It’s November 16th 2005, and I’m in the stands at Stadium Australia with my football mates — grown men reduced to sobbing, dancing idiots. When John Aloisi smashed home that penalty against Uruguay, time stopped. Then it exploded. We hugged strangers, kissed the air, screamed until our throats burned. Hell, I even high-fived a cop.
After 32 long years, the Socceroos were finally going to the World Cup. I’ve had some great nights, but this one was only beaten by watching my baby being born. And even then, it’s a tight photo finish.
For those of us who’d spent a lifetime loving a game Australia pretended not to care about, that night was everything. It wasn’t just about qualifying for Germany — it was about belonging. About validation. About finally feeling like football was ours.
We’d lived through Iran ’97, Uruguay ’01, the endless heartbreaks and near misses that defined us. But when Aloisi tore off down that pitch, the past dissolved. The game that had always lived quietly in the margins came roaring into the centre of Australian life.
And that’s when it hit me. Football hadn’t just arrived. It had always been there — lingering on the edges of my life like a tune I couldn’t quite name. Waiting patiently under my nose while I tried on other obsessions. I thought I’d found football that night. But the truth is, football had been finding me all along.
Born on the wrong side of the oval
I was born in Prahran, Melbourne, into a family that loved football — just not that football. Ours came with ovals, Sherrins, and men in short shorts screaming “BALLLLL!”
We then moved to South Melbourne — one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city. But in our household, diversity meant Dad barracked for Collingwood and Mum for South Melbourne (to this day, she still can’t bring herself to call them Sydney). We were a VFL family through and through.
And yet, just a few kilometres away, South Melbourne Hellas was producing legends like Ange Postecoglou and Paul Trimboli. I sometimes imagine little me kicking a ball around with them in the backstreets — the late bloomer, hopelessly two-footed, trying to keep up. If my parents had just picked a different team, maybe my whole life would’ve gone differently. But fate had other plans.
Wallsend: where the game first whispered
Next stop: Wallsend — Australia’s secret football capital. This was KB United territory. To us kids, they were gods. Forget the VFL; this was real football. We traded KB player cards like sacred relics. The rarest, of course, was the Col Curran card — only slightly less valuable than a Kiss iron-on transfer.
I loved everything about it — the songs, the scarves, the smell of Deep Heat wafting from the changerooms. I even played a bit myself. I was quick, but my first touch would make you blush. Luckily, I found my stride in other areas — especially art. At nine, I won my first national award for a poster I designed, which probably says more about my drawing ability than my dribbling.
But for a few golden years, I was part of the game — not great, not even good, but in it. And I didn’t realise how much I’d miss it when life — and geography — carried me somewhere else.
The years I looked the other way
Then came Jamberoo. These days, the name’s synonymous with football thanks to its ad-hoc museum in the famous old pub. But when I rolled into town in the early ’80s, rugby league ruled.
So, wanting to fit in, I swapped my KB kit for a St George Dragons jersey. I memorised the team sheet, worshipped Steve Rogers and Constable Craig Young, and when they lost the ’82 Grand Final, I tore my jersey in half like a heartbroken teen in a soap opera.
Cricket came next — the Anglo-Australian rite of passage. I devoured the stats in the ABC cricket book, copied Malcolm Marshall’s action, and convinced myself I was the next Dennis Lillee. I wasn’t. My batting was more Bruce Laird than Kim Hughes — all guts, no glamour — but I became a decent all-rounder, opening both the batting and the bowling, even making a few rep teams. For a while, it gave me an identity.
Meanwhile, football — the real football — slipped quietly to the back of my mind. Like Andy’s forgotten toy in Toy Story, it just sat there waiting.
A reluctant reunion
Winter meant rugby league. But while I was fast, I was never a match for the boys built like refrigerators. So eventually I traded rugby league for “soccer.”
Our school team was a ragtag bunch of misfits — mostly the kids with lunchboxes full of leftovers that no one could pronounce, and surnames the teachers always stumbled over. Our coach was the English teacher. I loved him, but he showed little interest in the game. No surprise then that we were dreadful. We scored one goal all season — and yes, I scored it. A toe-poke classic. The crowd (one teacher, two subs and a magpie) went wild.
We were hopeless, but I’d found something again — a team that fit, a sense of belonging. Maybe football was quietly tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me where I really came from.
Girls, guitars, and missed signs
By the end of high school, sport gave way to girls and guitars. I formed a band, fell in love with distortion pedals, and swapped my shin pads for Doc Martens.
Even then, fate kept leaving clues. Johnny Warren’s hometown pub was literally down the road — the same pub where I snuck my first beer at 15, blissfully unaware that “Australia’s Mr Football” was practically blessing the place.
Football was right under my nose, but I still didn’t see it.
