Book Review, The Little Professor of Soccer - Leo Baumgartner

Among Australian soccer history aficionados, Leopold Baumgartner's The Little Professor of Soccer holds a special place as being the first notable published biography of an Australian soccer player, even if Baumgartner was an Austrian first, and only later an Australian.

Well, they either know it for that reason, or because of its distinct green and black cover.

Either way, even those familiar with the book likely haven't read it. Published in the late 1960s, the book is long out of print, and available only in a scant few libraries in Australia; in other words, you really will have to have gone out of your way in order to have read the book.

When finally accessing a copy, you'll find that the book is rather short (just over 100 pages), making it the kind of thing you'll zip through - although I am curious about the book's provenance. Who decided that an autobiography of a foreign, but not-world famous soccer player - one who spent about half his career in Australia - was a worthwhile venture? And who helped Baumgartner write the book, considering Baumgartner's self-admitted not exactly exemplary knowledge of the English language?

Anyway, the book covers Baumgartner's life from his early days in Austria, until near the end of his playing career in the late 1960s. The first half or so of the book focuses on Baumgartner's youth and pathway to professional soccer in Austria - which was still a semi-professional pursuit. So even before you get to the commentary on 1960s Australian soccer, you get some good information on what it was like to become a professional player in Austria in the 1950s. Baumgartner covers training, internal politics, transfers, and the hard yards - including securing a job outside your semi-pro football gig - that had to be put in while rising through the ranks of youth and regional football, until Baumgartner makes it to FK Austria.

What's interesting about this part of the book is its relative naivete. Just about everyone in 1950s Austrian football seems good-natured and easy-going, and Baumgartner's narrative has almost a childlike wonder about it - the post-war poverty, the joy of watching the crack teams of Austrian football on a weekend as a kid, and the sheer fun of being involved with football. The combination of all these are factors make the book come *this* close to being cloying, were it not for Baumgartner's sincerity.

Perhaps the best example is when Baumgartner represents Austria in a youth tournament in The Netherlands. The team travels by train, stays in a nice hotel, and has a lovely time mixing with the players from the other nations, even if they can't understand each other. It doesn't even matter too much that the Austrians get knocked out of the tournament early by England - the experience was worthwhile for its novelty, and for the opportunity of pitting yourself against Europe's best, and finding out that you still have a long way to go to improve. Baumgartner is clearly appreciative of the opportunity to experience what he has.

(as an aside, I'm reminded here of Danny Kelly from Christos Tsiolkas' novel Barracuda, who when competing at an international swimming meet in Japan, feels a palpable sense of awe and wonder at the experience of international travel that his wealthier, yet more insular teammates, do not)

Later when he's secured a senior team position at FK Austria, there are also tours of South America, where cross-national bonhomie and the exoticism of touring compete with the very obvious signs of grinding poverty he encounters in Latin America.

But there's also the Australian tours, and it's these which eventually lead to Baumgartner and players of his ilk migrating to Australia permanently, in order to play for clubs like Sydney's Prague and Hakoah clubs. This leads to the mess of Australia being kicked out of FIFA for not paying transfers to the European clubs, an issue which Baumgartner largely ignores in this book. But the imports at least bring advanced tactics, better preparation (to a degree) and skill to Australia, as well as boosting crowds.

Baumgartner plays for a variety of clubs and undertakes a variety of roles, though he never settles at one club for too long even if they've had success. When playing for Prague, Baumgartner notes the lack of overall professionalism from his mostly European teammates. At Canterbury, he manages to elevate and guide a young, Australian-born/raised cohort (including players such as Johnny Warren) to unexpected success, but he doesn't stay for long here either, moving to South Coast for what turns out to be a short stint due to pressing personal money problems. (it's annoying that he doesn't talk much about his and his family's life - and their adjustment to Australia - away from football)

Moving back to Sydney to play for APIA - with whose fans he's had a combative relationship - the fun times don't last long here either. Baumgartner once more unwillingly gets drawn into board squabbles. Indeed, Baumgartner doesn't think very much of the supposed soccer knowledge of club administrators, especially from the ethnic clubs; but he doesn't spare the shambling incompetence of federation officials either, especially when it comes to organising the basics such as competent youth training.

In amid the banquets, the barbecues, and the assorted social gatherings, it may well be that Baumgartner himself is not quite the easy going character he likes to portray himself as. He clearly has a low patience threshold for the various characters involved in Australian soccer, perhaps with good reason, but it's also clear that at some point people cease to listen to him. Like a smattering of voices of the time, Baumgartner believes that the late 1950s/early 1960s standard in Sydney was much better than that of the late 1960s, suggesting already that there was a downturn in Australian soccer - but also that no one seemed particularly keen to take the necessary action to arrest that decline.

Thus a book that begins so full of naivety and hope, ends with the sobering warning that Australian soccer in the late 1960s is already on the brink of difficult times. It's a bit of a let-down then that the book doesn't go beyond the 1960s, as Baumgartner remained engaged in soccer in various guises for the rest of his life, especially coaching junior soccer, and it would've been interesting to see him explain.

The lasting impact of this book is a strange one - the cultural memory of the culture that this book talks about is gone. Many of the clubs are dead; even the strongest of those that remain are a mere shadow of what they were. It's not even a matter of immediate relevance - but if a modern Australian soccer fan was asked about this time in Australian soccer (and specifically in Sydney), there will be little to no knowledge of this era. Baumgartner is not just an ancient figure in Australian soccer terms, but also an increasingly obscure one.

It's incongruous to an extent because soccer in this era – especially important games – was very well attended. Thousands packed suburban grounds and chaired off winning teams; and now, it’s like it never happened. Even between this period and the start of the A-League, it’s arguable that something culturally important was already lost. But did that short-lived period of optimism and ascendancy in Australian soccer last long enough? Or was it the fact that much of the experience remains sequestered what are now redundant languages and cultures?

It's possible to argue that had two Baumgartner admirers - Johnny Warren and Les Murray - not been at the forefront of Australia's soccer media for as long as they were, that the cultural memory of Baumgartner and what he brought to Australian soccer may have faded even earlier than it did.

While I have noted that the book is long out of print, you can download a sneaky scanned copy here.

