Roar Guru
Joined June 2012
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During last week's World Cup qualifiers, while Europe's sporting media were focused on the giant, and not-so-giant, nations of European football taking each other…
A few years ago, cartoonist David Squires, who was recently interviewed on The Roar about his weekly A-League comic strips for The Guardian, came…
A Roarer recently wrote an article listing the greatest fictional sports characters of all time. A specific character mentioned in the comments got me…
While it's a common occurrence to see an Australian or American sporting organisations and clubs referred to by their nickname, English football clubs, even…
We’ve come to that time of year again, when the English Premier League’s PR machine is in full swing, gearing up for the upcoming…
I’m getting to the point where I don’t understand Channel Nine’s raison d'être (that’s French for ‘reason for existence’, in case any of Nine’s…
After last year's Rugby World Cup, most keen sports watchers would be only too aware of a shared low opinion of Channel Nine and…
Some sporting historians will point to English non-league football team Kettering Town's deal with a local tyre firm in the mid 1970s as being…
Before the ink was dry on newspapers reporting the Wallabies' loss to Scotland, the whinging began. "It was the wind"; "it was too cold";…
I’ve just re-read this piece and noticed that the first link to the David Squires cartoon is incorrect, it should be this one:
Bullshit Rodeo
Dark times at the Stadium of Light
Northerner,
Was it your post detailing the history of codes and their oldest clubs? I get email notifications of any thread I respond to and still have a copy of it, if you’re interested…?
Is it ever okay to stop supporting your team?
Great piece Mike, and a subject so close to my heart that I wrote this article for the Roar last year:
I think that there are always going to be some circumstances that will cause fans to question whether their club is worth it, but in my experience those that do stop supporting tend to go right off the sport itself. I can think of a number of Fitzroy fans who don’t follow AFL any more, and a couple of Glaswegian friends of mine, both former Rangers supporters, are so disillusioned with the club and Scottish football in general that they either follow clubs from other countries, or no longer follow football at all.
Is it ever okay to stop supporting your team?
Nottingham Forest fans switched to support Notts County? In what parallel universe did this happen?
If true I would suggest that those fans were never genuine Forest fans in the first place, and they’d likely have been castigated and abused by both Forest and County fans for doing so.
Likewise, I don’t know of anyone that switched clubs to support Wimbledon. Even when the club were at their most successful they never attracted big crowds and were certainly not likely to win over fans with their style of play.
The only incidence of English fans “switching” clubs I can think of was when Wimbledon relocated to Milton Keynes. Most supporters switched allegiance to the newly formed AFC Wimbledon instead.
Is it ever okay to stop supporting your team?
Good to see that I’m not alone in thinking Moyes could pull Sunderland away from the drop zone.
I don’t recall too many years when there have been so many likely relegation candidates though, the bottom half of the table looks dire this season.
EPL mid-season summary: Who's staying up and who's going to win?
Can you imagine what sort of TV coverage this is going to get too?
It’s bad enough that recent Olympic coverage on Australian FTA TV has been so atrocious, and that they drop everything to show us the Brazil v Sweden women’s beach volleyball, but with this too? You can forget about seeing any other sports if it clashes with the cheerleading!
Cheerleading now recognised as an Olympic sport - provisionally
I would’ve thought boxing is more accessible, and affordable, for many than golf.
Cheerleading now recognised as an Olympic sport - provisionally
“London clubs Palace, West Ham and Champions Leicester”
Is it just me or does that read as though Leicester are considered to be a London club?
Conte cruising, Mourinho's madness: Premier League talking points
Sunderland are relative newcomers to this relegation avoidance game: Coventry City managed 34 years in the top flight, narrowly avoiding the drop for most of these seasons while doing so.
Premier League basement dwellers getting set for relegation battle
I’m a Sunderland supporter, and despite being bottom of the table I’m strangely optimistic about my club’s chances of survival.
It was always going to be difficult after the close season we had: the FA were sniffing around our manager before eventually taking him, Moyes was appointed only a few weeks before the season started, and no players could be signed because of this instability.
It’s also important to remember that the squad we had only just finished outside the dropzone the previous year, so a weaker squad going into this season, after the departures of number of regular first team players, including Giaccherini, Brown & Kaboul was always going to struggle.
I wasn’t surprised that we started so badly and took so long to register our first win, but the team are beginning to come together as a decent unit, and have shored up the defence in recent weeks. Even in the 2-0 loss to Liverpool we looked far stronger defensively than we have for a long time, it did take ages for Liverpool to finally get their first goal, and it was a pretty special one at that.
I think what is also going to serve us well, in our (now annual) fight against the drop, is that there are a lot of very poor teams down there this year.
Premier League basement dwellers getting set for relegation battle
Good to see there’s some coverage of this game, I’m quite looking forward to seeing two experimental teams go at it.
French Barbarians vs Wallabies live stream: How to watch online - Spring Tour match
Heh heh! That’d give the birthers something to really get wound up about!
Aa Ooo! WareWallabies of Dublin
Doesn’t one have to be a British or Commonwealth citizen to use the title Sir?
Have we documented proof that Trump was born in the US? Has anyone seen his birth certificate?
