MATCHDAY - New publication · Yellow Fever Ngā Wana Kōwhai

Football fans – I hope nobody minds me posting this here (I did file a request with the website some days ago but received no response) but now available for purchase is:

MATCHDAY: An eclectic anthology of 40 Waikato United, Waikato FC, WaiBOP United & Melville United match reports.

It is being sold in PDF format for $10 via email [email protected] or website www.matchdayanthology.weebly.com

I appreciate that a publication such as this is going to have limited traction outside the 3206 postcode.

But there are universal constants to be found at the intersection of football and literature that may interest other football fans.

This anthology is a celebration of the dying art of the football match report, with a cross section of examples from my own back catalogue (1992-2019).

It starts with a report from a 1992 Chatham Cup semifinal - and finishes with a report from a 2019 Chatham Cup semifinal.

The humble match report used to be the bread and butter of football fandom for generations.

But these days daily and weekly publications, and even online and social media, have increasingly abandoned the written report in any guise.

While the anthology has a handful of reports which were printed in newspapers, many more examples were originally published in fanzines, blogsites, or club programmes

In that regard they owe much to the style of writing that emerged in the new wave of football fanzines that erupted around the western world in the early 1990s.

Here match reports tended to be passionate, zany, exuberant, impudent, and commonly as unbalanced or disrespectful as the audience they were pitched at.

Read them at your peril. Even many years on, there is every prospect of readers being offended or outraged by the observations within.

So as not to confuse the point of the anthology, while there are some heroic wins recorded here, other matches covered were absolutely dire.

Inept losses, frustrating draws and lucky escapes are highlighted almost as much as stirring victories.

Anyway, over to you...