das libero

The Obsession of Lenny Colquhoun,
Invermay, Tasmania

In our observation of the Australian sports media and its expression of soccerphobia, one name seems to come up quite a lot, Leonard Colquhoun. What follows is a selection of Lenny’s ‘arguments’. For someone who claims that no-one is taking much notice of association football he certainly seems to be taking a lot of notice.

On the idea of a Tasmanian A League team
The Mercury
1 May 2008

"BTW, are those spruiking soccer because lots of foreigners play it" - Yes, Charles of Hobart, No 11, I do realise that lots of Australians play it as well, but that was not my point. It is the inconsistency of pushing something BECAUSE lots of foreigners do it, rather than because it is higher, faster, stronger, niftier, nicer, etc. Noted writer and teacher of English A A Phillips made up the expression "cultural cringe" for this denigration of our own, the If Something is Foreign it Must be Better attitude, and I thought after Whitlam we had grown out of it. Seems I was wrong, or a bit premature.

Lenny's on dodgy ground here. Not only does he quote an old Lefty (Phillips) he invokes the 'cultural cringe', a term meant specifically to be applied to imaginative literature. Phillips felt that we didn't need to look to Britain or elsewhere to find our novels; nor did we need to promote our parochial forms. We could compete on the literary world stage with a 'relaxed erectness of carriage'. Carry this analogy over to sport and: we can compete on the world stage in sport; we don't have to invent our own parochial forms. We can pursue and develop our own version of Association football without feeling second rate.

Funnily enough, Lenny advocates what Phillips called the 'cringe inverted'.

Reply by Charles of Hobart
Leonard, I think you are confusing "foreign" with "international". Foreign implies that it is ONLY played overseas. And yes, I think a sport played internationally is better because then there is something to aim for once you get past the top level domestic league. The team or league can also get higher levels of sponsorship because of increased coverage - in 2009, the A-League's Central Coast Mariners and the Newcastle Jets will be playing in the Asian Champions League. Imagine Tasmania doing that - getting "Tasmania" on the front of Hawthorn's shirts is one thing, but what about getting "Tasmania" in front of 100 million potential Japanese, Chinese and Koreans tourists?

And earlier on the same day:

At last, some realism in the Lets Get an A-League Side Now push. The same economic realities which deter the AFL from investing in a Tasmanian based Australian football club also deter the FFA from doing so for a national league soccer club here. The Hawthorn situation is probably about as good as that sort of sporting set up can be, our two very successful cricketing teams are in quite a different kind of set up. BTW, are those spruiking soccer because lots of foreigners play it the same people who reckon we should get rid of the "foreign Queen" ? Or that taxpayers should pay lots of their hard earned to boring but worthy Australian film and TV so that we dont have to watch "foreign" movies?

Talk about a revolution
SMH blog
31 March 2008

“Probably will not happen though because of the politics involved”, reckoned R O’Hara, 31 March 3.24 pm, explaining why a form of rugby won’t become Australia’s dominant football code.

But not “because of the politics involved”, but because of the people not involved. A family member living in Canberra once perceptively observed that while adherents of the rugbies were quite familiar with Australian Football (and utterly uninterested in soccer), people from the southern states were almost totally uninterested in either RU or RL, except for a passing glance at some international match or other. Parochial narrow-mindedness ? Not necessarily: you, see, being brought up on AFL, a game so athletic, varied and with so many chances for spectacular play, every other game seemed boringly repetitive and one-dimensional by comparison, with rules seemingly designed to limit the players’ creative spirits – the no-hands thing in soccer, the bias against kicking in the rugbies, the absolutely incomprehensible off-side rules, the gentle pace of soccer players strolling at their leisure as an “attack” (sic) builds up, to name just some. (Toss in soccer’s frequent nil-nil scores, and is it any wonder that God created soccer yobbos? And don’t start on the prevalence of bad acting, and sooking about love taps.)

No, “we the people” reared on Australia’s own game would need a collective cultural lobotomy to take up in any seriousness any of the foreign codes. (Although both Gaelic Football and America’s NFL have their moments.)

On the idea of a Tasmanian AFL team
The Mercury
27 March 2008

In reponse to the by now predictable and thoroughly boring claim about soccer being real football, two points: (i) FIFA stands for, in French, International Federation of Association Football, NOT for International Federation of Football Associations, and the significance of this important distinction should be very obvious; (ii) page 4 of the FIFA Statutes has Definition 12, which is Association Football: the game controlled by FIFA and organised in accordance with the Laws of the Game. (Of course, the full name is not used every time, which is standard practice for all organisations.) The implication here should be even more obvious — not even FIFA claims a right for sole use of the word football. Feel free to google or Wikipedia FIFA.

