Why I took a break from Australian football - Part 3: Personal struggles

In parts four and five of this series, I plan to delve deeper into some of the issues with the discourse surrounding Australian football that I thought critically about during my absence from the game. But as you can imagine, I've found that writing is one of the best forms of therapy, not just in parts one and two but in my life generally. So today, I want to talk more about what my absence entailed and how I felt during it, with some feelings that I'm sure many would think are applicable beyond just the world of Australian football.

What did taking myself out of the landscape to explore other hobbies and interests look like? From memory, the last game that I seriously watched (you know, was locked in) of the 2024/25 season was when Adelaide lost 3-2 at home to Sydney FC (btw how on earth did that Adelaide team make the Finals Series).

Anyway, reflecting on it now, it's evident that it was partly due to my university studies, as I touched on in part one. But there was also this general frustration and inclination that whatever I was doing didn't feel like it was progressing my life.

This past season, until April, I effectively ran myself into the ground, trying to keep up with as many aspects of Australian football as possible. A big part of that was attempting to watch every A-League game live, and when I couldn't, I'd either wake up the next day or stay up late at night watching replays. While we're circling the topic of sleep, I cannot stress enough the importance of getting your body clock in order. Shit does some severe damage when over three days, you're going to bed at 10pm, 12am, then 2am. The inverse will do the same damage.

But—and I don't know if we all have this—there was this internal pressure to ensure I was across everything: games, press conferences, shows, articles. And when I didn't watch a game, press conference, show, or read an article, I felt anxious, as if I was falling behind everyone else because I wasn't up to date with the news surrounding the game. It's harder to do this with the landscape offering little content, and even locating it can be challenging.

Maybe it's this internal voice that kept telling me, "Hey, if you want to make this a career, you need to show everyone that you know all the ins and outs of this sport", which, as I write that out, seems like a crazy amount of pressure. In addition, there is the pressure that you won't achieve what you want if you don't throw yourself into everything.

So yeah, watching every game, listening to pressers/shows when I went on walks in the morning or was driving, and then the real force multiplier of that stress and anxiety: running pretty much everything here at Front Page Football with the feeling that many are dependent on me. Oh, and all of this while completing the final year of my degree. It's actually kind of insane how I didn't take a step back way earlier.

Some people might be reading this and think, "Far out, it's just a hobby, you're not getting paid, why make such a fuss?" Part one goes into greater detail about the background behind why, but when I first relaunched FPF in 2020, the start felt very much like a hobby.

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You can read Part 1 of this series here: Why I took a break from Australian football - Part 1: For the love of the game

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I was still working in hospitality then, and there were times a couple of years in when I was enjoying how we were progressing so much that I'd come home from a night shift that finished around 9pm, have a shower, and then sit down and edit articles or whatever needed to be done for the platform until probably 2am or 3am. And I wasn't tired; I was just doing it because I loved it.

I guess that's the critical word right there. I did love that time, but unfortunately, we can't trick our brains; over time, they get too tired and demotivated to keep up with such an absurd schedule. Before you know it, your passion for the things you love starts to wilt.

What also starts to happen is that even just thinking makes you tired. I remember when I went on holiday to America from December 2023 to January 2024, and it genuinely felt like the first time I gave my brain a proper rest in three or so years. Honestly, I think how good it felt to experience that harmed my work cycle when I returned because I kept trying to regain that feeling of rest.

So, I laboured and tried to find various things to use as sources of motivation that would sustain me daily. I'd have two-week stretches where everything was going great, and then one day, I hit that metaphoric wall and came crashing down. The following two weeks, I was labouring again. It became what felt like a never-ending cycle.

Before this most recent football 'detox' if you will, there were a couple of, I guess, 'incidents' in the Australian football space (not bad or anything, just things that dampened my mood) that tipped me over the edge when coupled with a growing amount of university work. One day, I just woke up, and human nature took over. This is too much, and it's making me angry. It's time to stop.

The fundamental feelings that developed and probably gradually built up over five years were a lack of motivation and the uncertainty that I felt lay ahead for my career aspirations.

The eventual lack of motivation towards covering or even talking about this sport stems from the persistent lows outweighing the occasional highs. The Socceroos would go on an incredible World Cup run, then the APL made one of the worst administrative decisions we've seen in the game's history. The Matildas did well in a successful, transformative home World Cup, and we're sitting here almost two years later with a whole bunch of infrastructure barriers still harming the women's game at a grassroots level. Whenever there were highs, they were not only followed by lows but the lows were scattered like I was being stabbed five or six times with a knife every six months.

And these aren't lows like the Socceroos or Matildas losing a crucial game; that's football and will always happen. No, these are existential lows where, without the proper ability to emotionally regulate your reaction, it can feel like each negative headline or announcement means the game is nosediving into oblivion.

Eventually, when you think of something like the Women's World Cup not having an impact to the level we all desired (at least to the degree that I don't think anyone can really argue they are satisfied with it yet), you just think, "If something like this can't have the desired impact, then what the fuck is the point?"

That's just an isolated example; of course, I'm talking about a build-up of things. Before my break, I heard about people who have been in this landscape for decades still having to scratch and claw their way for opportunities. Heard about volunteers at the grassroots level becoming so apathetic towards the system that it has sapped all their energy and passion for progressing their clubs. These things add up, and you eventually allow the negative thoughts to overcome and, I guess, 'win.'

It led me to those growing feelings of, "This game really isn't going anywhere" and "I can't believe I live in the one country where I probably can't be a football journalist or work in football media." The victim mentality became rife.

