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.