Book Review - Trevor Thompson's Playing For Australia

ABC journalist Trevor Thompson had previously written One Fantastic Goal, one of a slew of books that were commissioned (or were reprinted) during the time the Socceroos had made the 2006 World Cup. And I must admit, I wasn't a huge fan of that book.

Apart from its general tone, which was (naturally) celebratory of what had been achieved in a very such short space of time under the Lowy regime, I also felt like the book was rushed out to the market by an opportunistic publisher looking to cash-in on the Socceroos' moment in the sun, and that the book was therefore released in a manner which did not to the author justice, feeling a bit underdone, with many parts of that book repeating themselves.

I am glad to say that I enjoyed Thompson’s Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia and World Football far more and I'm glad to recommend it to readers, albeit with a couple of necessary caveats.

Playing for Australia came out late last year via Bonita Mersiedes’ Fairplay Publishing. Its main focus is the early days of the Australian national team, long before they were the Socceroos, and long before they were entering international competition - with a couple of exceptions, we’re largely talking about the inter-war years from 1922 through to the early 1940s.

What we get from Thompson about this era (and the years immediately preceding them) is informative and lively, and just as importantly, highly accessible. At its best, Thompson is able combine the narrative with interesting anecdotes. Playing for Australia's greatest strengths lie in the little details that Thompson regales us with, such as the “Ego yah!” chant. Here, Thompson notes the attempt by Australia's soccer players to establish their own version of the All Blacks haka, during a tour of the Dutch East Indies in the 1928.

Ego yah, ego yah! The Emu, The Wallaby, The Kangaroo, The Wombat; Who are, who are, who are we? We are the boys from the Southern Sea, Bonza Cobber, Dinki Di, Best of luck to you and I, We'll not fail her, young Australia, Ego Yah... Boska!

(although Thompson is not quite correct about the chant being created by the players for this tour; variants of the "ego yah" chant existed prior to the 1928 tour).

The book covers the various touring teams which visited Australia, including by Chinese, Indian, Czechoslovakian, New Zealand, Jewish, and English sides. These tours were both a boon and a burden to Australian soccer. When the touring teams were of good calibre, they provided excellent entertainment - but if they were too good, they made Australian soccer look second-rate. Just as often, the visiting teams were not what they were advertised as, with the promoters - often private financiers - who funded the tours marketing the tourists as being national teams when they were more likely to clubs sides. Australian crowds, too, were a fickle lot, at least when it came to value for money. They wanted to see visiting teams partly on novelty grounds (such as the Chinese touring sides), but attendance for novelty's sake is something that quickly wears thin.

The Australian teams (whether local, state, or national) cobbled together to represent the country against these touring teams, or to venture across to New Zealand or South-East Asia were scarcely able to avoid controversy in their own right. National teams and their selection policies were fraught by questions of amateurism of professionalism, national team vs state club loyalties, New South Wales dominance, and the “necessity” of playing Victorian and South Australian players in the national team in their home states, even though those states were weaker. Along with splits in the national bodies which created a weak base from which to evangelise the game, and the failure to maintain meaningful interstate competition, Thompson's overview is a useful way of seeing how soccer's lack of a dominant administrative centre has a long history.

But politics aside, there is also the matter of Australia’s slavering devotion to England's Football Association, as Australian soccer throws its lot in with a body (the FA) which cares little for soccer's fortune's in the Antipodes. The longstanding and persistent lack of moral, financial and logistical support offered by England towards Australian soccer, and at times even hypocrisy of British sporting authorities should have rung alarm bells for Australian soccer years before the penny dropped. Yet the Australian soccer authorities, even as they became ever more aware of this lack of support, nevertheless remained devoted to the FA, even as Australia remained a subsidiary member of the FA on the same level as the Elementary Schools Association.

The book also detours into chapters about contemporary Indian, Indonesian Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Kiwi football. Some of these nations obviously had interactions with Australian soccer, either via tours to Australia or by Australia, but the main point of Thompson’s summaries of those neighbours of ours is to show how differently they approached international competition – not friendlies – and in some cases the differences in their relationships with their own colonial masters (East Indies/Dutch) or as colonial masters themselves (the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria). A point that the book seeks to make is that Kiwi soccer was especially poor by the 1930s – and that as a consequence of this, an inward looking Australia lacked meaningful competition among its own Empire brethren.

While I enjoyed the book, it does still suffer from some of the issues that Thompson’s previous book did, as well as some other issues. The book jumps around very quickly at times, and it can be difficult to follow the central argument and/or narrative. That’s because the book is at times underwritten, in that some chapters feel they're one anecdote or point of interest following another in a heady rush. That may be the case here because it’s a bit under-edited, an issue which can be put down to what is still in many ways a production of a fledgling small publisher finding its way.

Of more concern is the complete lack of footnotes as well as a bibliography or reference list. I understand that on one level the book isn't meant to be an academic treatise, but clearly there’s been a fair bit of research undertaken by Thompson to write the book, and I think it would've been valuable for people to see the sources that he’s relied upon, especially where it presents information that may new to researchers. Overall however, I really enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anyone looking for a history lesson on the early days of the Australian national men’s team, and the era and conditions under which they played.

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.

Book review - A double dose of Knox City

Knox City is an unremarkable club. That's not a slur, but merely a statement of fact. They are not and never will be a household name, or even a cult name in Australian soccer. Being unremarkable does not mean however that the club is unimportant. Socceroos have come from this club. Knox played in Victoria's top-tier. Knox even had a brief a stint in the National Youth League. And if nothing else, Knox City is important to the people who continue to attend and support the club, as they have done in the club's various guises since 1951 - remarkable longevity for any club in Victoria, but especially for one not tied to a major ethnic community, and especially one situated in the far-eastern suburbs.

What is remarkable about Knox City however is that where most clubs in Australia have managed to produce nothing in print about their history, Knox is able to say that there are two published works about the club in circulation.

Covering the first 50 years, some 18 years ago Chas Collison put out From Basywater to Knox City: The history of a soccer club, 1951-2001, a small booklet discussing the first 50 years of the Knox City Soccer Club. The A4 booklet runs to no more than about 20 pages, but within those pages it does its job admirably. Augmented by photographs, the booklet briefly covers the origins of the club within the local community of German members of the Temple Society; a list of office bearers; brief decade-by-decade narrative summaries of the club's first 50 years; a divisional history; some stuff on the club's juniors; and a page on the off-season All Nations Cup tournament, which Knox hosts on an annual basis.

