Token of our appreciation artefact Wednesday - Goal Weekly mementos

For several years I was an intermittent contributor for the print edition of Goal Weekly. Indeed, most of the copies of that paper that I still have are because of the complimentary copies sent to me when I had an article printed in there. It is one of my chief regrets of the past few years that I did not stump up the cover price of three or so dollars more often than I actually did.

A couple of Christmas cards and sturdy mug from
Goal Weekly. Missing from this photo is a wooden
plaque. I've got no idea where it could be.

Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun writing for Goal Weekly. I think I got one genuine match report published in there. There were of course a smattering of book reviews, all of which you can find on the blog. I also filled in several times for Southpole's state league round-up when he couldn't do it - though there was one occasion where I botched the results of a Provisional League 2 North-West result and hoped no one would ever notice. I even watched a World Cup qualifier between Singapore and Malaysia on a dodgy internet stream, and wrote a report on that and had it published.

But my favourite things to write were the quasi-journalistic and quasi-factual news blended with opinion pieces, especially those dealing with the oncoming implementation of NPL and the furore that was causing in Victoria. How could I write such pieces without breaking my own unwritten rule of pretty much never interviewing anyone? I don't know, but I somehow made do with attending the odd information session, reading media releases and doing a lot of summing up the more reputable posts from the various forums.

Eventually this process saw the production of pieces that were way of out control, and ended up with then the FFV CEO Mitchell Murphy penning a not entirely unreasonable letter to Goal Weekly to complain about what would turn out to be my final piece for the paper. That was two years ago now, and while I have some regrets about some of the material that I ended up producing for Goal Weekly, I still had a blast providing a variety of content for what was a wonderfully ramshackle production, which gave a lot of writers a chance to learn their craft - both those who saw their work as the starting point of their journalistic vocation, and those amateurs who felt they performing a public service.

As for the artefacts, Costa from Goal Weekly had a habit of sending out these items at the end of the year, as a way of showing his appreciation for the efforts put in by his writers. I'm not one for Christmas cards and such, but the mug got a good run until the enamel/plastic label started peeling off, and it was forced to retire to a dusty corner of some built in wardrobe in West Sunshine.

Anyway, all the best to the people who'll be doing the hard yards for Victorian soccer reportage in 2016. Don't ever forget that we're clearly the most important demographic in Victorian soccer.

Social Club Artefact Wednesdays - Hobart Olympia Mug from 1986

Well, last week we did a West Adelaide themed episode for this segment's official launch - because it was all topical, like - so now we're doing the other half of the recent interstate visitor double.

I'm also quickly disregarding my pledge to use half decent photos, because frankly this is a terrible photo of an otherwise very nice commemorative object. We could have used the much better photo of the wooden plaque of Tasmania from our 1993 tour, but we'll save that for some other time.

This silver (the colour, not the metal - I wouldn't have a clue if it was legit silver) mug was presented to us during our 1986 visit to Tasmania, which you can read about on Walter Pless' site. The match was played on March 1st 1986, at KGV Park, with South winning the game 3-0. I was under the impression (honestly not sure why now), that we also played against the Tasmanian state team on that tour as well, but I must be confusing it with the 1993 tour. One question Walter's article throws up though, is what are the whereabouts of the decent sized trophy that's in several of those 1986 photos?

I also wonder what similar objects we may have gotten off previous such tours (to anywhere really, not just Tasmania), as well as our most recent trip to the Apple Isle in 2011. Hopefully we reciprocated in our own way when Hobart Olympia visited us last week.