Return of the blog

FanFooty began as an idea in December of 2004, which is a bloody long time ago. I didn’t think I would still be doing it at this age – I turn 50 this year – and the site has been sliding a bit the last few years over COVID, as I would be the first to admit.

Nevertheless I am going to try to add a few new things in 2023, one of which is a feature I have daydreamed about doing for many years now: a weekly wrap column. Now, I fully realise that the market for footy hot takes is fairly saturated at the moment, both from professionals and amateurs. I am somewhere in between, having been trained as a journalist but letting my skills in this area largely lay fallow for a decade or more. Part of the reason that I dropped the blog in the first place was that it was taking 50% of my time for a handful of percent of the traffic of the site. I would expect this to still be the case, but perhaps I can sustain interest in it for other reasons than purely commercial.

Specifically, I would be doing it for two reasons. First, I greatly enjoyed the format of Gregg Easterbrooks’ old Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns, which interspersed NFL analysis with a polymath’s interest in any and every other subject that came up during the week. Gregg would make sure he had something interesting to say about every game, and plenty of other things besides. You would be entertained and sometimes educated along the way, in a very pleasing mix for the discerning reader. If I could produce something half as good as what he used to roll out, I would be a very contented writer.

Second, I also used to enjoy reading the old Melbourne Times newspaper back when I was at university in the late 1990s, and they had a page or two devoted to fan articles including what they called the Inner Melbourne Football Cup. This centred around a modified ladder where bonus points were awarded for big rivalry wins, especially if the win caused negative press about the opposition during the week. If you could get the opposing coach under pressure for his job or even sacked there were big premiership points on offer, such that the overall winner often wasn’t the best team! That was a lot of fun to read, and I would like to exhume that feature as a set piece in a weekly column.

The old TMQ columns would run to 10,000 words or more every week which sounds like a heap of work, but once you start on something like this I can understand how it can grow into something monstrous. Gregg was also a past master at running gags, something which I also enjoy greatly.

Back in my former life as a technology journo I moved gradually away from hard news and towards feature writing and columns, and I think that is where my strengths lie as a writer. Having been online from the heights of Usenet newsgroups through to the modern obsession with short-form content, I hope I can coalesce all of that into something worth reading every week this AFL season. I can’t promise it will be good, but I will try to try hard.