It's well presented, and is the kind of thing that most clubs should be able to produce without too much effort. An interesting element of Collison's booklet, and one which might otherwise go overlooked is that it was completed with a small government grant given during the International Year of the Volunteer. It's the kind of thing that more clubs should be aware of: that not only do these kinds of grants exist to help clubs compile, preserve and present their histories, but that Football Victoria also offers assistance in winning these grants (though in Collison's case I assume it would've well pre-dated such federation assistance).


Bruce Darnell's Knox City FC: An Updated History from 2017 is by the author's own admission not an attempt to re-write Collison's work, but rather to make note of what's happened since; namely a sharp decline after a brief flirtation with the Victorian top-flight, and the eventual steadying of the ship and the club's status in the Victorian third and fourth tiers.

But Darnell also goes back in time and tries to fill in gaps that perhaps didn't occur to Collison. Thus Darnell also provides space to Knox's women's teams, its juniors and veterans teams, and also about 20 pages of photographs. About 100 of the 180 pages on offer are dedicated to the statistical history of the club. This includes divisional histories, league and cup information, as well as information about office holders, record holders, and an updated list of All Nations Cup winners.

The centrepiece of Darnell's statistical summary is his cataloguing of the results of 1,432 of 1,440 of Knox's senior men's league matches up until the end of 2017. The fact that Darnell has been able to achieve that level of detail for a predominantly lower league club is incredible. Darnell's summary also provides a kind of snapshot for the state of Victorian soccer records. Mainline federation (that is the not the amateurs or church leagues) results for senior men's are usually available if you look hard enough; scorers for those games are much rarer, and line-ups rarer still; and for women's teams all but impossible to get, especially before the mid-1990s. Darnell's work also highlights the collaborative nature of soccer historiography as practised by Victorian amateur soccer historians. Darnell pays credit to the many historians and stats collectors who have come before him, including John Punshon and Mark Boric.

One disappointing thing about both of these publications is that neither appears to have made it to the State Library of Victoria's collections. It'd be a safe bet that few people outside publishing circles are aware of the concept of "legal deposit" - that is, the legal requirement of sending in copies of your publication to a state or national library. It's not just a matter of legal obligation; it also makes good preservationist sense. Australian soccer clubs are notoriously poor record keepers when it comes to history, and thus having a copy of a text published on this or any other club in the safe hands of a state library is a good idea/ And apart from helping researchers and the curious have a safe, easy to find copy, it also takes some of the pressure amateur collectors and archivists from having to preserve and somehow promote all of this material on their own.

Copies of Darnell's book are reportedly still available from Knox City. For those who want to peruse a copy of Collison's book, I have scanned it and made it available here.

In the slash - Heidelberg United 4 South Melbourne 2

Unlike Cosmo Kramer, it's unlikely that we'll run out
of gas and wake up in a ditch to find the tank full.

Whatever illusory momentum we'd seemed to have built up by the end of the Green Gully match seems to have flown off into the ether. That goes for on field and off field, as the end of the season can't come fast enough, and the subsequent reckonings of how we ended up in this situation can get played out properly. At this stage all I'm hoping for is that our season ends in two weeks time, and is not extended to the damn playoff game on grand final day.

The previous week, an indeterminate amount of supporters were suddenly banned by the club for less than clear reasons. There was some talk that those people would also be banned from the away game against Heidelberg, but that did not seem to come to pass. Clarendon Corner arrived, situated itself in south-east corner of Olympic Village as opposed to its usual spot underneath shed roof, and chanted their usual repertoire as well countless adaptations of those familiar tunes substituted with the words "sack the board".

The club has since put up a notice on its website acknowledging the bans - clumsily noted as "up to eight supporters", as if they don't know the exact numbers.

It is impossible to make out from that post what exactly constituted the anti-social behaviour. In the past there have been attempts to clamp down on swearing in chants, but if that was the case here, then even your correspondent would be banned. If it was for the "sack the board" chants, those have been a serious and non-serious staple of South Melbourne matches for 20 years. If it was for the "sack the board" banner, that seems incredibly petty. If it was because of the events following our last home game against Heidelberg, I wasn't in the vicinity of that action, so I can't say with any authority whether the club has the moral right to do what it has done. If it's something else apart from that, I'd love to know what it is.

All that will be answered in good time, one way or another, but back to the immediate concern at hand. I don't think anyone seriously expected us to get a point at the Village, and the state of the substitutes bench said a bit too. Marcus Schroen started there, I would assume because he was still suffering from the effects of his injury the previous week; but talk around the ground was that he'd been dropped because he'd missed a training session due to new work commitments. As it was, Schroen came on during the second half and made a noticeable difference, and you wonder what would've happened had he played the whole game?

Milos Lujic started, even as rumours began circulating around the possibility that he's already come to a verbal agreement to play at Oakleigh next year. I don't know how much stock to put into rumours like that, which seem to gain momentum mostly when he has a bad game for us. He didn't have a  great game on Sunday, but to be honest, the service he received from our almost completely poxy midfield in the first half was very poor. Ndumba Makeche came off the bench, and seemed to do a lot better, being more mobile and more willing to throw himself into the fray.

Disregarding for a moment the post-season chaos that could engulf the club, I waver between thinking that there are at least a handful of players from this squad that could be retained, and then thinking that just about everyone is likely to bail and that we could be seeing an entirely new squad next year. Leigh Minopoulos played his heart out, but will his persistent injuries finally see him move on? Matthew Foschini sometimes shows proper leadership qualities and determination, but he's just as prone on his worst days to playing lazy football, hitting blind passes to nobody.

I could go on, but there really isn't any point just yet, because we still have to survive this season. With no other teams playing this weekend, it was our nominal chance to get a point or even a very unlikely win, or at the very least lose minimally and keep our goal difference advantage over Green Gully. Instead we found ourselves 4-0 down at halftime, our goal difference lead nearly evaporated, and the likelihood that it would disappearing over the subsequent 45 minutes. Somehow that didn't come to pass, which I put down to Makeche and Schroen's intervention. Back at 4-2, at least something from the day had been salvaged, and for some even the possibility that had we just got that third goal that we could've stormed our way to an unlikely draw.

