By Phil Dimitriadis The gut holds our emotions, our food, our poisons, our hopes and our fears. We get inspired by those who show guts, but do we get gutted too easily when things don’t go our way? Jimmy’s dead. Wounds are raw and words are plenty. He reached out and people are reaching [Read more]
Politics, power and emotion in The Club
March 14, 2012 by 14 Comments
by Phil Dimitriadis Club politics do not always sit comfortably with the ideas of the coach and his methods of disciplining errant players. In The Club, prize recruit Geoff Hayward is a protected species according to President Ted Parker because he paid an extra ten thousand dollars out of his own pocket to ensure that [Read more]
Loyalty and Symbolism in The Club
March 7, 2012 by 12 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis The Club by David Williamson examines the political machinations of a failing football club and the power plays of its traditional and emerging stakeholders. The play challenges the hero myth and teamwork ethic that seems prevalent in the celebratory publications. It is a play about relationships and their vulnerability as the club [Read more]
Ancient Myths – Local Heroes
February 29, 2012 by 16 Comments
by Phil Dimitriadis Where does Australian Rules football, derive its imperative ideologies? What disciplines or beliefs drive the allegory of the sport? It is here that Biblical comparisons and Greek mythology might come into play. Hero mythology is derived from these two ideologies because of their influence on the moral fabric of language in [Read more]
Bomber Return
December 20, 2011 by 8 Comments
Essendon versus Geelong – 7.10pm, Saturday, 2 July – Docklands Stadium by Phil Dimitriadis Geelong fans were treated with contempt by Mark Thompson last year. The brooding surliness and lack of respect he showed extracted understandable displays of righteous anger from the Cat’s faithful. Yet he coached them to a drought-breaking premiership and [Read more]
Ode to a Magpie
October 11, 2011 by 8 Comments
This anonymous poem was handed to my cousin John Scopas by an old Collingwood fan. He passed it on to me in the hope that it will get a run on the site and that we may yet find the author. I have cleaned up a fair bit of punctuation (written by a Collingwood [Read more]
Old Unwelcome Memories
October 2, 2011 by 13 Comments
Collingwood v Geelong Grand Final 2011 By Phil Dimitriadis Nothing ends well that starts with a Meat Loaf ‘Kiss’. The omens were there from the beginning and I chose to ignore them. Even as a seven year old the lyrics of ‘Hot Summer Night’: “You took the words right out of my mouth” had [Read more]
The Recurring Dream
July 29, 2011 by 13 Comments
Every once in a while I have this dream. It is April 1990. The light is always the same. The last waves of summer have passed but there is still enough warmth to obfuscate the chill in the air. Footy season has commenced with its majestic ephemera and hyperbole. I’m part of a team. [Read more]
Daisy Cutter
July 12, 2011 by 5 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis DAISY CUTTER This term denotes a sense of speed and precision that is both metaphorical and absurd because daisies aren’t allowed to grow on football fields. If they did the studded boots of the forty-four competing players would soon tread on them. Nevertheless, the ‘daisy cutter’ evokes a feeling that a [Read more]
The Symbolic Dissemination of a High Mark
May 25, 2011 by 7 Comments
by Phil Dimitriadis Symbolism and rhetoric find their place in football discourse through the power of language and the images it projects. For example, the sometimes gravity defying elements of a ‘high mark’ have been theatrically rhetoricised over the years from ‘great mark’ to ‘a screamer’ to ‘a ripper’ to ‘a hanger’ to ‘mark [Read more]
Classic Passages:The Best of the Footy Almanac
May 19, 2011 by 3 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis Rounds 2 and 3, 2007 “A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. So the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.” Umberto [Read more]
Classic Passages 1: The Best of the Footy Almanac
May 12, 2011 by 4 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis “Everybody knows that you live forever, when you’ve done a line or two” Leonard Cohen The Footy Almanac is now into its fifth year. Many things have changed since early 2007, some have stayed the same. One constant has been the inspired, prophetic, deluded and passionate pieces that come from the writers [Read more]
The Language of Football: A Barthesian Perspective
March 23, 2011 by 15 Comments
by Phil Dimitriadis At this time of year conversation turns to footy in earnest and in jest. We take it for granted in Melbourne, reasoning that it has always been part of our cultural communication. It really is a language spawned by the game that intends to be a portal of inclusion and connection. Generally, [Read more]
Up There Cazaly and The Myth of Icarus
March 7, 2011 by 22 Comments
Phil Dimitriadis presented this paper at the 150 Years of Australian Football Conference: Up There Cazaly and The Myth of Icarus: An exploration into the narrative of freedom and failure in Australian Rules football. This is the abstract. [Interesting – wish I heard it. JTH]
Wrestle with this
January 26, 2011 by 3 Comments
by Phil Dimitriadis I’ve noticed that there are some not so ‘closet’ wrestling fans on the Almanac site. I found this excellent article (click on the link below) that is well worth a read, particularly for its focus on the history of Wrestling in Australia. I will write a follow up soon on the symbolism, [Read more]
The Loneliest Footballers
October 20, 2010 by 26 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis After chatting with Andrew Gigacz about football tragedies and the 2010 Footy Almanac cover, the 2008 Footy Almanac engaged my attention in a way it hadn’t done before. Jim Pavlidis’ perceptive painting captured the loneliness of Matthew Richardson the footballer. The crowd is a blur, there are no teammates or fanfare and [Read more]
Book Review: This Sporting Life
October 16, 2010 by 10 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis One of the early fictional accounts of a footballer’s life was This Sporting Life by David Storey. This work examines the contradictions and paradoxes that affect a footballer’s career directly and vicariously through the actions and attitudes of those involved with the main character, named Arthur Machin. Machin works at the factory [Read more]
150 Years and No Gay Footballer? That’s Queer.
May 22, 2010 by 6 Comments
By Phil Dimitriadis In almost one hundred and fifty years, there is no explicit history about a homosexual Australian Rules player at the highest level. This does not reflect the cultural realities of the society that plays and watches the game. If ten percent of the population were gay then out of the six hundred [Read more]
Book Review: All praise to exploration of Ablett enigma
February 19, 2010 by 6 Comments
Book: Playing God: The Rise and Fall of Gary Ablett Writer: Garry Linnell Publication: HarperCollins, 2003 Reviewer: Phillip Dimitriadis Some may consider Garry Linnell’s book, Playing God: The Rise and Fall of Gary Ablett to be a work of fact-based, journalistic non-fiction. It is an unauthorised biography that at times has an unnerving mix of [Read more]
Footy’s Coming
February 8, 2010 by 5 Comments
Footy’s Coming To the tune of Johnny Cash’s ‘Busted’ By Phil Dimitriadis Cricket and tennis aren’t my kind of drugs. Hauritz and Federer don’t inspire group hugs. Footy’s Coming. Serena took off, along with her bling. Caro and Wallsy are still hibernating. But,Footy’s coming. My daughter brought home a boy from school. I got sunstroke, [Read more]
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