Queensland's Women Roar

thesimplestgame has a remarkable interview to post. David Taylor, author of English Settlement, was generous enough to answer some questions so we’ve been looking forward to posting it.

And I will, soon enough.

Not today though. Today, its hats off to the Queensland Roar’s W-League team who followed their minor premiership win by taking out the grand final on Saturday.

The game itself wasn’t a great spectacle. Two good goals inside the first 25 minutes wrapped it up for Queensland. Canberra United never recovered. The event though, the winning of the inaugural league in front of over 5,000 paying fans, is something to consider. If a women’s league final can generate this much interest the game is clearly gathering strength and position in this country.

A-League fans would tell you that it’s been happening for a few years already. Their detractors, and there are still a lot more of them, would have you believe otherwise. For thesimplestgame, avid supporters of the W-League and our local team, a noisy women’s final is surely all the evidence that’s needed.

My wee lassie’s first trip to a big game was the story for the day. It’s hardly news right enough and she’s been in a stadium before, a glorious stadium, but she was too young to that remember now. She’s a sturdy, ‘grown-up’ (her words not mine) six year old.

One hot dog and 20 minutes of concern over the food wrappers being blown onto the pitch later, she’d missed the first goal. She was elated to have caught the second, and cheered along with the rest of us. I spent the remainder of the half explaining as much of the football as I could. Like any dutiful daughter she listened politely. She even exhibited some signs of interest.

Half time refreshments called for a run up and down steep stairs and a trip to the merchandise van, despite the Aladdin’s cave of orange attire on offer, all she wanted was a flag. So we got one. She waved the living shit out of it for the first 15 minutes of the second half. We stayed away from seated punters so she could do so with a reasonable amount of freedom. I then managed to get her back to our seats, but not before we’d tried higher in the stand and then lower, before settling back to the midway point. We sat in front of the wall at the bottom of the tier. She could not see the pitch and spent the duration of the game standing on my knees shouting as loud as her wee voice would allow.

With only a few minutes left we decided to start making our way to an exit. Thankfully she missed the streaker, if only because my explanation of that incident would have generated slightly more confusion than the offside rule.

Most importantly she wants to go again. She wants to go as soon as the season starts. I’ve not pushed her. Yes the game was my idea and the onus was on me to entertain but the Queensland Roar women’s team helped me out, enough to see her want to return.

It goes without saying that the more popular the game is, interest in football fiction will follow suit.

Strangers in a stranger land…

I’ve had to do a couple of readings recently and I’ve got a couple more coming. The thought of them is not any more alarming than actually doing a reading. It’s mortifying to be in front of a crowd reading out loud something you’ve written. What if they think its shit? What if they don’t like football? – in Australian literary circles there’s a fair chance that might happen or worse still, what if they can’t understand the thick Scottish Brogue? For me, in Brisbane, this is as close to dead cert territory I can get without getting electrocuted on the wire.

As a football fan and a football fiction enthusiast (read geek), I feel like a stranger in a stranger land. Like I’m looking for golden pins in a field of straw. The only Australian football fiction I’ve found, by Cath Crowley (Gracie Faltrain) and Neil Montagnana-Wallace (Megs), are both aimed at young adult fiction reading audiences. Australian Sports Commission and Football Federation of Australia figures point to the game’s popularity among young adults and children so it goes without saying that’s where the lion’s share of native football fiction should be aimed.

But I’ve not found any Australian based football fiction aimed at older audiences, so I’m asking for your help. Can you tell me if you know any?

See, I naively thought, “there’s a hole there”. And I thought,“I’ll fill that”. So I did. I wrote a book and thought, “Right, I’ve filled it”. The game of football in this country (a place where the uninitiated steadfastly call it feckin’ soccer) will be even more popular as a result of my work. But we all know that’s a long free kick from deep in your own half away from the truth. I kinda knew that before I started. Now I don’t say this because my work is unpublished, (I’m confident it’ll find a home one day). I say it because even if it was, I’m not sure I’d have filled the hole. Isn’t there just too much drama in the real thing without reading made up stuff about it?


The season, A-League version 4.0, beckons so you can make your own decisions. Before you do, please consider the following…

The A-League teams are improving beyond all expectation. Well enough, in fact, to attract stars from overseas. Queensland Roar, having already found a home for Craig Moore - albeit 20 minutes before his retirement from international football - have signed an indubitably hefty Charlie Miller. Moore’s former Rangers teammate, stopping only to empty kitchen cupboards all over b-side europe, has made his way to Brisbane. Hopefully his diet will fair better with all the fresh fruit and sea food here. Don’t worry Charlie you can still get a fish supper. They aren’t as good but you can get one. The best part is he looks like their best player.

Then there’s the Central Coast Mariners controversial Mark Bosnich.
In December 1995 the way clubs sign players changed significantly, thanks to a Belgian bloke called Bosman, allowed players to become their own Masters. Kind of like subcontracting tradesmen with the literal and figurative ball at their feet.
The Bosnich ruling is something else altogether. Signing a Bosnich is the equivalent of having a pinless grenade taped to your chest. While you can hold the grenade parts together with one hand, your other is holding a rope tied to a safety rail precariously floating off the side of a 80 story skyscraper. Either way it goes, it’s trouble. Sure, from a distance it looks spectacular. The close proximity truth is nobody knows what’s going to happen, except that, whether it’s the window cleaners or the street sweepers, someone’s cleaning up a mess. And that, as we all know, makes it worth watching.

I say good luck to the high-steppin, high flyin, crazy, crazy bastard. I hope he’s settled down. He is, after all, the lesson that one act of stupidity is not the unmaking of a man, unless, of course, it’s a nazi salute to a stadium full of Tottenham Hotspur fans. Even though I’m confident I’ve never done anything that stupid, I feel like I can kind of relate. Playing to the crowd, the literary or the football, can be an awesome responsibility. And there are clearly some stories you just can’t write, whether you read them out or not. I have to say though when the real-life stuff is that scary, I think I prefer the fiction.