popular pictures and women's football

Whether its prawns and bottled beer by the pool or a couple of pints and a whisky round the fire in the pub, it seems to be the time of year for reflection and family and watching loads of telly and eating too much and drinking more than is considered reasonable. It’s the holidays though and you should be good to yourself.

I gave a passing thought to joining the fray and posting one of those ‘the year that was’ posts, ye know, where we all cast an eye over my motley assemblage of entires into cyberspace, the football fiction, the events or the authors I’ve encountered, but you know what? You can read through those posts yourself. Have a wee look at the archive thing, past the posts, on the side there. >>>>>>

One thing that has been very curious though is the popularity of this picture of a woman holding her ball. I used it to discuss women’s football, and maybe highlight the attractiveness of their more graceful game, but for some reason this photo keeps pulling visitors into my wee football fictive world. Now I’ve put pictures of Hiedi Klum, David Beckham, Jessica Alba, Robbie Williams, Jessica Biel, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, the girl from Sex in the City, a women’s beach volleyball team and Danny Glover in my posts and yet the picture of the woman holding the ball has been the most requested, looked at, linked to article on my humble pages. Obviously I would love the main attractions to be my dazzling wit, rapacious insight, content, football fiction celebrities or even my sense of humour, but if it means people are reading it, it can’t be a bad thing. Can it? As unfortunate or desperate or debauched as detractors find it, sex really does sell.

And that leads me nicely to my next point.

I can only sit back and wonder why the W-League is not picking up even bigger audiences, it’s being marketed well, Australia’s ABC have been televising weekend games and the football’s good - if you needed any more convincing that it was worth watching Tameka Butt’s absolutely delicious goal against Melbourne Victory, a perfectly weighted curler into the postage stamp, is an excellent example. I can assure you it’s a belter but have a look anyway .

Our local team, the Women’s Queenland Roar, have just won the minor premiership and are odds on favourites to win the grand final in mid January too. The peeps at thesimplestgame would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the girls. They have our full support and ask that they would have yours too dear reader.

I know there isn’t much football fiction in this post, but there will be loads in the new year including a look at David Williams (Little Britain) foray into the young adult fiction market.

Before I finish I would quickly like to point to the close, and obviously unrelated, timing of the Australian Government's announcement of a $6.1bn effort to tackle homelessness and the success of the homeless world cup which finished on December 7th (that's another two fingers to you, Andrew Bolt).

To everyone else thesimplestgame says, enjoy your holidays, enjoy your pressies (if you’re lucky enough to get any), enjoy yourself (I don’t mean it like that... but if that’s what it takes, knock yourself out – just wash your hands afterwards). Go merrily onwards and Slainte!