Retired football journalist Philip Micallef has seen it all when it comes to Australian football.
Speaking after his new book ‘Quote, Unquote – My Top 100 Football Stories’ was released, Micallef expressed that his upbringing in his birth country of Malta helped foster his life for football.
“My earliest memory was in 1958, which shows my age I suppose,” revealed Micallef when speaking to Kick360.
“I was eight years old during the 1958 World Cup, and I was still living in Malta. I used to come from school at 3-3:30 in an afternoon, and because Malta did not have a mass prevalence of television in those days, we used to drop by a showroom showing all these television sets to sell to the people.
“Because it was 3pm in the afternoon and those days, football used to be played primarily in the afternoons, we used to watch and spend an hour watching World Cup football from Sweden in the shop windows. We used to see these players from Brazil playing football and we were fascinated.
“It was my first meeting with the game as an eight-year-old coming back from school watching the World Cup on a black-and-white TV.”
As he grew older, Micallef’s love for football only grew stronger, moving into journalism whilst still living in his homeland, before staying in the field after moving Down Under.
“As I grew up, my love for the game increased substantially, and there was a local paper in Malta and I got in touch and I became friends with the sports editor and he offered me an opportunity to write some football in a weekly column.
“I never got paid, but I just enjoyed writing and having my name appear in the paper. That was all sort of an amateurish setup it was really, then I went to university and studied journalism and then I got employed by The Times of Malta, which is the main paper in Malta.
“Of course, when I came to Australia, I got another job, at the Illawarra Mercury in Wollongong, which is a city an hour south of Sydney. From there, I went to News Limited (now News Corp), The Telegraph, SBS and now I’m retired.”
As his stature grew in the world of media, Micallef was able to converse with some of football’s biggest names, with the likes of Pele, Diego Maradona, and Franz Beckenbaur all subjects of one-on-one chats with the journalist.
“I’ve been lucky to come across quite a few. I had one-on-one interviews with Maradona, Pele, Beckenbaur, Platini, Zola, Geoff Hurst, Dunga, captain of Brazil, Chilavert.
“I think the most fascinating person I’ve met was Michel Platini. I met him in 1999, I remember there was this Australia versus FIFA World Stars game, and Michel Platini was here in Sydney as a guest. I ran into him and I said, “Listen, do you mind if we have a chat?”
“We chatted for half an hour, he was a beautiful character, a wonderful person and he gave me a fairly decent story. I could not speak French, but he could speak Italian obviously because he played for Juventus and I can speak Italian, so we got by.
“It has been a privilege, of course it has. I wouldn’t say it to my bosses, but I would have done it for nothing. It has been a privilege, I have met lots of great people, I’ve made lots of friends, I’ve seen some fantastic football matches, I’ve been to lovely places.
“There has been a bit of a downside because sometimes I never went out of the office, I was involved in the production side of things, like [sub-editing] stories, writing headlines. That’s not really what I wanted to do, I wanted to be out on the road meeting people and seeing stories unfold.”
Despite having witnessed World Cup and European Championship Finals throughout his illustrious career, the former SBS journalist was not hesitant when naming the standout moment of his reporting life.
“I’ve got no doubt that the most uplifting moment I’ve ever had in journalism was in 2005 when Australia beat Uruguay in Sydney.
“I was there on the day, and it’s something that you’ll never forget because of the emotions that ran through me that day, I remember waking up and feeling so nervous.”
Australia had not qualified for a World Cup for 32 years, and I said, “Look, we have a big chance, we are only 1-0 behind from the first leg”, but I was afraid that we were going to stuff it up somewhere as we usually did.
“As the game progressed and Australia were playing well, they took the lead. We won it thanks to Mark Schwarzer’s heroics and then all hell broke loose, it was great.
“I wrote a big story that day from that match, I don’t even know what I wrote because the words just came out. On such an occasion, you don’t have to plan things, you just start writing and typing and the words will come out on their own.”
‘Quote, Unquote – My Top 100 Stories in Football’ is now available for purchase from the Fairplay Publishing website.
