AFLW Round 1 – St Kilda v Western Bulldogs: Moorabbin reflections, past and present

Things have changed at Moorabbin since Stephanie Holt first started watching footy there. Now with her footy mate and daughter she reflects on times past and times present with the Saints great AFLW Round 1 win against the Western Bulldogs.

Footy Town: Kick like a girl, score like a lady

Enjoy an excerpt from Stephanie Holt’s Footy Town essay on her year with the Boston Lady Demons in the US. Highly recommended.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot”

June 30, MIT Fields Boston Australian Rules tournament   As Melbourne sank into a slough of perfect footy weather  – cold, wet, unpredictable – we were sheltering from the smarting sunshine and exhausting humidity of a Boston heatwave, elbow-deep in boxes and bags and bubblewrap, packing away a year-long expat adventure. We’d recently discovered that [Read more]

Aussie Rules in the home of American Heroics

USAFL Philadelphia Tournament Women’s match: Boston/Montreal vs New York/Baltimore/Ontario Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park Saturday May 19 If the city of Philadelphia were an AFL team, I guess it would have to be Fremantle. Philly’s an easy place to like, an unpretentious hybrid of blue-collar and bohemian that spurns efforts to get too slick, prefering to [Read more]

It’s footy, Jim, but not as we know it

(AFL Quebec Preseason Cup: Concordia University, Loyola Campus, Montreal, Saturday April 28) A few things I’d never encountered in over 40 years of footy-going: snow en route to a game; a bagpipe medley of Advance Australia Fair and Waltzing Matilda; a rule forbidding goals kicked from beyond the 30-yard line; a field of artificial turf; [Read more]

That which I most feared has come to pass.

By Stephanie Holt For 43 years I’ve had one dream – or, at least, one that’s endured unchanged. A St Kilda premiership. And for almost as long, I’ve had one dread. Meeting Collingwood in a Grand Final. There are two ways to rewrite the script of ’66, and only one bears contemplating. It doesn’t help [Read more]