The grunge years (or, how I almost became a rock star)
After school, I did what every confused, creative kid in the early ’90s did — I ran off to art school. Sydney was heaving. Grunge was everywhere — not just the music, the mood. If you didn’t own a flannel shirt, a Fender, or a bad attitude, you were invisible.
I threw myself into it, convinced the world owed me a rock-star moment. My band played in sticky pubs to audiences of eight, most of whom were just waiting for the headliner. But I didn’t care. I was chasing something — that feeling of being completely consumed by sound, sweat, and purpose.
The record deal never came. Turns out the world wasn’t crying out for another skinny kid playing discordant bar chords. But art — that stuck. Painting, sculpting, sketching, making films, designing, creating — it gave me the same buzz, the same thrill of building something from nothing. I started to get some traction: exhibitions, praise, a few newspaper clippings, even the faint outline of a future.
Football was still nowhere to be seen, but I started to notice its shadow on the periphery. A few of my circle became obsessed with Italy ’90 — staying up all night to watch Baggio glide, Gazza cry, and Schillaci lose his mind. I wasn’t hooked yet, but something about it stirred me. Maybe it was the noise, the theatre, the colour — or maybe it was football quietly circling back into my orbit.
Europe: where football found me again
After uni, I did what any good art-school graduate does — I fled the country. I worked double shifts in a Darlo restaurant, saved enough for a plane ticket, and hitchhiked through Europe with more enthusiasm than money.
That’s where football found me again. In Cologne, I watched FC Köln fight relegation and learned that heartbreak sounds the same in every language. In Bologna, I cheered with locals whose hand gestures were more tactical than the team’s formation. In Prague, Barcelona, and Bordeaux, I joined street games and remembered the joy of just kicking a ball for no reason at all.
Then came Edinburgh — the city that truly converted me.
I was making money painting murals, playing in a band, and occasionally earning £20 to stand in police line-ups (don’t ask). My weekends were spent at Easter Road watching Hibernian. Bovril in hand, scarf around neck, I fell in love properly this time.
It wasn’t just about the football. It was about the people — the sectarian chaos, the old blokes drinking bovril and swearing poetically, the kids in oversized scarves, the snow-covered fields, the sound of collective hope.
For the first time, I didn’t just watch football. I felt it.
Football at 2 am
Next came Portland, Oregon — a city more into slam dunks than sliding tackles. Still, I found football there too. Local leagues, expat teams, random bars showing Serie A replays at 2 am.
But my heart was with the Socceroos. This was pre-internet, so following them was like tracking Bigfoot. I’d spend $20 on a week-old Sydney Morning Herald just to read a paragraph about a playoff against Vanuatu. I even bought a short-wave radio to catch the static-filled commentary as Maradona broke our hearts in '93.
I loved that team — the glorious underdogs who always fell just short. They were us.
Home again, and finally fluent in football
By the late ’90s, I was back in Sydney, working in advertising and surrounded by English colleagues who spoke fluent football. Naturally, we formed a team. We were terrible. But every Friday we’d argue about tactics like we were managing Arsenal.
Then came that morning in 2003 — the Socceroos versus England at Upton Park. We piled into the boardroom at 8:30 am, beers in hand, and watched Aloisi, Kewell, and Viduka dismantle the motherland. When the final whistle blew, champagne corks flew. For once, it felt like the balance of footballing power had shifted — even if just for a day.
That game sealed it. I was all in.
The cult we called a team
Club football followed. Same bunch of mates, same dodgy knees. We played together for more than twenty years — not just teammates, but brothers. We might not have been the best squad, but we were absolutely the best team.
Every match was followed by a culinary feast that would’ve made MasterChef jealous. We’d take turns cooking up our national dishes — Greek souvlaki, Japanese curry, Sri Lankan dhal, English pies. The Brazilian BBQ days always drew the biggest crowd. There were always a few cartons of beer — with the sacred rule it had to be something we’d never tried before, a DJ set from one of the lads, and “joke of the week” to keep us honest. We even made our own hand-crafted “man of the match” prizes — usually a mix of recycled junk spray-painted gold and running gags.
To be honest, it was (and still is) more of a cult than a team. But it was ours.
Fate, it seemed, was still teasing me.
Turning passion into print
Together, we suffered through Iran ’97. We screamed through Uruguay ’01. And we wept tears of joy when Aloisi’s penalty finally took us to the 2006 World Cup.
I missed that World Cup, of course. I bought a house instead. Dumb move. Then I missed South Africa 2010 because I had a baby. Fair. Then Brazil 2014 for no reason at all. Just dumb again.
By 2018, I wasn’t missing my shot. Russia — here I come.
That’s where it all clicked. Designing my own shirts started as a joke — Super Timmy, Mooy Mooy Mooy, Supreme Leader. But when people started stopping me in the streets to ask where they could buy one, something lit up inside me.