But that's people getting way too optimistic for my tastes. All we can take out of the game is that Heidelberg didn't put away any of their numerous second half chances, that we clawed back a couple of goals and maybe something positive to take into next week.

Next week
Avondale away on Saturday afternoon at the Reggio Calabria Club. By Saturday night we'll have a good idea of what it is we'll need from the final round.

MCC Library on Wednesday, with the panel for the launch of Ian Syson's
 The Game That  Never Happened. In the far distance, Ian Syson, John Harms,
 John Didulica, and Roy Hay. Photo: Les Street.

The game that never happened
Last Wednesday, soccer journalists, football academics, Twitter elite, and assorted other people found themselves at the MCC Library for the launch of Ian Syson's new book The Game That Never Happened: The Vanishing History of Soccer in Australia. 

The launch party was in the form of a panel, as seems to be the trend of these things - well, this is the second book in a row that I've seen launched in this way at least. Joining Syson on the panel were Australian Rules and general sports writer John Harms, and PFA CEO John Didulica, with the book's publisher Roy Hay being the compere of sorts. Sadly, noted sportswriter Gideon Haigh was unable to attend due to a competing engagement, but he did send in a short summary of his thoughts which was read out during the launch, I think noting the way the book overturns the illusion of Australian sporting meritocracy.

Harms proceeded to discuss the ways in which the book fills a gap in its intersection of sport and culture, as well as noting its combination of two intellectual streams - narrative history and classic cultural studies. Harms also reflected on the book's touching on an aspect of his history, when it mentions the south-east Queensland town of Oakey, where Harms grew up. Asked whether Syson's book had changed his views on the development of Australian sporting cultures, with particular reference to his Queensland experience, Harms answered that it had actually solidified his opinions that as worthwhile and vibrant as soccer was, it had nevertheless failed to establish itself at the apex or centre of the local or national sporting cultures. The book's discussion of the spread of British miners however did illuminate why some towns had more vibrant soccer scenes than nearby towns.

For his part, Didulica noted that his reaction to the book was an aggrieved, visceral reaction, centred on the injustices faced by the sport in eras prior to those of the ethnic game. The book reveals layers of history, to my mind kind of a series of Troys, each one built on top of the ruins of the previous city. Didulica connected in particular with page 60, and the ways in which the Australian Rules fraternity was able to embed itself (within its dominant states) as being authentically British and Australian, while the commitment of the soccer people was seen as only towards Britain. It's an issue of perceived separateness which has persisted in the portrayals of Australian soccer and its adherents as having a lesser commitment to Australia, despite the fact that the formation of those clubs was in itself a commitment to a permanent existence in this country. But we return again to the idea that soccer, existing outside the official institutions and cultural mainstream of Australian life, finds itself forever battling for a way in against entrenched and defensive competitors.

Syson sees this soccerphobia beginning in Perth, where the Edwardian ideals of sporting amateurism and pluralism are shown to be an illusion, as the choice of which football code to pursue becomes more than just an aesthetic choice; morality and values exhibited through sport become important, and a sort of footy nationalism begins to take hold. There was some follow up discussion after that discussing the public debates of system of chaos vs scientific play, differing depictions of the violence of play, the militarisation of sport then and now, and the danger of people working on these histories having their work become part of what I consider to be pissing contests between codes about who sacrificed more for various war efforts. It's certainly not Syson's intention to contribute to that kind of discourse - his intention is show how the growth of early 20th Australian soccer was devastated by players volunteering for war - but it is something that could certainly happen, and probably already has.

If I were to summarise the point of both the book and the launch discussion in a sentence, I would say that soccer is popular in the wrong places, then popular with the wrong people. Where it becomes the mainstream game in its early days, it is too far away from the centres of economic and social power to become a game embedded within the broader culture. Later, of course, it becomes associated so much with foreignness that even though the game has been revived in metropolitan centres, there is a stigma that cannot be overcome.

As for the book itself, it is in many ways a reworking and consolidation of several academic journal articles that Syson has written, mostly on the pre-wogball history of soccer in Australia. There's other stuff that could've been included - including some really interesting stuff on early Aboriginal soccer players - but this is a lean book whose main goal is to provoke a fervent revisionist discussion about Australian soccer history, while also prompting further research from others. Only time will tell of course how successful this book is at doing that.

Knowing the author for so long, and having discussed elements of this work with Ian for many years now, I can't really go out of my way to review the book as such. What I can say is that for various reasons the book had a protracted and difficult gestation period, and I'm glad and relieved that it's finally seen the light of day. Like many Australian soccer books, this one hardly sets out to provide the definitive take on the game's history. What it does do is scratch the surface of hitherto under-researched areas, breaking down assumptions about the origins of the game in Australia and its relationship to other football codes. It flies across the country, to both urban and rural areas, taking what on the surface seem like random formations of often short-lived clubs and soccer scenes, into what could be classed as broader trends. (One day Syson will have to follow through on his interactive historical map idea).

To that end I would've liked to have seen perhaps an appendix dealing with the research methodology, and especially its use of the National Library of Australian newspaper database Trove. It's an interesting point because during the panel discussions Syson did go into a bit of detail into his use of Trove, finding issues of nomenclature, articles where it was unclear what code of football was being played, and moments where soccer disappears so suddenly from the public record, that people believe themselves to be founding "inaugural" soccer clubs in their towns, oblivious to the fact that soccer had been there before; in some cases, very recently.

History is forgotten then; now it's flattened, so that mythologies about the game (and its counterpart games) have taken firm hold, and that cultural assumptions also obscure how those deciding which sports to play in colonial and early Federation Australia came to their decisions. So much of what we claim to understand about how that all happened is informed by the present, not the past; for instance, the matter of low scoring being used as justification for Australian Rules' popularity over soccer, when in its early decades Australian Rules had scoring that was comparable to that of soccer.

Within the book, too, one gets the idea that as much as Syson has done well to unearth hitherto forgotten and neglected materials, still was is often found is viewed through the lens of people who are not from the soccer fraternity. That causes its own problems, but that correspondence is still better than nothing and especially the assumed absence of writing about soccer from that era. The contemporary reports Syson looks at may be spotty, biased, dismissive, curious, and any number of other things, including an often frustrating penchant for having no eye to posterity, a trait common to news reports on both proto-football and codified football. But these articles are there, and they provide their own clues to what Syson argues is a much more complicated situation than has been given credit for.

