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Games Goals Glory: The A-League's Teams, Players, Coaches and Greatest Moments
In eleven short years Australias A-League has become one of the most competitive and enertaining sports in this country. It is producing great games, great goals, great players and the most committed fans of any sport. In 2016 any one of five teams could have won the premiership with only two rounds to play and six were realistic chances of playing off in the grand final. Ten of the games best writers have come together to produce this companion to the A-League, taking a critical and entertaining look at the stories of the first eleven seasons as well as the future for the A-League. This is an essential book for all A-League fans and those who have only just discovered what Australias national football league is all about. In this beautifully presented full colour book, readers will discover the stars, coaches, memorable games a compendium of the best and the greatest.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2016
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April 5, 2021
This is a messy, inchoate, spasmodically informative dog's breakfast of a book that is supposed to celebrate the first 10 years of Australia's A-League. Instead of hitting this goal it is more like a Nikolai Topor-Stanley punt over the woodwork, ending in Row ZZZ at Newcastle Stadium.
What could have been (or perhaps more importantly should have been) the approach of the editors and publishers of this text was a club-based or chronological analysis of the A-League. Instead the ill-fitted gang of contributors throw in anecdotes, memories, recondite yarns and semi-articulate history that are accompanied with plenty of glossy but also dull images. Instead of getting a cohesive understanding of what transpired during the first ten seasons of the premier Australian professional football competition the reader is left with a grab bag of hyperbole and bland prose.
It must be said that the format of the book is probably the reason for this; a more serious and eruidte publisher would've done much better. If one wants to understand the history of Australian soccer then the preferred paradigms should be something like Joe Gorman's 'Death and Life of Australian Soccer', not this tosh that is perhaps designed to appeal to the same non-sokkah compliant audience that has been chased by those in charge of the game for too many years. It's to be noted that Gorman is given the opportunity to contribute to this text, however his words are drastically outnumbered by the verbose meaningless screeds of Andy Harper.
I also have a gripe about this book insofar as it is dominated by the narratives around a select few clubs, i.e. Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory. Other clubs get a mention however these two clubs are the focus of somewhere around 25-35% of the content. These two entities allow those who write about them to send forth great paroxysms of praise, leaving other clubs' histories to be minimised if not ignored. And for whatever reason the only club to ever win the Asian Champions League, the Western Sydney Wanderers, is spoken of more as an afterthought, barely surpassing the likes of North Queensland Fury or the New Zealand Knights for column space.
Bottom line; if you love Australian football/soccer history and want a satisfying, perceptive, challenging, provocative tome on how the A-League developed over its first decade of its existence this is not it. Hopefully someone else does a far better job for the 20th anniversary...
What could have been (or perhaps more importantly should have been) the approach of the editors and publishers of this text was a club-based or chronological analysis of the A-League. Instead the ill-fitted gang of contributors throw in anecdotes, memories, recondite yarns and semi-articulate history that are accompanied with plenty of glossy but also dull images. Instead of getting a cohesive understanding of what transpired during the first ten seasons of the premier Australian professional football competition the reader is left with a grab bag of hyperbole and bland prose.
It must be said that the format of the book is probably the reason for this; a more serious and eruidte publisher would've done much better. If one wants to understand the history of Australian soccer then the preferred paradigms should be something like Joe Gorman's 'Death and Life of Australian Soccer', not this tosh that is perhaps designed to appeal to the same non-sokkah compliant audience that has been chased by those in charge of the game for too many years. It's to be noted that Gorman is given the opportunity to contribute to this text, however his words are drastically outnumbered by the verbose meaningless screeds of Andy Harper.
I also have a gripe about this book insofar as it is dominated by the narratives around a select few clubs, i.e. Sydney FC and Melbourne Victory. Other clubs get a mention however these two clubs are the focus of somewhere around 25-35% of the content. These two entities allow those who write about them to send forth great paroxysms of praise, leaving other clubs' histories to be minimised if not ignored. And for whatever reason the only club to ever win the Asian Champions League, the Western Sydney Wanderers, is spoken of more as an afterthought, barely surpassing the likes of North Queensland Fury or the New Zealand Knights for column space.
Bottom line; if you love Australian football/soccer history and want a satisfying, perceptive, challenging, provocative tome on how the A-League developed over its first decade of its existence this is not it. Hopefully someone else does a far better job for the 20th anniversary...
Displaying 1 of 1 review