It was never about selling T-shirts. It was about visibility. About giving football fans something to wear that actually felt like us — equal parts humour, history, and heart.
Back home, I pitched an A-League club on improving their merch. They shrugged and said, “There’s no money in it.” So I made it my mission to prove them wrong.
That’s how Strip Tees was born — not from profit, but from passion. From the simple belief that football deserves to look as good as it feels.
Samara, and the moment it all clicked
I still think about those moments in Russia — like the time I stood outside the Cosmos Arena in Samara wearing one of my own shirts, the Mile Jedinak “Supreme Leader” design, surrounded by new Danish and Senegalese friends. We were chanting “Aussie Aussie Aussie, Mooy Mooy Mooy,” and laughing at how ridiculous it all was.
It was absurd. It was beautiful. And it was everything I’ve ever loved about football — chaos, community, and comedy all rolled into one.
That’s when it hit me again. The journey that began with tears in Sydney had carried me halfway across the world to this ridiculous, wonderful scene. The game that had found me all those years ago was still doing what it does best — connecting people, breaking down barriers, and reminding us why we fell in love in the first place.
Five years on, Strip Tees has carved its own little corner of Australian football culture. We’ve made shirts for forgotten heroes and cult icons. We’ve celebrated the Matildas’ rise and collaborated with legends like Simon Hill. We’ve supported grassroots programs like the Moriarty Foundation.
We’ve even popped up on Fox Sports, Channel 10, CNN, BBC, and Bein. All from a brand that started because I couldn’t find a decent T-shirt.
But more than that, Strip Tees became the thing that tied it all together — art, music, humour, and football. The beautiful game wasn’t something I stumbled on late in life. It was something that had been whispering to me all along — from Prahran to Wallsend, from Hibernian terraces to Red Square.
I just finally started listening.
Passing it on
If the early ’90s was when football quietly found me, then 2023 was the year I watched it burst into everyone else’s hearts.
The Women’s World Cup rolled into Australia like a tidal wave — joyful, defiant, unstoppable. Everywhere I went, there were green and gold jerseys, face paint, people who couldn’t tell an offside trap from a mousetrap suddenly glued to their screens. It was glorious.
This time, I wasn’t travelling solo. I was on the road with my now-teenage daughter — my own little teammate. Together, we followed the Matildas around the country, screaming, laughing, singing, and, when it was all over, crying.
We stood shoulder-to-shoulder in packed stadiums, watching Sam Kerr do Sam Kerr things and Mackenzie Arnold become a national hero. We lost our voices against France, we dared to dream against England, and when that dream finally slipped away, we just held each other and wept.
It was heartbreak, yes. But it was also something more — pride, connection, joy. The kind of emotion that only football can conjure.
Watching my daughter fall in love with the game I’d spent a lifetime circling was something I’ll never forget. It was like fate had come full circle — the game that had been chasing me for decades had finally caught us both.
The team that finally felt like us
Somewhere along the line, the Socceroos and Matildas stopped feeling like just “teams” and started feeling like Australia. Not the airbrushed, ad-agency version, but the real one — messy, diverse, warm, awkward, loud, generous, and occasionally prone to heartbreak.
They reflect us — the best of us.
I still have a soft spot for cricket, but it’s hard to ignore how it feels rooted in another era. You can see it in the blazers, the commentary, the nostalgia. It’s a game that still echoes Menzies’ Australia — a place of afternoon teas, quiet lawns, and mostly Anglo names on the scorecard. Rugby league? There’s skill there, no doubt, but it’s buried beneath a mountain of brute force and chest-thumping.
And rugby? Meh. It’s hard to feel connected to a team that only exists in private schools and corporate boardrooms.
And AFL? For all its popularity, it’s hard to get excited by a game built on endurance and collisions more than craft. For me, it’s always felt oddly closed — territorial and a little xenophobic.
Football, though — football feels like us. It’s the perfect mix of art and intelligence, rhythm and improvisation. It rewards creativity as much as courage, thought as much as strength. It’s the game of the poet, the migrant, the dreamer.
My own roots are Scottish and Portuguese, but somewhere in the mix there’s Eastern European, Scandinavian, North African, even Nigerian blood. I don’t see that in cricket crowds or rugby terraces. I see it on a football pitch — in the faces of the players, in the flags in the stands, in the songs that cut across every accent in the country.
That’s what makes the Socceroos and Matildas special. They don’t just play for us — they are us.
Football was always waiting
Now, when I look back, it all feels inevitable — like fate disguised as bad geography and worse decisions.
Football was always there, hiding behind AFL jerseys, St George banners, and cricket bats. Waiting for me in the dusty schoolyard, in the stands of Easter Road, in the streets of Bologna.
It took me decades to realise it wasn’t me chasing football — it was football chasing me.
And in the end, it found me.
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