The Kid is enjoying the final days of an extended holiday before rejoining his teammates in China, but his thoughts keep returning to the strange events that unfolded during the club’s tour of Australia.
A training-ground bust-up, an unlikely boxing comparison and a crossbar challenge that appears to have escaped from Soccer AM all leave The Kid wondering whether pre-season football has become its own form of entertainment.
Pre-Season Gets Complicated
The Kid should be looking ahead to meeting up with his teammates in China.
Instead, he is still thinking about what happened during the club’s Australian tour.
Pre-season is supposed to be about fitness, tactical preparation and getting players ready for the new campaign.
This particular trip appears to have produced considerably more than that.
The Shark Incident
The Kid cannot get over one of the more unusual moments from the tour.
An Australian surfer becomes part of the conversation after surviving a dramatic shark encounter.
The Kid jokingly decides that anybody capable of fighting off a shark might even have a chance in the ring with Pepe.
It is an absurd comparison, but exactly the sort of leap Storybook enjoys making.
A Training-Ground Bust-Up
The joke quickly gives way to another source of concern.
A confrontation at training has attracted attention and overshadowed the club’s preparations.
Pre-season tours often provide clubs with carefully controlled publicity opportunities.
A training-ground argument does rather the opposite.
For The Kid, it becomes another reminder that football headlines rarely follow the script.
The Crossbar Challenge Returns
Elsewhere on the training pitch, the players appear to be taking part in a crossbar challenge.
The sight immediately brings back memories of Soccer AM, where hitting the crossbar became one of football television’s best-known recurring features.
The Kid is unimpressed.
As far as he is concerned, the challenge is ridiculous.
What Was the Coach Thinking?
The Boss appears equally unconvinced.
The new coach’s training methods have clearly not won everybody over.
What was intended as a light-hearted exercise starts to look more like a television segment than serious pre-season preparation.
The comparison becomes even stronger when the strip cuts to a familiar football television face.
Did he think he was back on Soccer AM?
When Football Training Becomes Entertainment
Modern pre-season tours often blur the line between football preparation and commercial entertainment.
Players train in front of supporters.
Clubs create social media content.
Challenges and competitions are filmed for television and online audiences.
Storybook pushes that idea further by imagining a training camp that has started to resemble a football entertainment show.
The Football Inspiration Behind the Comic
This episode was inspired by the club’s 2015 pre-season tour of Australia and the stories surrounding training sessions, player disagreements and unusual preparation methods.
It also references the famous crossbar challenge popularised by Soccer AM, where footballers attempted to hit the crossbar from distance.
The shark reference reflects another major Australian news story from the same period, allowing Storybook to combine football, current events and television nostalgia in a single strip.
Characters Featured
The Kid
The Kid is still away from the squad but remains closely interested in everything happening during pre-season.
He is already looking forward to the competitive season, preferably with fewer crossbar challenges.
The Boss
The Boss observes the training methods from a distance and appears distinctly unimpressed with what he sees.
The New Coach
The coach becomes the focus of the joke after introducing a training exercise that looks suspiciously like something borrowed from football television.
Behind the Gag
The strip combines several completely different stories.
An Australian surfer fights off a shark.
A football training session produces a bust-up.
A crossbar challenge appears on the training pitch.
And suddenly everybody is wondering whether Soccer AM has relocated to Australia.
For The Kid, the conclusion is simple.
The new fantasy football season cannot start soon enough.
Looking Back
Originally published in 2015, Soccer AM Heads Down Under captured the increasingly commercial and entertainment-driven nature of modern pre-season tours.
It also showed how Storybook could combine genuine football events with wider news stories and familiar football culture to create a joke that made sense far beyond the result of a match.
The next episode brings the drama back to the touchline.
