House Of The Rising Suns

The first year behind the scenes with the AFL's newest club.

'Throw out your birth certificates, boys. This game couldn't care less how old you are.'

Guy McKenna Gold Coast SUNS Senior Coach AFL is a fiercely competitive game built on a more than a century of tradition. On April 2, 2011, the Gold Coast SUNS, the AFL's newest club, set out to forge their very own.

This is the story of the group of footballers who took the Gold Coast SUNS' first steps. It's the story of the community that banded together and cheered them on. It's a story about brilliant victories, horrible floggings, freakish talent, wasted chances, tireless enthusiasm and limitless determination. It's also the story of the game's expansionist frontier told from the very front row.

Exciting, revealing, tragic, funny, and always tinted by the raw, unbridled emotion so unique to Australia's indigenous code, this is the up close and personal tale of a club's first steps in a brave new sporting world.

About the Author

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, will be Matt's first book.Matt is married to the unflinchingly supportive Samantha. They have two daughters, Daisy, 3, definitely a Saint, and Peggy, 1, maybe a Sun.