A RECKISTORY OF FOOTBALL

 I suppose I should do a blog about my footballish-ness...so here it is

Well to start with, I am from Dutch descent, both my dad and uncle played constantly when they were young, my uncle even played with MVV in the late 50's early 60's, I actually got the chance to take in a MVV  v Go Ahead Eagles game back in 2007, MVV are a solid ist division mid-table team who have gone broke 3 times but managed to stick around, oh yeah and I got a bit of a liking for Feyenoord in the Dutch comp, don't tell my uncle he'll kick me up the bum...

Anyway back to soccer and me, I didn't play that much due to the fact that i stopped growing when i was 12 and i dislocated my neck in year 8 so sport was shelved for a while...

I guess, I really became aware of soccer, football, the world game, whatever you want to call it, back in 1969, ABC or channel 2 as we call it out here, use to play the second half of the main game of the round from England, this particular saturday avo I had the great pleasure to watch Manchester United play Queens Park Rangers, the thing about this game was the fact that Dennis Law, Bobby Charlton and Georgie Best were playing and between the 3 of them they decimated QPR..what chance did I have, i ended up a Man U fan and still am till this day,

 also around this time the tele also had on the German game of the week, and I discovered my passion for Borussia Dortmund, although Borussia Munchengladbach tickled my fancy, and I got to see Gunter Netzer run around, now that bloke was no slouch for sure, back to BMG,  i couldnt believe a team name could be that long, and to this day I prefer the Bundesliga to the Seire A or La Liga...people say I'm football neanderthal but who gives a.....

Now to the local stuff...I seem to remember going to watch game's with the old man to watch Pan-Hellenic, which I though was weird since they were greek and we were dutch, I thought he'd find a dutch team to follow...ANYWAY...Pan Hellenic became Sydney Olympic and I consequently spent  some of my time at Belmore Oval watching the Bulldogs ( well, the family were fans of knuckle draggers, as was I at the time) or watching Olympic go around ....I really wasn't going to too many games, as I was a bit of a music fan and i wasnt getting home till 4 am after watching Rose tattoo or the angels or Aussie crawl or whoever....I went to a few games but not as many as i did when i was under the legal drinking age ;).

But I do remember Francis Awaritefe running around Belmore Oval on balmy winter nights with that god awful blond dye job he had, I must admit to having a bit of a liking for Wollongong Wolves around this time, i even got the train down once or twice to watch them, I also enjoyed watching Cosmos go around as well, and arguably, my all time fave team, South Melbourne with Paul Trimboli in the ranks...geez they were good.

So time go's by and I lose track with the local stuff after moving up to Lismore
then after a bit I moved to Brisbane and got to watch the Strikers go around against whoever came to town, Strikers had current Hearts keeper Clint Bolton in the side, he played 23 or so games for them, they also had Rod Brown, Frank Farina and probabaly my favourtie name for a player ever DANNY INVINCIBLE...sounds like a pro wrestler dont he ...I had the good fortune to go to the Grand Final between Strikers and Sydney United when Rod Brown and Frank farina scored the winning goals...anyway, all this while I was watching Manchester United on Austar and luckily got to see Eric Cantona, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Mark Hughes, Paul Scholes,  Ole Gunnar Solskajaer and the might viking, Peter Schmicael blocking the net.

the NSL finished up and I thought well, thats that, NRL and AFL are ruling the airwaves, no local soccer product is gonna get a fair go now,....how wrong was I, before we knew it The Hyundai A-League was announced and the bigger bonus, Gosford (where I live) was getting its own team, took the young fella to the pre-season cup games before the first season kicked off, and was immediately hooked by Andre Gumprecht, Wayne Sullivan, Kwasi and Hutcho, been to 99% of home games since and dont look like stopping anytime soon.