What Syson seeks to make clear is that soccer is often there physically, even in its ebbs and flows of popularity, but that its cultural and historical status is made much smaller than it actually is, or rendered entirely non-existent. That's not to argue that soccer is akin to the mainstream codes in its centrality to Australian culture, only that  the ledger leans too much one way. How it got to that stage is part of what the book begins to answer. There is scope then to discuss in future work - should it ever come to pass - ideas of Victorian (as in the state/colony, not the era) nationalism and cultural imperialism, alongside the self-inflicted wounds.

Syson is also careful though; while acknowledging the debates being had in Australia in the 1800s about what game of football is best and which to play, that we need to avoid elevating those advocating for soccer into higher positions of cultural prominence than they probably/possibly had. There book is also informed by the centrality of Victoria to these matters, and sometimes you can see glimpses of Syson's anti-Victorian leanings become evident throughout the book. It often does read like something written by a cultural outsider, and one wonders if there's scope for work on the cultural history of early Australian Rules to be written by someone from the outside.

(James Coventry's book on the evolution of Australian Rules tactics, Time and Space, does this to a degree - it helps reclaim the role in the development of Australian Rules from a hegemonic Victorian point of view - but Coventry is a still a fo0ty person, albeit one from South Australia.)

As for how to purchase this book, while sales have gone well, there is an issue with the book's distributor, which has gone into liquidation. That will be rectified soon I'm told. For those hoping for an ebook edition, I am told that this is also being worked on.

Final thought
The funniest thing to happen this week was seeing fellow South fan Dave's reaction at the book launch, as he saw me in my element of quasi Australian soccer writing celebrity. In that regard, it was nice to meet sometime poet Alan Whykes, and writer/coach/fan George Ploumidis at the game itself, and to have a casual chat. If it was only about watching the game, and not being able to share our joy and misery with other people, it'd be a much lesser experience.

Dire situation - South Melbourne 1 Bulleen Lions 2

Yes, it's true. I have done everything in my powers to push the writing of this post to whenever the latest possible moment was. I read a novel from start to finish for the first time since January. I went on ridiculously long bus trips with one of my brothers so that he could order some new glasses. I watched a hell of a lot of TV that even I'm embarrassed to admit that I watched - though I stopped short at the Denton interview of Gene Simmons. I even read the letters pages of Royal Auto, where people who like going on car trips to see lighthouses or complaining about less than stellar driving by their fellow motorists go because they haven't discovered the black hole of social media.

Spoilt as we have been these past few years with something approximating relative success, being now mired in something very much more akin to complete and utter suckage makes being a South fan less tolerable. The suddenness of that transformation adds to the misery. At least when we sucked in the years 2007 to (June/July) 2013, that sucking felt like a warm blanket: yes we sucked, but in the VPL years it became basically all we knew, and on some level you could justify turning up to watch mediocre season after mediocre season. After all, the club was probably going to cark it soon, so what did it matter if we won or lost?

But winning changed the feeling, made the real or imagined post-NSL death spiral of the club feel less real. But winning has gone, so here we are, back to the old feeling, but much worse. Lining up with what could be considered a makeshift midfield at best - no Schroen, Epifano, Jawadi, Brennan, Pavlou, and instead fielding newly signed and probably out of position Howard and Marafioti, and a busted up Minopoulos - expectations were low. Sure there was a returning after five weeks' suspension and before he leaves for Russia next week Milos Lujic, but that was probably just as much down to new striker signing Ndumba Makeche's international clearance not coming through as anything. Unless of course Makeche actually isn't very good, and we were going to start Milos regardless.

Of course none of that mattered in the slightest because we conceded a goal after seven seconds. SEVEN SECONDS! I can only remember seeing such a thing happen in the flesh once, and even then it was a state league two reserves game and there were mitigating circumstances of an absolute fool of a referee who made a big deal before kickoff about the colour of the long sleeves worn under the jerseys, and despite that there were still no real excuses for copping that goal. The blokes who copped that goal for us on Sunday are experienced, well-remunerated, and any number of other positive epithets you can choose to use. You can point to discord and disquiet, low morale, poor coaching, any number of things, but you should still never cop a goal within seven second of play.

At least wait thirty seconds! That implies that there may have been some neat passing, or a piece of stunning bad luck, or at least some semblance of someone trying to provide an obstacle to conceding the goal. The only obstacle to us conceding was a hopelessly stranded Jerrad Tyson in goals, and what he could seriously do when seeing that blue and white Red Sea open in front of him except hope for the absolute best while expecting the absolute worst?

After that, we put in some effort to try and get back that goal, but it was rather like the proverbial dirty, slimy, airborne pig. No amount of rationalisation could convince anyone that it was still any good. Brad Norton, the one man seemingly willing to front up and take any responsibility for what has been going on this year, did his best; but as for the rest, whether new signing or old hand, nothing clicked, nothing worked, and nothing looked like working. And when you're going through a dire run of form, all the things which work out when you're going well - opposition mistakes, referee decisions, a cleared ball landing in or at the edge of the box with one of yours ready to hit it home - all goes the window, making things even harder.

I mean, there were neat touches, and lots of crosses and corners, but rarely any of these things in consecutive order, and thus rarely a moment where there seemed to be any coherence in our path towards goal. Everything seems forced and predictable now. And then the ball gets turned over, and then the other side of problem comes out, players out of position, players being played out of position, and players making fundamental errors of skill and concentration. Sure we lasted more than seven seconds without conceding after halftime, but the goal we copped three minutes into the second half was little better than the one we copped in the first. If there was any doubt that we were going to get back in this game, it was extinguished then and there.

Late on we actually managed to score, Oliver Minatel bundling home what we hoped but did not dare believe could be the goal that would kick start a comeback, and it turns out that it didn't. This is not 2017 after all. Sure we pumped balls forward, but never really got close, just as we hadn't got close for the rest of the game. Now, critical as I have been of Minatel this season, I will give him this much credit - even though his four goals in 2018 have been the arsiest collection of goals in a South shirt since Kevin Nelson's half season with us in 2006, at least he's managed to get them! While everyone else fiddles while Rome burns or wallows in their own misery, Minatel has something to point to as a contribution. Call it clutching at straws if you like, but in a shipwreck situation you try and grab onto anything you can to stay afloat.

