Capalaba

The ground carries a man's name twice over. John Fredericks Park sits on Old Cleveland Road, and the same patch of grass answers to Sam Sciacca Sportsfield.

Capalaba was a suburb still filling in when the club took shape there in 1972, and the shape it took was a community one rather than a competitive one. It began as Capalaba Bulldogs Soccer Club, and the nickname outlasted the longer name: The Bulldogs is what people say. The blue shirts with yellow trim, and the yellow with blue trim on the road, have never asked to be read as anything more than that.

What the club does most of, still, is take in whoever turns up.

There are no national trophies in the cabinet, no state title to point at. The Bulldogs have spent their history in the semi-professional and amateur layers of Queensland football, which is a different sort of life.

The current business is the Queensland NPL and the Queensland Premier League, and the business there is position. Gold Coast Knights and Broadbeach United come up on the fixture list; so do Ipswich and Magpies Crusaders, and every one of those games is worth the same three points as any other.