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Football 3
Soccer and Anzac: Forgetting and Remembering in Western Sydney
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
The Indispensable Football (as in Soccer) Fan’s Guide To AFL 2014
Are you a football fan who is interested in following an AFL team this season? Even outgoing AFL capo dei capi Andrew Demetriou once admitted that it was ...
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Australian Rules
Magpie Relegation Blues: Is the AFL Ready for a Second Division?
It’s a freezing Saturday afternoon in June at Trevor Barker Oval and the Zebras faithful wait for their team to run onto the field to greet the howling ...
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