On Australia's bid for the World Cup
The Australian
26 February 2008

THE federal Government’s endorsement of Australia’s bidding for the 2018 soccer World Cup, prompts some stimulating questions regardless of the athletic merits of, or one’s involvement in, our four principal codes of football: Australian football, rugby union, rugby league and soccer.

First, there’ll be the reaction of those who vehemently oppose taxpayer funds going to events such as the F1 Grand Prix, the Commonwealth Games or the Tiddlywinks World Championships on the grounds that health and hospitals, schools and universities, and other infrastructure have prior call.

Next, there’s the anti-globalisation crowd’s claims that their often violent actions are justified by the danger that small nations, and their people, are losing their individual characteristics in becoming clones of big business. Will they be out there supporting an indigenous sport against the most globalised game of all?

Finally, there are our actors, who, around AFI awards time, urge governments to fork out voters’ money to save our film and TV industry from being swamped by foreign (read US) products. Could we look forward to support from the luvvies, even from the Sydney A-list, to save the game of our own from being swamped by a foreign code?

As the Nine Network’s The Footy Show slogan says, “It’s more than a game’’.

What's in a name? A lot, actually
14 September 2007

WHY a "tick for (the ABC's) Gerard Whateley" for calling a soccer ball a footy (Sporting Life, 13/9)? When Australians talk about going to the footy, or of watching the football on TV, they are overwhelmingly not referring to a soccer match.

The essence of the matter in applying the word "football" to what we've customarily called "soccer" is not whether one form of football is better, more beautiful, more manly or widespread than another. Rather, it is whether we should ditch our own language usage because lots, even millions, of foreigners tell us to, thereby adding to, or reviving, that cultural cringe which we like to think we've outgrown.

Calling the ball (a response to Lenny)
LEONARD Colquhoun (Letters, 14/9/2007), when my father arrived in Australia in the days of new Australians he found his name Giancarlo too difficult for the locals. So they decided that he should be called Charlie. He was working in a factory, trying to feed his family, in a new environment, so he never demanded that people call him by his correct name. Times have changed. So people now love to call him Giancarlo and even apologise in case they have mispronounced his name. Some older friends still call him Charlie because they find it hard to change. This doesn't offend my father, but he is happy when people call him by his correct name.

Similarly this is the reason why football (soccer) wants to be called by its correct name. It is proud of its name, and everyone knows it as such. But if you still want to call AFL football, go ahead. All we ask is for football to be called football.
Alan Contini, Princes Hill

Lenny on the proposed ‘football’ stadium
May 6, 2007

Two points are germane to this topic: (i) is a new (rectangular) stadium seating 45 to 50,000 needed on a weekly basis; and (ii) if need can be shown, who ought pay for it.

Melbourne currently has two 'footballing' clubs which use a rectangular pitch; this may increase to three if Victoria gets a SANZAR rugby union club, but it's unlikely to get any further use, unless a second A-league club is established in Melbourne, which goes against the current Sydney bias of that competition and its organisers. As for a Gaelic Football or an American Football club . . . , or (field) hockey getting a sudden surge of popular atttendance.

Melbourne Storm NRL club is very unlikely to ever average more than 15,000 a game, much less 20,000 and so their present arrangements need just a bit of added comfort.

Melbourne Victory A-league club has shown that it can play very well at the Docklands Stadium, and if that continues, maybe they can persuade Boss Collo to roll out the movable seats. Given that Victory's season and the AFL season are in opposite times of the year (mostly), surely the existence of Docklands precludes any need for yet another umpteen million dollar arena, especially if the poor bloody taxpayer is to be slugged for it.

Surely average Victorian taxpayers, no matter how they use the word 'football', would prefer hospitals which keep them alive, schools which don't have leaking roofs, trains which run on time - or even just run, and so on. A water supply would be nice, too.

Leave the days of panem et circenses with the emperor T Flavius Vespasianus in his eponymously named Flavian Amphitheatre, aka the Colosseum.

150 years of football
December 24, 2006

Melbourne Victory captain Kevin Muscat's column (17/12) has probably qualified for entry to Spindoctoring 101 with its creative repetition of his one main point that too much media reporting of soccer is about crowd behaviour. But his claims about a soccer-bashing agenda are derailed by his reference to the "enemies of football".

Most Australian soccer fans, like most sports fans anywhere, see their game as entertainment and welcome relief from the drudgery of everyday life.
But a pushy minority demand that we change our sporting habits because theirs is a globalised game, with the pejorative term "parochial" being the insult of choice for our national/indigenous code of football.

