A short lived Flame

The situation is something like this. 

Australian soccer record keeping, regardless of era or area, is generally garbage. I'm not even talking about minutes of board meetings, or narrative histories, or of collective memory. I'm talking about the most basic and fundamental aspect of the sport: records of who played, who scored, who won, and where everyone finished up at the end of the season. 

Clubs, federations, referees, fans, players, and journalists are all to blame. Few people in the game have ever wanted to do the hard yards, and fewer still have wanted to support them. A handful of anoraks potter around the edges, filling in gaps in the past, and trying to make sure that what's happening now doesn't become another gap to be filled in the future.

It's no less a problem at South Melbourne Hellas than it is at any other club. The senior men's team has played 64 seasons of football, and yet probably only the seasons from 2000-2001 onward have anything like the desired combination of completeness and accuracy in terms of appearances and goalscorers. The less said reserves and women's teams records, the better.

At various times, records from the NSL years are mired by lacunae to do with the poor record keeping associated with NSL Cups, Oceania Championships, Dockerty Cups, and officially sanctioned pre-season cups; and then there's such basics as not listing unused subs in the NSL proper, and sometimes not having details of subs making appearances at all. Go further back, and it gets even worse, with the crowning glory being the 1960 season, the club's first. It was a fantastic season: promotion to the State League with an almost perfect record, Dockerty Cup semi-finalists, and yet the match details of that season are a mess. 

The amateur (and now one professional) historians of Victorian soccer have done their best to piece together the match and season records not just of our past, but also of any other Victorian team they come into contact with. But with so much archival material missing, probably for good, and with so much of the necessary record keeping likely never existing in the first place, one has to acknowledge the fact that there's just going to be some information that we'll never get our hands on.

So, on to South. Wading into this mess a few years ago the club's historian John Kyrou started with a basic premise - creating spreadsheets trying to compile the foundational statistical of every senior men's season, and of every person who ever pulled the boots on for us in a senior game. Match details needing to be filled include date, kickoff time, venue, competition, round, score, crowd, South scorers, South team, coach. (no room for refs...) Then trying to fill in competition details for that season, and finally grand totals of games and goals.  

Some of the sources Kyrou relies upon are solid, some of them less so. OzFootball, the various newspapers like Soccer Action, Soccer World, ABSW... all are reliable, until they aren't; mistakes and omissions are made, and sometimes all you get is a couple of paragraphs. The same goes for the still kicking socceraust.co.uk, the labour of love of the late Alan Morley, whose data was based on the UK soccer pools. So what do you do? The only thing you can do, really. Keep looking over old sources, and hope that new old things turn up. For example, there are so many missing copies of Victoria's Soccer News which could help fill in gaps. There are also newspapers in the State Library, which might have a result or two.

The work of people like John Punshon and Mark Boric has pushed this approach to its extremes. The State Library has some great material, but microfilm is a terrible medium to work with, archaic and fiddly. Physical newspapers are better, but also have their limits; fragility, missing issues, limits on access. Then there are the language barriers; while the ethnic press isn't as helpful as you'd like to think (you'd be surprised how non-prominent sport is in early editions of Neos Kosmos), at least the stuff using Latin scripts is decipherable to anyone whose first language is English, with a bit of a patience.

But what about non-Latin scripts like Greek or Cyrillic? At least for the former, this is where the Greek readers have to step up, and it's an area where I admit I have been much slacker than I would have liked. Sure, there was COVID, and before that a thesis, but still. I've tried to make some amends in recent weeks by accessing first the Athletic Echo, the long running (1961?-1996) Melbourne based Greek-Australian sports newspaper, focusing on trying to confirm some specific 1990s details, and generally trying to get a feel for what the paper was like.

But then I recalled that there was another paper, the Athletic Flame (Athlitiki Floga). Remembering it from citations in Petros Kosmopoulos' thesis covering the first 30 years of the club, I had no idea how long that newspaper had been around for, only that it had been around in the 1960s. Well, I had nothing to do last Sunday afternoon, so I managed to book the paper in - you need to provide at least two days notice to get access to something like that - and went to the State Library to check it out.

Would it be chock full of ads? How much detail would there be? Would I be able to understand it? Would it be any good? No; heaps; yes; and yes. 
 