I can't even say Bulleen played that well. They looked like the bottom of the table team that they are, but they still created three or four genuine chances compared to our measly half chances of crosses met by no one or players off balance or caught easily by the Bulleen keeper. And I don't mean to sell Bulleen short, because they did the job they came to do, but even out of form the calibre of players we had out there shouldn't have let the situation deteriorate so much. But we are so much less the sum of our parts at the moment that anything resembling competence from our opponents makes things seem impossible from our end. Indeed, the last game we won, against Kingston, was as much due to Kingston's incompetence in the two goals they coughed up to us as it was due to anything we did ourselves.

Where improvement will come in the short term, let alone the rest of the season as a whole, is anyone's guess, but I don't think anyone's particularly optimistic. At some point Marcus Schroen will come back into the side, hopefully a fit Iqi. Maybe this Ndumba guy will show us that the Malaysian third division is a step up from the NPL? We're somehow still outside the relegation zone, but that won't last - indeed that could happen as early ads Saturday night if Northcote and Hume play out a draw. There's half a season's worth of games to go for us, but seemingly no one inside the club who knows how to "dig up, stupid".

Next game
Dandenong Thunder at home.

Mid-season ins and out
There are a lot of rumours flying around about who's in and who's out, and those rumours are getting increasingly extreme as befits our current crisis. Among the factual elements:

Ins

• Luke Adams (miscellaneous frozen tundra) 
• Giuseppe "Pep" Marafioti (Oakleigh)
• George Howard (APIA, not the insurance company unless he has a day job there)
• Ndumba Makeche (Malaysia)

Outs

• Andy Brennan (Oakleigh)
• Luke Pavlou (Oakleigh)
• Keegan Coulter (dunno)
• Ajdin Fetahagic (*shrugs shoulders*)

After that though... I don't know. There have been persistent rumours that night club proprietor and recently ousted Oakleigh Cannons co-coach Con Tangalakis will be coming in as an assistant or mentor or something for Sasa Kolman. That hasn't happened yet, it may not ever happen, or it could happen really subtly and one day he'll just happen to be there as if he was always there.

Not that it was any of our business, and it may not even become relevant regardless, but I always wondered how a co-coaching arrangement worked. I mean, co-captains is a stupid enough arrangement, but unless you're in a sport like cricket or rugby union where captains have some tangible responsibility aside from deciding which end to kick to, captaincy is probably a fairly overrated concept in sports; though I say this with no first-hand experience of having had to serve under a captain in any sport. But co-coaches? Who is ultimately responsible for success or failure? Typically, my mind goes to toward Andorra's dual-prince arrangement, though even there I assume that's mostly ceremonial in function.

As for the rest of the transfer window, I don't know if there are any other players lined up for entry or exit. A lot of that probably depends on the fate of the matter below.

A Gannon Television production, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The whereabouts and fate of the People's Champ against Bulleen went largely unremarked upon, surprisingly. I suppose when you cop a goal within seven seconds of starting, trivial things like that seem to matter a lot less. Still, there are no official reports of what the ultimate fate is for Nick Epifano regarding his tenure at South. The overwhelming consensus of the rumour mill is that he is no longer at South, or that he is on his way out of the club. Somebody told me or I read somewhere that his name was taken down from his locker, but I have no idea if this is true or whether the players even have their names above their lockers.

While agreeing that he is out of the club, the various rumour mongers can't agree on just where he will or where he has ended up. Oakleigh to reunite with Chris Taylor? Avondale, whom he reputedly was set to join up with after the end of the 2017 season? Heidelberg, with his mate Andrew Cartanos? At the time of print, no one seemed to know for sure. Neither does anyone know whether these or any other potential destination clubs have room in their PPS caps - assuming anyone's still bothering to tally those up - or whether potential destination clubs even want him, seeing Epifano a disruptive and needy dressing room presence that they could do without, regardless of his talent.

And then of course you have those of our fans who view these things pragmatically and/or vindictively, who suggest that as an unwilling but nevertheless contracted player, the People's Champ should be made to play out the rest of the season in the under 20s especially if we can't get a decent transfer fee for him. I get the logic of that kind of sentiment, but... actually there is no but. Surely we should do what's in South's best interests here, right? It's coming across all very high school at the moment. Considering Epifano's inability to bust out a convincing highbrow pro-wrestling style face-turn, such a development in the storyline probably suits the low-rent Australian teen soap-opera the whole Epifano saga has actually resembled.

Andrew Howe's Socceroos Encyclopaedia
Last Tuesday, Andrew Howe's national tour to launch his Socceroos Encyclopaedia made its Melbourne stop, in our very own social club. It being a Tuesday (training) night and the proceedings getting underway at about 6:00PM perhaps made it difficult for people to attend; nevertheless to my mind the turnout was disappointing. At about 30 odd people, there was a distinct lack of South fans, general Australian soccer and Socceroos fans, and especially former Socceroos. Look, I get that it's a book launch, and not exactly the hottest ticket in town in Australian soccer circles, but when we complain that we don't get enough positive press and that we don't get enough of our stories told, and then we refuse to support those who are doing some of the heavy lifting - and in Howe's case, some of the heaviest lifting over a considerable period of time - then how surely we lose some credibility as a self-righteous and always indignant soccer culture.

Anyway, that little rant out of the way, let's turn our attention to the festivities at hand. Bonita Mersiadies, (the publisher of the book via her Fair Play press, a new player in the local soccer publishing scene) was overseas, so it fell to former South Melbourne Hellas board member and current AAFC spruiker Tom Kalas to introduce the book, who did a good job. Then it was time for the man of the moment to do his thing. Howe provided a shortened version of the presentation he gave at the PFA's history conference a couple of weeks before (and I will get to finishing that write up, I swear), discussing trends of migration and ethnic origins of the Socceroos, as well the national men's journeys across the world over the past 96 years.