They insist that we adopt their use of the word "football" because millions of foreigners use it that way, dismissing 150 years of Australian linguistic history.

Fittingly, The Age, having just celebrated its own sesquicentenary, and The Sunday Age have honorably refused to be cowed on this matter.
When Australians talk of going to the football or watching the footy on TV, they don't have a soccer match in mind.

The "enemies of football" are those socceristas who have revived the cultural cringe and applied it to our preference for our own winter games.

2 Responses (Dec 30, 2006)

Many games of football

Leonard Colquhoun of Tasmania got his Christmas grumble in early with his correspondence (Letters, 24/12) insisting that Melbourne Victory captain and Sunday Age columnist Kevin Muscat cease describing his sport as football. To pretend that there's only one football played across Australia, and that's the Aussie Rules version, isn't true, even if Australia comprised only land south of the Murray. There are many footballs played here. None deserves exclusive use of the term.

Your readers are smart enough to work out which football is being referred to, based on the context. Whenever someone from Melbourne Storm says football, we know rugby league is being referred to. If it's a Wallaby, we know it's rugby union. If it's in an article about AFL, we know it's Aussie Rules. In stories about the football of Darren Bennett and Ben Graham, we know it's the NFL type. And whenever Muscat writes about football, we know it's association football.

Muscat and football fans are not insisting that no other sport can be called football. We only insist that football also be allowed to call itself football.

See? Not too tough to come to grips with. Even for a Tasmanian.
ALAN CLARK, Abbotsford

Hands off our game

No, Leonard Colquhoun (Letters, 24/12), "Enemies of football" is a unique and legitimate term coined by the millions of Australian fans of world football to describe those who would denigrate both them and their favourite sport. Those with their own particular agendas to peddle. With their pathetic attempts to smear the A League, Channel Nine, The Herald-Sun and 3AW have demonstrated the meaning of this term perfectly.

Kevin Muscat is spot on. And seeing the word "football" was invented for this sport back in the Middle Ages, we will call our beloved game whatever we darn well like.

If you want to call this local game played 70 per cent with your hands football, go for your life. But a recent readers' poll in The Age revealed 55 per cent supported soccer being called football. (And this before last June's World Cup, which captured the country's imagination.)
KAY FUTCHER, Kilmore

Leonard has another go at Rugby
September 1, 2006

John Ryan's suggestion to "really spend some money ... promoting RL in the southern states" assumes two things: (i) that there's anyone in the 'southern' States interested, and (ii), that there's a grass-roots network there.

Probable answers: (i) there's almost no-one. People brung up on Australian Football's spectacular athleticism find it unnecessary and/or difficult to find much enthusiasm for the foreign codes, and, no, it's not the the reverse of the almost pathological hatred one sees and hears expressed in Sydney about the 'Gay FL'. It's a combination of apathy, uninterest, ennui, indifference and pococurantism (What a ripper of a word !!).

As for (ii), whereas throughout the 'northern' States, there are many 4-club, 5-club and 6-club Australian Football competitions which, while not being to the forefront of local sporting prominence, nevertheless exist. But there are few comparable LANs for RL (or for RU, for that matter - although RU has some cachet among trendoids).

But, be all of the above as it may, it's likely that most of the bloggers to this site would agree on one thing: that when groups of Australians talk of 'going to the footy' or of 'watching the football on TV', they are 99% unlikely to be referring to a soccer game. The way that some media and other organisations are trying to impose a foreign usage of the word 'football' on us is just one more sad instance of that cultural cringe which we thought we'd grown out of.
At least most of the newspapers in the 'southern' States have not kowtowed to foreigners in the usage of the word "football".

Playing with globalised balls
November 2005

How much of what has been reported in the media, at times quite breathlessly, is a genuine new-found enthusiasm for the round-ball game, and how much of it is simply celeb cheer-leading, especially from the Sydney A-list ? And how much is a sad vestige of the old Australian cultural cringe, denigrating the game of our own because the foreign self-styled World Game must, ipso facto, be better ? — quite apart from whether the cheering was for the event rather than for the game itself. Eight years ago, 80000+ for the equivalent match at the MCG did not produce thousands, let alone tens of thousands, more spectators at NSL club v club matches.

NOVEMBER 2005: Australia’s recent success at the soccer World Cup qualifier at Sydney’s Homebush stadium, and media reports about the hype thus generated, have prompted lots of speculation about the prospects for increased soccer interest among the general population.

Forecasts range from “So what ?” at one extreme to “The end of ‘football’ as we know it” at the other.

First of all — actually, before we even get to “First of all” — a word or two about nomenclature.

