According to The Age (22/03/22)  AFL Top Banana, Gil McLachlan is confident Season 2022 will be the first normal football season since COVID hit. Normal? Has there ever really been such a thing as far as football fixtures and seasons go? Join John and new co-host Andrew 'Gigs' Gigacz as they take a look the idea of fixtures, football and notions of normality.

We close this season, and the search for that perfect game of football we are all sure existed once, somewhere, in someone's memory (for the moment anyway), with an episode that looks at memory and remembering through the lens of 'The Game that Never Happened.  We'll be back next year - see you then!

If Tom Wills did bring Marngrook to the football table in 1859, how come its characteristic high kicking and high marking didn't become a part of the game for decades, how come Aboriginal people were shut out of the game until the 1900s, how come Marngrook is not mentioned in the press in relation to football until the late 20th Century? These and other questions...

The second part of our discussion of the Tom Wills controversy.  What can we say categorically about him and the alleged role he played in a massacre of Aboriginal people? When and on what grounds could we 'cancel' Tom Wills?  Is cancelling Wills or any historical figure the right thing to do? What should the AFL do right now, in response to this? We find we're left with more questions that answers. What do you think? [email protected]

We're back baby! We've overcome surgeries, pandemics, earthquakes and riots in the streets and  we're now  back at the desk talking football history. Once again, though, we were waylaid in our quest to find the golden fleece: the game as it was originally intended, the game we all long for when we talk of the glory days of football. We were all set to talk 1874, when the game of yesteryear began to resemble to game of today but, instead, we got caught up in the Tom Wills controversy. We'll be following this episode with a Part Two because, even as we type this, the commentary surrounding this issue is growing and we find we're revisiting our conversation already. In fact, we've already  gone back and made a few small edits to this episode - you'll hear them, the audio quality changes slightly. We could have made more, but we wanted to get this out there. We hope you enjoy listening to this discussion of what is a troubling issue for football in this country.  Are we off track? Did we get it wrong or right? If you have something to add,  we'd love to hear from you.. Find us on Facebook at Behind The Play, on Twitter, @behindtheplayok, or email us at [email protected].

It's school holiday time in Melbourne so John and Ian are taking a short break. There's still time, though, to thank everyone who has listened, reviewed and commented on the show and to look forward to where they might go in Episode 4.

In which John and Ian once again get side tracked in their search for the golden game, the game as it should be, the football we all yearn for and seek to resurrect via our endless tinkering and tweaking. 
This time, while on the way to 1858 and the very birth of the game in Melbourne, Ian throws a spanner in the works, claiming that there was no birth and there is no origin. This leads to discussions involving the work of legendary Soccer Historian Roy Hay, friend of the show @AFLisnotthesport, George Orwell, Martin Flanagan and Greg de Moore's biography of Tom Wills , who, apparently, is not the father of the game after all.

DISCLAIMER. This episode was recorded during a hard lock down in Melbourne meaning we had to converse over long distance. This resulted in the audio being less that perfect in the middle section of the podcast. For this we apologise and we thank you for your patience.

Episode Two was supposed to be an in depth look at football as it was first codified in Melbourne in the 1850s, in an effort to begin the search for the golden game we're always harking back to. However,  what actually happens is, John is thwarted in this quest by Ian who has to get off his chest the ideas that Australian Football is: a mish mash of inherent flaws, an arrogant, imperialistic endeavor and that it's not, after all, the great game it is cracked up to be. Dad's Army and Waiting for Godot are in there somewhere too. Nice.

Hosts John Weldon and Ian Syson discuss why football history is so important to them and, hopefully, others too.

Books/plays/poems discussed in this episode:

Barassi, by Tee O'Neill: 

• https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/6038990 

Up Where Cazaly? The Great Australian Game, by Leonie Sandercock and Ian Turner:

• https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/260715

Lifecycle: for Big Jim Phelan, by Bruce Dawe, in Up Where Cazaly?

Why do we keep changing the rules in Aussie Rules?  If footy is the greatest game in the world, why does it always need fixing? In this episode, hosts John Weldon and Ian Syson, look at the history of tinkering and tweaking and ask the question: was there ever a time when we were satisfied with the game?