The masthead and part of the front page from the first edition of Athlitiki Floga, featuring the squads from South Melbourne Hellas and Alexander which had played a pre-season match on Greek national day.

I was impressed from the get-go. The Athletic Flame was, for the most part, an eight-page weekly sports newspaper, at first published on Fridays, and later on Wednesdays. It was mostly soccer, but included some coverage of other sports like boxing and professional wrestling.

For the soccer content, it contained thorough, blow-by-blow match reports for South matches, including starting lineups and player evaluations for everyone who took the field for Hellas. This is important, because I was able to correct a listed Hellas lineup on OzFootball (and in Kyrou's files - probably from the same source) that was otherwise complete; it's hard to think that a writer would compile such detail, only to then confuse George Papadopoulos for Takis Xanthopoulos.

Most weeks there were even Hellas reserves results, with goal scorers. That's how you know that youngster Mike Mandalis spent most of the year in the twos alongside the veteran striker Antonis Karagiannis. There were gossip columns, a generic round up of the rest of the State League, match reports and (often) team lists for Alexander and Athena, some coverage of small Sunday league teams, news on the big interstate Greek clubs,  profiles of big name overseas players, and a couple of pages dedicated to the Greek and Cypriot leagues.  

So far, so good. But there's also a downside. The quality of the photo reproductions isn't the best. Detailed information on the opponents of the Greek clubs is often negligible. But worst, the typeface used is pretty small. Here was me worrying about diacritics and how "educated" the language would be, but the clearly demotic language was little bother. But my poor, weak eyes, squinting at the small text! There was also a missing issue (no. 08), and worst of all, the State Library's collection seems to stop in late July at no. 18.

So incredibly frustrating. Here we are, having a great time, and then it just stops. Is that because that's all the State Library had, or because that was as far as the paper got? Methinks the latter, and that's a real shame, because apart from usefulness up to that point in filling in and confirming details for several Hellas matches (probably a dozen, and a pre-season friendly) in our first state league title year, it was such a good paper! It was passionate, and biased, and fickle, and played favourites, and it was a real ride.

While mostly just skimming through, I was able to tell that the match reporter was a huge fan of some players, and not others. For instance, he was harsh on John Bedford, and mainly wrote backhanded compliments about Ted Smith as someone who ran a lot. Other players, like John Margaritis, were geniuses. There was a bias toward the Greek players, but when they failed, the criticism was magnified; ineffective, ill-disciplined (especially said of Savvas Salapasidis), and greedy - not teamwork oriented.

The paper had forthright opinions about a lot of things, including the standard of referees, the fickleness of South supporters, and the poor standard of some of the grounds. For example, the extract on the right gives as one reason why Hellas could only draw 1-1 with the struggling Melbourne Hungaria, the state of the tiny McDonald Reserve in Gardiner:

"A paddock unsuitable for football. The murderers of football, all those who make up the Federation, not looking to create or find grounds, only taking money from clubs, technical teams getting murdered on unsuitable fields, because they are unable to perform."

Remarkably, the front page would even have an English column, with its own bullish opinions. Sadly, that column disappeared about two thirds of the way through the available issues. When the Greek and Cypriot leagues moved into their off-seasons, the paper came with fewer pages. And then it was over, or so it seems. I know that there is a copy of issue no. 08 at La Trobe University, in the Dardalis Collection. Not quite an impenetrable fortress, but they don't get close to rolling out the welcome mat for you like they do in the History and Heritage room at the State Library. But there are also scattered Greek-Australian sports papers in there from the late 1950s and 1960 which could be interesting...

So what did we learn? That the Athletic Flame is a paper worth revisiting, because its coverage of South Melbourne Hellas is outstanding. It'll also need revisiting because it has lineups for Alexander and Athena which likely exist nowhere else. It has details, or at least acknowledgement, of new teams (like the short lived Doxa Richmond), and the demise of others (Florina). It even has a fan writing in (see right) with suggestions for songs to sing at the matches. (these would have been handy to find about five years ago...)

One also remembered some research basics that one knew back in his student days, but which he had forgotten since. Chief among those - focusing on the task at hand, and not getting distracted by all the fun stuff. Never underestimating how long it can take to through a source. Getting familiar with an unfamiliar source can take time. But I also remembered the thrill of research. it's been a while.