Girls on Field

Meet Corrimal’s (possible) new media officer

2008-10-30T10:50:00.000+11:00

Considering I’m at nearly every game (except of course for Mittagong and Ruse) my beloved other half thought it would be a great idea to nominate me as the club’s media officer.

It sounds like an alright gig. I’d get to do the weekly newsletter (which really needs some womanly love and freshness added to it) as well as trying to promote the game a little more through work. I did however put my foot down about me taking the photos every Saturday because the guy who currently does it, he’s a genius, and I’m not that good at it. He stands out there with his big straw hat all day – from Youth to Reserve to First Grade – roasting in the sun, furiously snapping away at moments that could be lost if it weren’t for him:

Although the decision won’t be made final until the AGM next weekend, I’m already trying to think up some original and interesting ideas to keep their club in the limelight.
So if anyone has any suggestions, let me know. It could be something like ideas for advertising, ideas for content in the newsletter etc…

Hit me with it!

The most confusing term in sport

2008-10-21T12:56:00.003+11:00

After two seasons of watching my partner play soccer, I've got the rules pretty much down pat. Though there is one term that still frustrates me today, because I can never officially call it when I see it.
However, in saying that, I guess I should be proud of myself for at least vaguely understanding the term after months and months of practice.

Yes, I'm talking about the term "Off-side."

Several websites try their best explain the rule, even this one had a flash video, but it's a lot like algebra - you have to just 'get' it.

In my search for the truth, I came across this little gem of explaining the term. Nothing beats John Cleese.

I say you like soccer and that's final!

2008-10-20T12:49:00.000+11:00

At work last week, I was asked to put together a co-op feature (aka advertorial) for our paper. It was a topic that really ruffles my feathers, but after a clear warning that the advertisers had paid for the space and therefore deserved to get an editorial, there wasn’t much I could do but drink some concrete, swallow my pride and just do the story.

It soon made me think about sport in commercial media and the popularity of certain sports. Do we, as a nation, really like NRL in the beginning because we enjoyed it, or because there has been a long-standing exposure to it that drowns out any other sport? It happens with pop music, so why not sport?

Take the Olympics for example. Channel Seven bought the rights to a percentage of coverage of the Beijing Olympics, which resulted in a very condensed version of events that sometimes didn’t make much sense. Sometimes we’d be watching the Aussies in something like water polo, but we would never actually see the final score – instead, it just jumped to another sporting event Australia was competing in. After a while I noticed that most events Australia didn’t win, Channel Seven didn’t bother showing on television which resulted in the heavy edits. Maybe they assumed we had trouble dealing with such a loss?

Can we all as a nation, just get a grip?

2008-10-06T10:20:00.005+11:00

[source]

Ok, I can understand and acknowledge that a great majority of Australia love and follow rugby league. We need only watch the lead up to Sunday night’s clash with Manly and Melbourne to really get a taste of how much a silly little footy game can mean to someone.

But, sorry to all those followers of the sport – I’m just not that into it and because of that reason, I’m not going to be involved in the excessive display of utter stupidity - screaming of the team name while hooning around in my car, the “We won!” cry (which really annoys me because YOU didn’t win anything, the team did) and donning the colored scarfs on a warm day like a real tool. The thought of watching big, bulky, sometimes stupid guys running around after a ball, tackling each other, throwing punches at the person they’re holding a grudge against, in a method they think no one will notice (there are cameras everywhere fellas! Do you not get it!!) and what really gets me hot under the collar – calling it football. They don’t kick the ball around, so why is it called foot-ball?

I don’t normally bag out someone’s favourite sport, so apologies to the innocent, but when faced with a group of Manly supporters having the nerve of thinking they have the right in giving me the option of choosing to support Manly or be banished, I really hit the roof. Ladies and Gentlemen of the favoured sport: there is such as thing as people who JUST DON’T CARE. Just like you guys aren’t necessarily interested in ballet or good hygiene practices, I’m not into footy. It’s not a sign of disrespect, it’s just a fact of life that most of you need to accept.