Then several Socceroos in attendance - Heidelberg's Jim Tansey and Gary Cole, South Melbourne's
George Christopoulos, Jimmy Armstrong, Alan Davidson, Con Boutsianis, and Ted Smith -  recounted brief highlights and recollections of playing for Australia. This can be seen below in George Cotsanis' video of that portion of the event.



Afterwards, I appreciated those Socceroos present - later joined by a late arriving FFV president and former Socceroo Kimon Taliadoros - taking the time to sign the books for those fans who had made the effort to turn up for the launch. I'm not usually an autograph hunter or prone to fan boy antics (except for one particular example from many years ago, but that's another story), and usually the author's signature is more than enough. But I made sure to go around collecting all the signatures available. I also enjoyed the conversations had with some of the players, especially about Middle Park and trying to identify the characters in South's Team of the Century painting.

As for the book itself... it's a beast of a hardcover, retailing at around $70. I'm not a fan of hardcover books myself, but I've no regrets over my purchase. It's beautifully presented, plenty of colour photographs, and the kind of thing that should find its way into every public library and into the home. Along with the biographies of each Socceroo, the book also included statistical and demographic analysis, and special features on four World Cup captains, which don't shy away from the personal toll that role can take on a player.

A Matildas version is also in the works, set for publication next year, which will tell a very different but equally important story. If the quality of that production comes anywhere close to this book, it'll also be worth purchasing. One feels also that with the 100th anniversary of the first Australian national team game coming up in 2022, that there could be a bumper centenary edition coming up.

Comment moderation issue
I'm slower in approving comments on here lately because they're no longer being emailed to me for approval. That's a Google issue, which I hope is sorted out soon.

Around the grounds
Shiny swinging metallic balls
Sometimes if South is going really badly or has lost an important match, I don't have the heart to go to other matches. And sometimes South is going so badly, that going to another match, one I can watch as a neutral, is actually kind of pleasurable. I don't mind the cold when the sun disappears behind a cloud or some trees. I don't mind the dewy grass, or the bracing winds. I don't even mind the dire football likely to be on offer. I don't even have a formula for deciding whether to go or not when I'm in one of these moods. At best it's a Newton's cradle; sometimes the metallic misery balls swing one way, and then another. So, after doing the weekly supermarket trip on Saturday I decided to drive to Ardeer Reserve for Westgate vs Corio. I hadn't seen Westgate play since they moved back to the newly renovated Ardeer Reserve this season, after spending last year playing home games around the corner from my house. I hadn't seen Corio for three years.

I bought my cevapi roll, resisted the urge to buy a "Косово је Србија" wristband, and settled in to watch the game. I got chatting to the Whittlesea United assistant coach who was there to watch Westgate - they play them this week in a catch-up game - and learned that Tansel Baser is still kicking arse for Whittlesea at 40 years of age. Corio took the lead from the one indisputable moment of quality in the game; a brilliant through ball cut up the Westgate defence, and the poor touch of the Corio forward actually saw the ball slip out of reach while also making the home side's keeper collide with said forward, giving away a penalty. The penalty was saved, but the rebound tucked away, and thus we settled in for about 80 minutes of Corio sitting back, soaking up pressure, and Westgate not really having any idea how to break that down. Oh, they got close a couple of times from set pieces - and one disallowed goal had the locals in a frenzy, which then ended up in a bizarrely amicable discussion between the crowd and the officiating linesman on the outer side - but they could've played for another 90 minutes and still not have found the equaliser.

Still, I look forward to seeing Tansel in action there this week.

Final thought
The loukoumades people couldn't even organise to have crushed walnuts on hand. End times are nearer than even I'd imagined.

Book review - David Hill's The Fair and the Foul

Let's cut right to the chase: no one needs to buy David Hill's The Fair and the Foul, and no one needs to read it either. I can only think of two kinds of people who would end up reading this book:

1. Older Anglo-Celtic Australian males who received this book as a Christmas or birthday present, to be read on holiday or during a long train trip from regional Australia to see a city-based medical specialist.
2. Australian soccer people who hate David Hill.

Your correspondent clearly falls into the latter of these demographics, and thus my copy was sourced from a university library. Yes, David Hill will probably get a lending rights royalty in addition to his cut of whatever Victoria University paid for the book, but I'm trying to minimise the damage as much as possible without resorting to treating a bookstore like a public library.

Anyway, this book's problems are numerous. Hill flits between thematic and chronological approaches, occasionally inserting personal anecdotes. This prevents a coherent narrative emerging, while also undermining the book's sense of purpose; it's a real mess of a book, often little more than a bunch of populist generalisations which zip by. And as Tom Heenan points out in his review, there are far too many factual mistakes for a book which aims to be on at least some level an authoritative reference to Australian sport, regardless of its generalist scope. (though Heenan's review also has a key mistake, claiming that Hill was chairman of Soccer Australia from 1987-1995)

All of these failures point to slack editing. The book has an index and reference list, though it does not include a reference for the one quote that I really wanted to chase up on behalf of someone else.  There are even moments where Hill feels the need to explain things which don't need explaining: after quoting cricket writer Gideon Haigh's assertion that Australian cricket authorities in the 1970s were a conservative gerontocracy, Hill goes on to say what Haigh meant by that statement.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that Hill spends much of the book talking about the heroes and villains already familiar to most Australian sports fans with some historical knowledge, a few themes carve an accidental course throughout Fair and Foul. Hill tells us that Australians are often too forgiving of their sporting heroes when they screw up; that Australian sporting clubs and bodies, when given the choice between money and ethics, will almost always choose the former; that in the battle between those seeking to professionalise sport and those seeking to keep a sense of antiquated 'purity' alive, neither group had athletes' best interests at heart.

Hill also pulls up a great unspoken thread of Australian sport - that of the interaction of class and sport. There are the egos of men like Alan Bond and Kerry Packer, the immovable elitism of amateur sporting bodies, and the uncaring administrators of football codes who disregard the emotions of fans as being a burden to progress. Then there are the athletes themselves, especially those from working class or disadvantaged backgrounds, for whom having talent is not enough, and who have to overcome barriers of class in order to reach the top.