This article will follow customary Australian language usage and unapologetically refer to the 11-a-side, round-ball rectangular pitch “Look Mum, No hands” game as “soccer”. North of the Murray-Murrumbidgee, which is the Aussie Rules / rugby league Mason-Dixon Line, people generally mean one or other of the two rugbys when they refer to football or “the footy”; south and west of that line, they mean Australian Football. Wherever they are, when groups of Australians talk about “going to the footy” or about “watching the footy on the TV”, they do NOT mean attending or viewing a soccer match.

The decision by some media outlets, such as the Fairfax Sydney Morning Herald, to bestow the unadjectived word “football” on soccer can evoke three main reactions. The most common, and maybe the most reasonable, is probably “Who cares ?” People who reckon we should “get with it” or “get with the strength” or “catch up with the rest of the world” would support changing the customary Australian usage of the word, while those who question why we need to adjust our language at the behest of foreigners, or to conform to foreign practice, would regard the SMH’s move as yet another example of the bad old Aussie cultural cringe*. [Some might further add: “Why be surprised that a Sydney institution kowtows to foreigners, anyway ?"] The nation’s other two broadsheets, The Australian and The Age, have stood by our traditional usage, as have both The Examiner and The Mercury. . . .

[Lenny goes on to attack the rubgy codes but at least gives a useful list of foundation moments for all forms of football - click here for more]

Stuff the world, football it ain't
February 9, 2005

It's a free country, so the local soccer authorities can call their game "football" if they wish (Sport, 8/2). Whether most of us take any notice is another matter.

The undoubted fact, pointed out by Football Federation Australia boss John O'Neill, that the round-ball code is known as "football" in most of FIFA's fiefdom is neither here nor there. That is no imperative for us to change our language usage simply because lots of foreigners use the word differently.
What's more, for at least 150 years, when Australians talked of "going to the football", they most definitely have not meant attending a soccer match.
We will decide how we will use the world "football". It is not a matter of which game is bigger or better - it is to do with our own language. The Age is to be congratulated for maintaining our traditional usages of "football" and "soccer".

Cultural Cringe makes the First XVIII?
Sunday, December 19, 2004

Early in 2005 sports journalists in general, and football writers specifically, will be faced with a language challenge - how to use the word ‘football’.
As reported in The Age of Fri 17 Dec 04, Australian soccer authorities have decided to claim ‘football’ in its unadjectived form as the way they will refer to their game. Similarly, in the Herald Sun,

It is true that, as The Age article reports, Australia is one of the few countries in the world that does not refer to soccer as ‘football’. There is no doubt that in the southern states, ‘football’ refers, both in the popular mind and in media usage, to "the game of our own", while in most of NSW and Qld, it means one of the rugby codes. These established usages have over 120 years of custom, even tradition, behind them: they are the ways we Australians as Australians have used this word.

Should football writers in particular and journalists generally maintain our Australian usage, precisely, among other reasons, because it is our usage? Should we change our language simply because lots of foreigners use the word ‘football’ differently?

In the Herald Sun article, soccer benefactor Lowy is reported as acknowledging it is a big ask to convince Australians to call soccer ‘football’. It is unlikely that Joe and Joanna Citizen will submit to this change of language simply on the say-so of a rich Sydney-sider.

The mid-20th century writer and critic, A A Phillips, coined the expression "Cultural Cringe" for our tendency at the time to consider that anything foreign and/or British must be inherently better than our own efforts.

Surely, we will decide how we use the word 'football' and the circumstances in which it is used. Why should the thousands of past and present 'footballers' from "the game of our own" have to change how they refer to their achievements? Why should Herald Sun contributor Gary Lyon have to stop saying "I played 226 games of football for the Melbourne Football Club"? And The Age’s Robert Walls have to make ‘corrections’ to, "I played 218 games of football for the Carlton Football Club"? Let’s not revive the Cultural Cringe on the football field.

For many millions of Australians "going to the footy" most decidedly does not mean attending a soccer match. Australian journalists, sports writers and commentators should be mindful how we Australians think of and talk about our games, and resist inducements to jump on yet another trendoid bandwagon.

PS: We may not like every aspect of how Americans do things, but can you imagine them changing the way they use the word "football" just because the Hispanic lobby thinks it should mean "soccer"?

A game not necessarily better if it's foreign
August 5, 2004

Ben Cubby may think he has discovered that our lack of interest in soccer equates with a lack of culture ("Knights of the round ball," Herald, August 4), but it seems to be no more than yet another example of the old Australian cultural cringe: if it's home grown, it's inferior; if it's foreign, it must be better.