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I was born into a family with claret-and-blue blood three generations deep, so tasting the sweet nectar of English footballing glory was always going to be an elusive privilege for me.
My grandad, born and raised just down the road from Upton Park, instilled in his sons (except my traitorous Gunner uncle) an unwavering, semi-masochistic devotion to West Ham United, and when I was born my father passed that same double-edged devotion down to me.
In my teenage years, the A-League was a breathless reintroduction to the agony and the ecstasy of football and, most importantly, for the first time, it was local.
The sense of tribal camaraderie, the great wave of collective you will feel in a partisan stadium is a swelling, an addictive experience and boy, could I feel it. It was authentic, and Aussie.
As I got older, I was lucky enough to see Premier League matches too, including those involving my beloved West Ham.
The days of bleary-eyed irritability were invariably thanks to nights spent eagerly staving off weariness just so I could witness the live and latest dire serving of Hammering ineptitude.
I learnt a valuable lesson two years ago when I snapped the slat of our bed celebrating Ricardo Vaz Te’s 87th minute winner in the Championship play-off final, an act of unbridled euphoria that my girlfriend didn’t appreciate in the slightest, because it was her bed I was jumping on and she was in it at the time. I think I remember, at three in the morning, saying “sod the bed, we’re going up!”, a verbal gaffe to rival the very best in football history. On other occasions, I’ve feared a burst blood vessel, such was the furiousness of my silent flurry of post-goal fist-pumps.
After emigrating with my grandparents from England to Bundaberg, Queensland, in 1974, my father found himself in a country where the word “football” no longer referred to that beautiful game of perfect simplicity, played with a spherical ball.
In the steamy north of Australia, “football” was the name of a game where kicking was only sporadically employed. It was a far rougher game too, that my father, skinny, small and English, was hopelessly unsuited to play.
For him, attempting to tackle one of the bronzed behemoths, sculpted in the sugar-cane fields, who were now his classmates, would have ended in paraplegia or, at best, a scene similar to this. International football never made the news, and Australia’s own National Soccer League was three years away from being founded. These formative years were a test of my father’s dedication to the game. My enduring love for football that proves he survived the trial.
I have a vague memory of attending a NSL game in the late 90s, a Sydney Olympic match, I think, with my dad. I had had the rare treat of going to a West Ham match at the Boleyn Ground a year earlier during a family holiday, and so had this ready to compare to Australia’s version of professional football.
The East London cauldron had been a potent footballing baptism, and I remember being flattened by the booming energy of an army of cockney voices stained with vicious desire, rattling my bones along with the rafters. The Belmore Sports Ground, on the other hand, imprinted less lasting images; a scruffy-looking pitch, a stand that leaned lazily away from the field, and a smattering of supporters whose cheers wafted away into the afternoon air like grandfatherly flatulence at a picnic. For a rather shallow member of Gen Y, the dwindling NSL, limping towards its disbandment, offered no essential pizzazz.
It was a struggle for football to compete with the other established codes, so the storming arrival of the A-League in 2004 (when I was the same age my father had been when he moved here from England) was a real shot in the arm for my love of the sport in Australia. It was exactly what the game in the country was crying out for. Think back the Sydney Derby, or Melbourne’s two teams going at it, and you’ll see how far the game in this country has come.
I went to nearly every Sydney FC match that inaugural season, and saw Dwight Yorke lift the toilet seat trophy in Grand Final triumph over the Mariners. In the subsequent seasons, I was often found yelling in breaking, adolescent voice at David Zdrillic’s plodding performances, or cheering hysterically after an improbable Clint Bolton save.
So I began to write about it. Finding the words to elucidate the beautiful game has only entangled me further in love with it, and now I sit, irretrievably and contentedly smitten.
The winding path to explain exactly why the sight of Shinji Kagawa expertly navigating a suffocating midfield is so unspeakably satisfying, or why the audacity of this finish renders us blind and mute in amazement, is one I’ll never get sick of treading. And the path is constantly pitching in new, exciting directions.
Who, three seasons earlier, would have expected Barcelona to be on the wrong end of a 7-0 aggregate score in the Champions League?
Who would have foreseen the defending champions, Spain, exiting the World Cup so meekly in the group stages?
How often have we stopped to properly realise how blessed we really are to have Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo going tit-for-tat every weekend?
Seeing John Aloisi score that final clinching penalty in 2005 for the Socceroos puts a buttery lump in my throat and sends a heavenly shiver down my spine, and I suspect it always will. It’s these milestone moments, indescribable and perfect, that ensure my love for football will persist.
What are the landmark football memories that have shaped your own histories, Roarers?