The Bad Boys of Footy

AFL, Football, NRL and Rugby: Modern Failings Of Football's Finest. We read about footballers every day. We celebrate their physical feats, their freakish athleticism, their guile and poise. We rejoice in their glories. We feel their hurt. We share their tears. But more and more, football is not enough. Nowadays off-field behaviour steals more than its share of column space. Private lives are no longer. Mistakes are magnified. And we in the outer are voyeurs. We delve for details. We delight in knowing everything. We are judge and juror. Sometimes we are executioner. And when footballers stumble our damnation is usually ruthless. In the end we measure men to a standard we'd never come close to matching ourselves. Crossing all four winter codes, The Bad Boys of Footy shines a critical light on the tales of a host contemporary footballing miscreants those who've tripped up, boozed, lied, cheated, whacked, thumped, kicked, scratched, frittered, robbed, and bottomed out. Everybody screws up. Of course they do. But no one screws up like a modern day gladiator.

It took Matt Webber the better part of a decade to realise a listless existence as an unimaginative litigation lawyer wasn't making him very happy. Things turned for the better when he ditched the timesheets and began scribbling for a sporadic quid. And when an impromptu conversation with Gold Coast Suns CEO Travis Auld on a plane home from the 2009 AFL Grand Final morphed into a year as the club's in-house scribe, well, Christmas arrived early and things just fell into place. House of the Rising Suns, a from-the-outer analysis of the Gold Coast Suns' first year in the AFL, was Matt's first book. This book is his second. Matt is married to the unflinchingly supportive Samantha. They have two daughters, Daisy, 3, definitely a Saint, and Peggy, 1, maybe a Sun.