Book review - Jason Goldsmith's "Surfing for England: Our Lost Socceroos"

Jason Goldsmith's Surfing for England: Our Lost Socceroos, begins with the kind of question which keeps certain kinds of Australian soccer fans up at night: what if we didn't lose all those players who couldn't or wouldn't commit to Australia? What if we had Craig Johnston or Tony Dorigo playing for the national team during the 1980s? What if Joe Simunic hadn't played for Croatia in the 1990s? Would we have made World Cups during that time, and changed the course of Australian soccer history?

Take for example the inspiration for the book and its title, Craig Johnston, simultaneously one of Australian soccer's greatest players and one of its greatest villains. When the Australian national team was struggling to make world cups using semi-pro players, we had at our nominal disposal a player plying his trade at one of the strongest clubs in the world. And yet when asked to front up

These days Johnston is a weird sort of pariah, in that while he was persona non-grata in this country for a very long time for his "surfing for England" commentary, and has since had a sort of minor rehabilitation of his legacy despite his best efforts to undermine that with nonsense rants about the state of Australian soccer. Having read parts of Johnston's biography, I was on top of the personal commitments required of Johnstone to play football in England at the time as a foreigner - especially the precariousness of being a squad member at a successful club like Liverpool, in an era where starting XIs seldom changed even with a crowded schedule, and where flitting off to Australia to play in World cup qualifiers could cost you your livelihood.

But it's the Tony Dorigo chapter which follows Johnston's which makes the situation as it was as the time much clearer. Unlike Johnston, Dorigo doesn't have the self-aggrandising character traits that immediately, and thus the reader is able to elicit empathy not just for Dorigo, but also for Johnston. The situation is as straightforwards as this: with no worldwide fixture windows set aside to give international football clean air within the crowded domestic and continental club scenes, players from far-flung corners of the football world such as Australia had to make a choice - choose their club and continue making a living as a professional footballers, or choose country and squander their hard-won position in the starting XI of a club.

To its credit, Surfing for England also goes beyond the well-known cases of players "betraying" Australia (especially the well-known Croatian examples of the 1990s), and looks at players who made decisions based on other factors. These include the existence of the perennial Australian goalkeeping glut (Joey Didulica and Sasa Ilic) with Ilic being the hilarious surprise packet of this book. There's also Australia's 1960s FIFA suspension, which cost Indigenous player John Moriarty a national team cap, also covered in John Maynard's The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe. There's even the great 'what if?' moment in the form of Christian Vieri - including how he never really stood out as a junior at Marconi - but also the tragic case of Dylan Tombides.

Surfing for England also looks at players who knew they never had a realistic chance of playing for Australia, and thus made decisions based on other factors. On that front the stories of Manny Muscat and John Hutchinson playing for Malta - especially the latter's lack of awareness of his eligibility for the Maltese national team - add to the quirkiness of the story of international football. And Buddy Farah's travails through the Lebanese and Asian football scenes, at a time when Australian soccer had yet to cross over to the Asian Football Confederation, are the kind of story you hope someone is eventually inspired to flesh out.

Some of what Goldsmith misses in this book - and it's by no means through lack of trying - are players who existed well before the time of current controversies of player allegiances, such as Frank Mitchell. I would have liked to have seen more on players like Jimmy Jackson, probably Australian soccer's first genuine star. And as noted by Adam Muyt, who is writing a history of Dutch-Australian soccer, there's also the matter of Western Australian players who by virtue of the state's long-term soccer isolation from the east coast, remain unknown despite their quality.

The book, published within the last couple of months, comes at a curious time in international football. Where once national team loyalties were largely clear-cut - you were eligible for one team and that's it - we are now in a situation where the factors of heritage, citizenship, residency, birthright and FIFA rule changes, have combined to give players and national teams options. Australia is in its own way well-placed to acquire a certain calibre of player through those channels, and the recent cases of Apostolos Giannou, Martin Boyle, and (just this week!) Harry Souttar demonstrate that.

The outcome of Goldsmith following through on the question of national team loyalty, is a book which sits somewhere between a guest contributor's article on The Roar and a weighty tome dealing thoroughly with the matters at hand. In that regard, people may find it an idea not worth being stretched out to the 80 odd pages here; or conversely, treating this relatively slim tome as an idea that deserved a more thorough exploration. That's not to take away from what this book does well however, which is fill in an important gap in the story of the national team, while also acting as a primer for why some of these things happened in the first place. Hopefully some people reading this book are intrigued enough by some of the stories that they decide to fill them out.