Football research in Australia has progressed in leaps and bounds during the last decade. Postgraduate work on all the major codes is taking place in various disciplines across the tertiary sector, some undergraduate subjects are now devoted entirely to football studies, and cash prizes are awarded in an annual football history essay-writing competition conducted by Victoria University and the Victorian Amateur Football Association.
In many ways, the contents of Football Fever: Crossing Boundaries represents just the tip of the iceberg in terms of current football research. The previous volume in this series, Football Fever: Grassroots, had a rather limited focus in that all the chapters dealt exclusively with Australian Rules football. But a subsequent Football Fever conference, hosted by Victoria University in July 2004, generated papers that not only dealt with a number of codes, but that also encompassed a diverse range of disciplines and methodologies, with speakers often leavening their research with international comparisons.
This anthology thus represents a sample of that research and includes several landmark chapters, notably a definitive work on the origins of Australian Rules football, an investigation of the remarkable proposal to merge two different codes, no less than three chapters that reflect the challenges facing soccer in Australia, and some important commentaries on the media exposure associated with players, spectators and administrators. Arranged in a loose chronological order, the chapters allow the reader to either traverse the histories of the codes, or to follow a particular theme. All major codes in Australia are discussed and a number of previously unpublished photographs are featured throughout the text.
Football Fever: Crossing Boundaries is edited by Rob Hess, Matthew Nicholson and Bob Stewart, from the Football Studies Unit in the School of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance at Victoria University.
Football Fever: Crossing Boundaries
Edited by Rob Hess, Matthew Nicholson and Bob Stewart
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Rob Hess
Crossing Boundaries in Football Research
Chapter 2
Gregory de Moore
Tom Wills, Marngrook and the Evolution of Australian Football
Chapter 3
Nick Guoth
Kindred Sports: Rugby Unions Involvement with the 1922 Australian Soccer Tour
Chapter 4
Tony Collins
One Common Code of Football for Australia!: The Australian Rules and Rugby League Merger Proposal of 1933
Chapter 5
Dave Nadel
A League of His Own: John Elliott and Ian Collins Vision of National Football
Chapter 6
Matthew Nicholson and Bob Stewart
Sports Writing Modes During Football Crisis Events
Chapter 7
Geoff Dickson, Danny OBrien and Laura Cousens
Warming the Bench: The Exclusion of Pacific Island Rugby from an Expanded Super 12 and Tri-Nations Competition
Chapter 8
Hans Westerbeek and Aaron Smith
Australian Amateur Soccer and Ethnicity: Cross-Cultural Marketing Challenges in One Country
Chapter 9
Julie Foreman
Corporate Governance Issues in Global Sport: A Comparison of Governance Issues in the Australian Football League and the English Premier League
Chapter 10
Braham Dabscheck
Unions and the Embrace of Partnership: The Case of Australian Soccer
Chapter 11
Russell Hoye and Matthew Nicholson
Contextual Factors Associated with Poor Spectator Behaviour in Football: An Exploratory Study
Chapter 12
Ian Warren
Footballers, Culture and Sexual Assault
Chapter 13
Stephen Alomes
The Barbarian Invasion: The Battle Against the Sydneyfication of the ABC Sports News
Chapter 14
Jack Frawley
