Category: The Dartboard Journeyman
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 10
“Come on man, you’re leaving me hanging here”, I said. “I’m sorry boss, it’s just I don’t know if it’s a good move for me right now”, replied the voice on the other side of the phone. I sighed. “José, it’s been almost ten years, you can call me by my name” “I’m sorry, force…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 9
No more distractions Grahame Park is quiet at night. Walking around the offices, making the rounds around the pitch, nobody is there, nothing is there. Just the sound of the waves of the Brisbane Water crashing against the coast on the other side of the A49, again and again and again. I had just wrapped…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 8
Enough Silver Medals As I sat in my office, I watched the smoke from the tobacco go up in the air, twisting and turning, and I reminded myself of a cheesy action movie where the villain got killed as a heat tracking missile followed his cigarette. I had taken to smoking a week or so…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 7
Feel Good Mojo You can tell how important football is for a country by how much sense their football season makes; at least, that’s one way I see it. Going by that metric, it’s clear to see that football, association football that is, is a relatively new phenomenon in a country ruled by Aussie rules…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 6
There was an unnerving tapping noise in my ears. It was late on a Monday night and I couldn’t do anything but stare at the emptiness of my laptop’s screen. “What time is it?”, I pondered. 7:44 PM. I didn’t think a moment more irrelevant could exist in one’s life. I got up and did…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 5
The Question It’s from a Pearl Jam song. And it’s one of the questions I was pondering more often than not. Sitting in my office, my actual office, I watched the Under 23s training under José through a small gap I had opened in the shades. He barked orders just like any of the other…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 4
The one thing nobody tells you about becoming a manager is how little downtime you have. With memories of the last day of the season still fresh, two weeks later I was once again under the scorching sun of the full-blown Indonesian summer. Out on the training pitch, I watched over the trialists’ work. We’ve…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 3
My office at Brawijaya Stadium was a comfortable and refurbished room, with wide, tall windows overlooking the training pitch and letting in a lot of sunlight inside. It had been part of my contract renegotiation, with Mr Susilo Tri Indrajaya making a much more concerted effort in my interests now that he was looking into…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 2
It was my first day. I was bending over the bathroom sink. Not one of the three taps could work, which was probably the reason the whole thing was out of order. That made it a perfect hiding place. “What the f*ck am I going to do?”, I said to myself. I checked my watch.…
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The Dartboard Journeyman – Part 1
“You want what?”, said the tourist agent, visibly confused.“An open ticket to any of these countries”, the young man sitting in front of her replied.“But… well, for starters, that’s not how an open ticket works. And secondly, you can’t just fly away to any given country. We’re in a pandemic, there are controls to pass,…
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