On Monday at the Queen's Birthday game, and in the midst of the tremendous fund-raising drive for motor neurone disease inspired by Neale Daniher, fans of many clubs other than just Melbourne and Collingwood rallied around the cause. I spoke to an Essendon fan from the 1980s, proudly sporting her old duffle coat, replete with the names of two Danihers, Neale and older brother Terry, and a host of badges and name tags of Bomber players of the day. The same evening, a tweet alerted me to some superb old football images, all in colour, from revered photographer, the late Rennie Ellis. Check out www.islandcontinent.com.au/rennie-ellis-at-the-footy if you can. It's brilliant. These are shots not of the games of the 1970s and 80s, but the spectators who attended them, the fanatical cheer squads covered head to toe in club colours and make-up, or the more regular supporters clad in plenty of denim, suede, lumber jackets, many of them clasping a can of Fosters and a cigarette. They hark back to those simpler times, when you knew your team would be playing the same time each week, and when you knew you didn't need to reserve a seat to get in.

They were times when the motivation to go to the football was simply to follow the fortunes of a team to which most held a deep emotional attachment, and whose performance may well dictate their own emotional well-being, rather than as a piece of entertainment to be slotted into a busy schedule between pre-game cocktails at a trendy bar followed by dinner in one of the Docklands' restaurants. Perhaps that is simply the sport catering to prevailing social trends. But intentionally or not, it makes someone like Collingwood diehard Jeff "Joffa" Corfe seem like even more of an anachronism. On Thursday night, Corfe's new book "Joffa: Isn't That Life?" is being launched, perhaps appropriately, at Trades Hall. If his name hasn't rung a bell by now, think TV close-ups of a man wearing a gold jacket and long blond wig as Collingwood wraps up another win. That might be enough for some to roll their eyes. In fact, Corfe himself acknowledges as much in the book. "I could picture the haters saying, 'It's him again, self-promoting' or, even worse, 'He's grandstanding'," he writes. Corfe's story, though, is worth telling. At times, it's like something straight from Dickens, Joffa one of seven children brought up in the doggedly working class East Preston, his childhood a sorry tale of abusive parents, being made a ward of the state and at one stage, homelessness and sleeping rough.

Corfe has survived that upbringing, and apart from being the supporter face of Collingwood, is a tireless charity worker, participating in an endless succession of causes on behalf of the Epilepsy Foundation. His daughter has epilepsy. But his is also a story about the sort of emotional nourishment even something as simple as the game of football can provide to those doing it tough. And like many diehards, Corfe sees danger ahead. "It's a life thing, not just a weather thing or a blockbuster thing or even a grand ﬁnal thing. It is our life. It's us," he writes. "It's what we have always done and, slowly, one by one, we are giving up. We appear to be dying, a horrible stain in football of another era long gone, that some would say should just disappear." "It baﬄes me to try and explain why men in suits have sanitised their own supporters. They're all guilty of it, to varying degrees. Do they have no understanding what it's like being on the frontline supporting your club, week after week, year after year?" Corfe gets it. Sadly, there's too many people these days directly involved in what is now no longer called a game, but an industry, who don't. And they're the ones who probably most need to read Joffa's book.