And so I just totally excommunicated myself from all of it for a bit, probably with two intentions: a) let's see what life is like without it, and b) there's a good chance whatever path I'm on might not involve it, so it's best to start dabbling into some other areas. While many felt excited by a nail-biting top-six race, the start of NPL seasons, a surprise A-League Women champion, or the eventual showpiece event of a Melbourne Derby Grand Final, I was unmoved, just in that state where no news could pick me back up off the canvas and get me even talking about Australian football again.

I stopped even talking to everyone involved at FPF for extended periods. And it certainly wasn't meant rudely; it was more about just speaking or thinking about Australian football exacerbating those feelings of fatigue and frustration. For the first time in my life, football, in general, became something I wasn't interested in. No Chelsea, A-League, or NPL games. No articles. No shows. No podcasts.

A lot of my days, while growing ever anxious and suffering increased procrastination towards university work, involved waking up late, having a shower, and then just sitting around avoiding my assignments while feeling too low to socialise or even wanting to discover anything new. I didn't even want to binge-watch TV shows, including my familiar favourites. Didn't want to talk to close or extended family.

All I wanted to do was sleep, close my eyes and ignore everything. One day, I was supposed to go to two university classes. Instead, I skipped them, spending my morning walking around at a conservation park near my house. My afternoon then involved going to a beach, walking along the sand, and listening to slow Adele songs. Unsurprisingly, my previous depression had resurfaced, and this time at probably a more severe level. I didn't shut off sports altogether, though. That would be even more catastrophic for me.

During this time, I threw myself more into supporting the Crows (who thankfully have got their shit together) and, more importantly, basketball. Anyone who has read the first two parts or knows me might think, "Wait, what? Since when does he like basketball?" Since 2021, it's undoubtedly become my second favourite sport.

I've become a pretty fanatic Boston Celtics supporter. I was lucky enough when I went to America to watch them twice in person, and even luckier last year to watch them win a championship. During that dark April-May period, they were chasing a repeat while I was struggling to have adequate satisfaction towards life; maybe my passion grew for them even more because their back-to-back push became the one thing at that point that I still believed in. And it's like I needed it to happen so I could believe in everything else again. If you ever feel like this about your sports teams, something is not right in your life.

Ultimately they were knocked out (fuck the Knicks), which ironically made it easier for me to focus on university without that absorbing most of my waking minutes. But seeing them lose, a team I felt would win again, also gave me a much-needed reality check.

Anyone reading this who also follows the NBA will know that while the Celtics in modern history haven't been the most successful, they still hold the most championships. More importantly, as an organisation, they were arguably pioneers for civil rights in American basketball. For example, being the first organisation to draft an African-American player. Then there's the legendary Bill Russell, whose resume in activism speaks for itself. Whenever you read about Russell, you get this feeling that he hated the city, which has had its fair share of history with racial issues. But he loved the organisation and his teammates.

That made supporting the Celtics a huge salvation during a dark period of my life. Just an organisation with proper, morally right values that you are drawn to beyond the basketball on the court.

The current Celtics are filled with individuals who are what I like to refer to as an embodiment of level-headedness, who are seemingly never too low when the going gets tough and never too high when everything is going their way. I have found it incredibly difficult to muster this mentality, and you can only imagine how the constant highs and lows of Australian football exacerbate that.

The team's two best players, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, are guys you can easily root for. Before Tatum was drafted, he found out he would be fathering a newborn son just as he was about to embark on his NBA dream. Meanwhile, when Brown was drafted, the fanbase hated the pick so much he was booed when his name was called on draft night. They were both immediately dealt with challenges while being drafted to play for the most storied franchise in the NBA. Last year, they overcame all their obstacles over a seven-year run together to win their first championship. Off the court, Tatum became so enamoured with fatherhood that, if anything, his relationship with his son has assisted his incredible career. Meanwhile, Brown, who is incredibly intelligent, is a champion for social justice and has done a myriad of work in this field in Boston.

Then there's the coach, Joe Mazzulla. What a guy. If you were ever looking for the answer to the physical form of level-headedness, he is it. An incredibly detail-oriented, process-driven, empathetic individual who is never fazed by defeat and never overjoyed by victory. Mazzulla's tendency for eccentric, larger-than-life one-liners has become popularised in the NBA world.

But one mantra he has, which I think is so applicable to all of us, is not having an expectation about how things will go. He often says this when talking about games, how the team cannot expect a game to play out a certain way. There's a hidden meaning about life, or even to bring this full circle, how we think about Australian football. Maybe reaffirming this mentality to myself made me realise that I needed to stop expecting everything in our sport to turn out how I wanted it to. Perhaps instead of retreating when the lows hit, I need to take those lows as building blocks to be stronger and more resilient.

Similarly to how I'd use the Ange Postecoglou speech, this clip of Mazzulla talking about the identity of the Celtics has also became a source of inspiration and motivation.

Maybe it was the values of these three individuals or, to be honest, most of the players on the Celtics that helped me reinforce to myself that I wasn't going to give up on football altogether and that I could still impact this sport in the way I wanted to.

While watching a lot of basketball over the last four years, I have observed much of how American sports media operates through basketball. As you can imagine, it was quite a shift adapting to it. Comparing that with what we see in Australian football has been very interesting. It is not just the media but also the discourse around something like the NBA.

While I grew increasingly interested in this Crows season, I also started to observe how AFL media operates more closely. When I say, "how AFL media operates", to be clear, I'm talking about how their analysts, commentators, fans, etc., talk about their sport, not the media biases and agendas on football.

Besides the blatantly obvious (reach, money, and resources), I wondered if there was anything different in the media and discourse across those two other sporting landscapes in my life compared to football. There are, and I will dive into them further in part four.

Click here to read Part 2 of Why I took a break from Australian football.