Playing long balls into empty space since 2012.

Thursday 10 October 2019

IYKYH 10/10/19

I want to start with a shout out.

It's my mother's birthday today. Happy birthday mum! She's 82 and yesterday I had my first sensible conversation with her in nearly a year. The dementia seems not to have had as deep a hold as we had thought. Fingers crossed for more improvement.

Notes and clean up
1. Mark Boric Express
2. Mark Boric and the Alec Barr incident.
On Tuesday, Fairfax published a sokkahriotz piece written by Alec Barr from 1960. On the piece's 59th anniversary. #sokkahtwitter went nuts of course (with some justification imho). Vince Rugari morphed into contrarian mode and it was hitting the fan. 
I made the point that while we complain about soccer history missing from the papers we probably didn't mean this kind of history. I'm happy to cop the bad stories as long as the good get a run as well.
Boric on Alec Barr https://melbournesoccer.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-search-of.html
Twitter thread https://twitter.com/MarkBoric/status/1181474386190032896
He was also jailed for killing a couple of pedestrians with his car in a tram zone.
Mark's important point was made in another tweet:

[Barr] would have liked the A-league model and loved Victory having a Scottish song. But in his constant highlighting of every single incident of trouble brought on by the temperamental/volatile immigrants he is also responsible for the stigma that still remains against the game. 
While we accept that such historical pieces need to be resurrected from time to time, we need also to acknowledge that the conditions in which they were written and published were skewed by prejudice and bias.
3. Paul Nicholls has made a call for the FA trophy to be resurrected as the trophy for the proposed second division https://www.theroar.com.au/2019/10/10/a-trophy-tailor-made-for-a-national-second-division/

4. Moment of frivoility
Andrew Urry: The prize is that you get announced on @ifyouknowyourh2 tonight as a gentleman of wit, wisdom and observational excellence. OK?

5. Paul's map.

6. A more important tweet was the following:
This makes me sad for two reasons: 1) Joe has dumped soccer and 2) people who think he hated wogball clearly haven't read this. The Forgotten Story of ... South Melbourne and Middle Park
Since Monday evening, over 15,000 impressions and 660 engagements. It's the third most engaged tweet I've ever made. 
(The second was a promo for my appearance on Foxtel and the first was a stern response to an Irish journo who said something quite silly about a passage of play in Gaelic football match)
The response speaks to the importance of Joe Gorman as a writer and journalist and the extent to which the game has lost an important figure, one who was able to create "mythology based on fact", something the game still cries out for.

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