Just like religion, not everyone is going to be in the Flanders Flock just like everyone isn’t going to be a scientologist. But perhaps these sports fans are lost souls that need saving, (or at least a place to call home), as Brian Reich says: “Sports are religious in the sense that they are organised institutions, disciplines and liturgies…”

However he does make a great connection between the two, identifying 13 areas where there is an overlap in religion and sport, but here are just a few:
- Saints - where souls who have departed, who in their lives exemplified and made manifest the prescription of the dogma of the sport
- Ruling patriarchs – coaches, managers, sportsmen etc
- Gods – star and superstar athletes
- High Councils – influenced by patriarchs who make and interpret the rules of sport
- Scribes – sports reporters, telecasters, broadcasters and so on
- Symbol of Faith – trophies, game balls, the equipment etc…

It's just like Scripture in high school, I tell you what!

Soccer Girlfriends

2008-09-29T12:17:00.006+10:00

Elizabeth, you sum up the Soccer Girlfriend well.

I’ve only been a soccer girlfriend for two seasons now and yes, I’m afraid I have uttered those words of doom: “It’s only a game.”

The world of the Soccer Girlfriend hardly reaches beyond the shallow understanding that we just turn up, cheer for our partner and then go home.
But alas, there is so much more going on inside the mind of a Soccer Girlfriend than meets the eye.

We’re constantly thinking about everything going on, from the moment we wake up the morning of the game through to the next day after a long night at the pub.

Like, which location are we going to? If it’s Ruse (Campbelltown) or Mittagong, not a chance in hell I'm going. Ruse is reminiscent of a Saudi Arabian desert - dusty and windy. But there is the 50/50 chance of some entertainment if you are dragged there, with one of their youth grade players starting a fight, thus causing the police to come out. Why go to the Antarctic when you can go to Mittagong? More than 30 minutes stuck there will result in you sitting on the bathroom bench, placing your feet and hands into the sink (not a very graceful look) under the hot water as the threat of frostbite edges closer and closer while the sun goes down.

My other primary objective is staying entertained throughout the day. There’s a large amount of time wasted between him getting changed and warming up, as well as during the game to waiting for him to emerge from the change-rooms after the game. That’s like four hours of your life gone! So, it’s important to entertain yourself be it visiting the nearby shops until his game or even hanging out with the other grades who have already played who you find interesting enough to talk to that isn’t about soccer.
If all else failed, I’d either read a book, call a friend which I knew would take two hours to catch up with or just have a nap in the sun. Obviously you don’t get caught doing this when he’s playing! You have no idea how many ‘screamers’ I’ve missed because I got so bored I went to the shops or something, yet fudged it enough to let him think I saw them.

It’s a tough business being a soccer girlfriend.

Rock N Roll?

2008-09-16T13:52:00.002+10:00

Just as half time was ending at an NRL match I was attending, I couldn’t help but quietly laugh when Motley Crue’s ‘Kick-start my Heart’ began playing just as the players were plodding back onto the field. What a perfect song to play at a rugby game?

The era of the drunk, drugged up musician being a public nuisance is long gone (for the most part), but it’s legacy continues on in today’s overpaid elite athlete.

When you think about it, the lifestyle of a sport star today is not much different from yesterday’s musician. Drugs, drinking and general public nuisance was what people expected from musicians and it’s what we are now expecting from elite athletes as well. So much so, we all eagerly look forward to it in the news every Monday morning when, like clockwork, some jock has ended up in a fistfight or assault at a nightclub over the weekend and gotten himself arrested.

On the rare occasion a player is actually punished for their behaviour (though still being paid kind of defeats the purpose), I often think the problem officials have with their players taking drugs and being a nuisance is that they think it will discourage fans from attending because it’s a bad image they’re projecting.

But seriously, are they kidding us with that? I agree with this guy (See Section 6). I’m sure from the perspective of a female footy fan, the idea that her favourite league player whom she has plans to marry, is not only good looking but has a highly publicised “bad boy” profile, is enough to give her some motivation to purchase season tickets.

