As of sometime in the middle of April, this blog has it’s birthday. It’s now come and gone, we’ve got a fancy new logo (thanks Jack) and got to put out plenty of blogs about the Matildas the week of and surrounding our anniversary. Now that the dust is settling, with the Asian Cup over, it’s time to give you the blog I’ve had planned for a while now. A post about how this blog came to be. So hope you enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed blogging this past year, and hears to more rants, Sleepy Observations, Prediction Thursdays and Match Day Mondays.
To Mum and for the love of footy.
You know how some conversations and ideas are best had during a long car drive? Well that’s how Mollys Footy Rants came to be. I was driving out to Cygnet with my Mum because I was going to be spending the weekend with her. We were talking, as you do during a car trip that’ll clock you an hour of windy, hilly driving. My memory is slightly hazy with how the conversation went, but it was important and its outcome was me figuring out WordPress, thinking up a name (my mum also decided on that because I’m useless with thinking up names) and writing, then publishing my first blog on Mollys Footy Rants.
My car conversation had two main points, I do remember that much. A lot like a good university lecture where you remember the two key points. One, I was definitely talking about soccer. The second I was having the age old crisis of having no idea what I was doing in life, and whilst having come back home to Hobart to finish the last two years of my law degree (now my last year, I’ll wait for the applause…), I was still flaming useless and just didn’t feel like I could pin down what I wanted to do, within the grand scheme kind of stuff. At this point my mum turns up with some of her genius, motherly wisdom. It went along the lines of, Jed’s got music, Jack’s got writing/art and you’ve got soccer. So you see how they’re doing things with their passion? You have permission to pursue yours. (Jed and Jack are my brothers, no just some randoms my mum uses for examples during life crises)
What was the product of that conversation you ask? Unfortunately it wasn’t dropping out of uni to try and make it as a professional soccer player. I’m self aware and know aiming for a Matildas spot for France 2019 is probably a bit too far reaching, and seriously I don’t want to train THAT hard. A product of this epiphany was for some more talk about soccer, my Mum rolling her eyes, tuning out while I babbled about soccer and telling me to write it down in a blog.
I hadn’t thought about writing a blog. What would I write about? Would anyone read it? Would I want to read it? In fact I can still remember my first attempt at writing a soccer match report. I was in grade 6, we were told to write a page length match report on the school game we had just played that week. Let’s just say this, writing and I have never been love at first sight, even with the freedom to write about soccer. I couldn’t even reach the page length required, instead I merely adjusted the font size to make my writing fit the page. It wasn’t a complete fail, but it didn’t have me thinking I would be sitting here 12 or so years later with a blog that I flipping love writing.
Had you asked my 12 year old self whether I could one day spend a W-League season writing two blog posts a week, I would said that’s ridiculous and writing that much feels would surely be awful. But I would like to think I’m making that soccer-crazy 12 year old happy. Pretty sure if she got to ask present me a question, it would be along the lines of “are we still loving soccer?”, and I can confidently say yeah. It wasn’t always in the most straightforward of ways, and how we are involved with the game has changed a lot. I would tell her, you know how we read all those soccer posts every night when it’s our turn on the family computer? Now we’re starting to write them mate. It’s good.
So it’s a year of blogging. A huge thanks to my Mum, for all the eye rolls, listening to me rant and rave about soccer and for encouraging me to do something with my passion by writing this blog. You’ve help make both me and 12 year old me absolutely stoked and excited for what’s next.
MOLLY'S FOOTY RANTS 