Aa Ooo! WareWallabies of Dublin
“No Scot has ever been world number one, even though officialdom has claimed the honour for Great Britain.”
Change the record David.
Being world number one at year's end is the ultimate honour
Liverpool “are the third youngest team, behind Tottenham and Newcastle”.
Out of curiosity, is that out of the 92 league teams? Or is that statistic from last season’s Premier League?
Why Liverpool might run out of steam
In the buildup to the match the Guardian were saying that the Thais were a stronger team than they looked.
It should be remembered that this was only their second home game in this stage of qualifying (the previous one they lost to Japan), and while their record away from home isn’t good, they did finish top of their stage 2 group.
Emotions are high in Thailand at the moment too, which probably did much to galvanise the players prior to the Australia game.
I reckon they’ll cause a few more upsets in qualifying.
On-field worries continue for Aussies in Thailand
Indeed.
Compare how good SBS’s coverage and analysis of the football World Cup is against the dross that Nine/Gem served up for the past two rugby World Cups.
SBS gave us every game live, their own presenters and commentators, and plenty of pre & post match analysis; Nine gave us selected matches, often from a NZ or UK feed, and no analysis unless the matches involved Australia.
It was amateurish. I don’t even recall seeing any results in Nine’s sport coverage at the time.
If SBS can get more rights to broadcast rugby, the better.
Lonely SBS fan devastated late-night porn programming shelved for Wallabies coverage
The full monty?
Robert Carlyle dancing to Hot Chocolate and Donna Summer? I’m pretty sure one of the commercial networks shows that film every few weeks…
Lonely SBS fan devastated late-night porn programming shelved for Wallabies coverage
It was Wales v Australia, a few years ago.
They did pretty well with it too, much better than the network that broadcast/buried rugby coverage at the time (Seven, I think?).
Lonely SBS fan devastated late-night porn programming shelved for Wallabies coverage
The misused apostrophe suits that team name well.
Every other code has one, so what should Australia's cricket nickname be?
Thanks Stuart.
We made the mistake of signing her up to the first team that we looked at. When our son decided to go for football we looked around at a few teams before settling on one that had decent coaches and cost a reasonable amount.
One other sorry tale to report though: I mentioned that my son has shown himself to be a promising rugby player. Like many sports clubs his team finished the year with an awards ceremony. There were three awards given out: most improved player, best team player, and best player. I thought my son wouldn’t be in with a chance of most improved as he started out well, but did think he could take home one of the other awards.
As it turned out, the team manager’s son took home the most improved award, and the other two went to the sons of the two coaches.
To add insult to injury the lad who was awarded best team player only played about 2 or 3 games all season as matches clashed with his football team’s, and many parents (those that were usually unable to go to training) had no clue who he was.
Organised sport: My 'lazy' kids are sending me broke
I feel your pain: I’ve spent thousands on my two kids to participate in sports too, and while much of it is well worth it (my son is showing quite a talent for rugby) there are limits.
My daughter wanted to play football a few years ago, in a team that some of her schoolmates had already signed up for.
I paid the rather exorbitant registration (over $500), but of course still had to fork out for kit, club hoodie, boots & shinpads, even a parking permit! Then there was the expense of getting to away games, some of which were nearly an hour’s drive away.
And what did we get in return?
Minimal coaching, run by another parent who cheerfully admitted that he hadn’t had any specialised training; and my daughter, who tried but will admit herself that she’s not a natural footballer, spending most of the matches on the bench.
Now, I’m all for drilling the kids into a winning team, but when that means leaving out a third of the squad, all of whose parents paid that $500+ registration, it’s quite soul-destroying. It was made worse when I’d see the opposition insisting on giving every kid the same amount of game time.
How are kids meant to learn the sport when the club hierarchy demands results from 9 year olds?!
Also, she was often made to train in an unsupervised group apart from the main core of players (i.e. the coach’s daughter, her mates, and the handful of genuinely talented players).
So, I’d regularly have to step in to assist with the coaching, otherwise nothing would get done. The kids would just run about and do their own thing. I didn’t mind doing that, but again, I have no experience or qualifications so was quite unsuitable, and probably not what most parents had hoped for their $500 outlay.
The final insult was that parents would be told (not asked, told, otherwise our kids were out of the team!) that they had to work the club’s coffee stall during games, so we were often not even able to watch our kids play.
Needless to say there was a mass exodus of players at the end of the season.
Organised sport: My 'lazy' kids are sending me broke
I think you’re being rather unfair to some teams who punched above their weight in the Euros.
The worst teams in the tournament were some of the more traditionally stronger footballing nations: as well as the aforementioned Russia & Ukraine there was also Austria, the Czech Republic, Sweden & Romania, all of whom finished bottom of their groups & didn’t manage a single win between them.
We were also treated to the “spectacle” of Portugal, possibly the least convincing winners of any major tournament in living memory, only managing a solitary victory within 90 minutes in their 7 matches.
I’m not sure that we can point to the larger amount of teams as the cause of that malaise though, some of the worst performers (Austria, England, Czech Republic, Northern Ireland) finished top of their qualifying groups.
FIFA announces 48-team world cup for 2026