John Bonham died choking on his own vomit after a binge drinking session, Jim Morrison grew cold in a bath after a heroin overdose and even Marilyn Monroe (to a lesser musical extent) decided one bottle of sleeping pills weren’t enough to end her life. Despite the depressing final months of their bloated lives, it still hasn’t stopped people idolising their music, and it’s pretty much the same for sports stars.

But the big question: They earn more than enough money for what they do, but with so much money lying around, is it asking too much to expect elite athletes to set a better example in public?

I say no!

Give these kids as much money as they want, group them together with other young males of legal drinking age and let them loose when the season is over. What’s the worst that could happen? A few fights here, glassing of girlfriends there; nothing to write home about. And especially let them completely forget what it’s like to actually love the game and instead learn to love the money.

Speaking of which, how is Sonny Bill Williams going over in France?

A Little Personality Goes a Long Way

2008-09-09T15:22:00.006+10:00

After coming across this article “Musical Taste Defines Personality” it made me think about other aspects of culture, namely the sporting culture. Does our personality define what sport we might play? For me, I would assume an individual sport like swimming, because I'm more of an introvert and prefer to achieve something on my own. But just to be sure, I decided to take a very credible online quiz at Quizilla:

Well, there you go.

Now that my dilemma is solved, what about other people who actually play sport?

My question starts with an experience involving the clash of my partner’s soccer team with an NRL team one Saturday evening, and made me think that surely we’re not all drawn together on the field by coincidence.

My partner and I were settling in to watch Arsenal about to score their first goal against West Bromwich Albion a few weeks ago, when a pack of local NRL players descended on the Leagues Club, boisterous, loud and testoid. The girlfriends sat to the side of their men who were busily wolfing down pizza and continued to make rude comments towards my partner’s teammates. In one foul swoop, one of these crude men switched off the TV that we were watching without even blinking and then proceeded to scull a jug of beer as part of their footy presentation, player’s player.

I've always been biased to the notion that footy players are stupid, rude and overtly masculated. But surely after my own experience, this can't just be a myth? Maybe it does have something to do with the personality of the player that draws them to that specific sport?

According to the Shelfield Sports and Community College online, there are four theories as to someone’s personality: psychodynamic theories, trait theories, social learning theories and inter-actional theories.

Although all four have very good ideas behind them, it’s difficult to determine just where these NRL players for example, get their personality from. Surely there’s a dickhead trait somewhere in Freud’s books?

Perhaps the reason next to no one has bothered to investigate this is because defining someone’s sporting personality is just too damn diverse?

Finding Some Blog-Spiration

2008-09-08T10:29:00.003+10:00

Starting a blog can be hard, especially when you’ve tried starting one a couple of times over the years and have collected at least 20 introductions about how wonderful your future blog will be but never actually get past the first post.

Well, I’m one of those people. Call it short impulse blogging.

But, hopefully with the help of looking at a few blogs that have made it past the starting line, I might be able to get some ideas and inspiration for my new blog that will be even bigger and better than the last one I tried two years ago!!

Ahem…

Oh Errol

This is actually a really fun blog to read from the perspective of female sports fans. Where else are you going to see a comparison of Nathan Hindmarsh to the character of Russell Hammond in the film Almost Famous? Though my only qualm would be the girls falling for the cliched "girls are only watching sport for the hot guys" theory that I'd love to break. Oh well.

Arsenal FC Blog

This is a pretty straightforward blog about Arsenal Football Club. At first it looks a little messy but once you get a handle on it, it’s quite interesting. I like how this guy has categorized everything from features, match reports to polls and news, and all from the comfort of his Brisbane home.

Juiced Sports Blog

I pretty much like this blog for its layout. Just like a newspaper, they have the little attention-getting ear on the front page that entices you to read on. In other words, you can scroll through the list of entries and skim over what’s happening, and, if you find something that tickles your fancy, you can read on, on another page.