As much as these threads and others like them are inherently interesting, they go largely unexplored. In detailing the folk heroes/legends of Australian sport up to the end of its amateur era in the 1960s and 70s, Hill never explains what if any relevance that era has to contemporary audiences. Do Australian sports audiences care for the Lithgow Flash and Les Darcy, or for Herb Elliot and Harry Hopman? One of the great Australian sporting truths is that what appears to be a shared national sporting culture is often anything but. Across gender, race, class, and geographic boundaries, the Australian sporting experience is, if anything, an incredibly fractured one. Individuals or teams which manage to escape the confines of their particular demographic are the exception, not the norm.

Despite the way they disrupt whatever narrative momentum he manages to create, Hill's personal experiences are the highlight of the book. Whether you love or hate Hill, he's had an interesting life, and a large part of that includes his proximity to sport. For Australian soccer fans, Hill's controversial tenure as chairman of Soccer Australia comes first to mind, but Hill was also a good rugby league player (offered a place in North Sydney's first team squad, he opted to play second tier instead), was president of Norths for three years, was involved with the anti-tobacco push in sport, and in broadcast deals as part his tenure as chairman of the ABC.

Among the worthwhile sporting nuggets Hill provides are his being invited to Kerry Packer's private television room - the one that had global satellite feeds, and from which Packer programmed Channel 9; the insights into the hold the tobacco industry had on Australian sports bodies through the 1980s (with clear parallels to the gambling industry today); being invited to a big cricket shindig because the organisers have him mistaken for a more prominent and successful namesake; and that the process of getting Terry Venables to become Socceroos coach started with an English backpacker who was working as an admin temp at Soccer Australia.

But these moments are few and far between, and their scarcity only serves to make them feel at odds with the rest of the book. Even worse, the fleeting nature of these personal reminiscences means that the chance for reflection and insight on Hill's behalf is almost non-existent. For example, while praising himself for the Venables adventure, Hill fails to mention that Venables also cost Soccer Australia its Coca-Cola sponsorship (Venables signed up with rival beverage company Schweppes).

As for the book's soccer content, it's largely limited to two chapters, one about our more recent world cup qualification history, the other about the game's status as the 'sleeping giant' of Australian sport. The 'sleeping giant' chapter spends much of its time focused on Tony Labozzetta and Marconi, and the outcomes of the Bradley report, Stewart inquiry, and NSL task-force report. There is almost nothing new here, and frustratingly considering his proximity to that era, almost nothing you can't find in more depth elsewhere, such as in Ross Solly's Shoot Out. Neither does Hill mention the ABC's abandonment of the National Soccer League part way into its broadcasting deal while Hill was ABC chairman.

Most gallingly for those of a particular political persuasion in Australian soccer, Hill does not apply the same set of standards to ethnic soccer supporters as he does for rugby league fans. Hill reiterates that his expulsion of Heidelberg United, Parramatta Melita, and Brunswick Juventus from the national Soccer League in the mid 1990s was necessary for soccer to shed its dead-weight of ethnicity to move forward into the mainstream. Hill points out - not without merit - that if the 10,000 strong crowd protesting that decision had actually turned up to games, the clubs and the game would have been healthier (or at least have made it harder for Hill to argue for the removal of those clubs).

But when rugby league's Super League war and and its aftermath occurs, Hill is much more sparing of the feelings of the fans of some of rugby league's struggling clubs. (as a rugby league novice, I found Hill's explanation of how the Super League war played out from beginning to end to be a useful primer on the subject). For his own side, Norths, which ended up in a disastrous merger (and later de-merger) with Manly, the blame is placed entirely on Norths' board at the time. For South Sydney, who were expelled from the league at the end of the ARL/Super League split, Hill addressed a crowd of (apparently) 50,000 Souths' protesters telling them to not give up the fight for reinstatement to national competition.

Why he was more supportive of Souths' fans than the ethnic soccer supporters is for the reader to infer. But a look at Souths' average crowds since the Rabbitohs' return to the national competition in 2002 shows no significant increase in attendances. Of course the situations are not exactly like for like - rugby league had a media profile and corporate support that could be exploited whereas soccer in its ethnic setup did not - but there's scope to see inherent contradictions in Hill's support of one group and not the other.

Hill finishes his book by comparing the future outlooks for the four football codes. For everyone other than the AFL, he foresees problems. Rugby union's crowds and player pool are, as they always have been, incredibly limited, and its dependence on very select demographics continues to stifle its chances of increasing its national footprint. Rugby league's player pool, even in its working class heartland, is under stress, its crowds have been slow to increase, and when combined with league's tiny global footprint, rugby league is an increasingly difficult position. This is notwithstanding Australian rugby league's healthy income from its broadcast rights (and unhealthy cowering to those broadcasters in terms of fixturing), and its willingness to make changes to the game to increase its attractiveness.

For soccer, while the A-League has manifest itself as the league that Hill wanted but could not create in the 1990s, its status as a backwater in terms of soccer's global empire holds it back. Meanwhile Hill has almost nothing but praise for the AFL, the most stable, wealthy and progressive of the Australian football codes, unencumbered (apparently) either culturally or economically by its limited global reach.

Despite some interesting if largely unexplored narrative threads, and the occasional interesting personal anecdote, The Fair and the Foul is content to rehash the usual stereotypes of Australian sports history and culture, This probably fits in with Hill's oeuvre of populist history writing - I've not read his other history books - but the book adds little to update or challenge assumptions about Australian sport. Should Hill ever decide to write a proper sporting memoir, going into detail about his experiences in rugby league and soccer as a player and administrator, and his dealings with various sports while chairman of the ABC (Fair and Foul includes a good one about lawn bowls, the ABC, and a Mazda sponsorship), that will be a book worth reading. But for now he seems content to faff about with disposable output.

Book review, sorta - Walk Alone: The Craig Johnston Story, by Craig Johnston and Neil Jameson

I'll be clear on this. I skimmed/speed read through much of this some time in late 2016, so don't treat this review as some sort of gospel truth. I was mostly interested in particular aspects of this as it relates to one of the chapters in my thesis. But even from a cursory reading, this book is interesting, at least up to a certain point. And then not so very much, at least to me.

The least interesting parts to be honest are when Johnston is at Liverpool. As a long-ago lapsed Liverpool supporter (it's a long story, not very interesting, even as that experience explains some things about me), I really couldn't care less about the trudging through the seasons, the reminiscences of games and incidents, with the exception of Johnston's experience of Heysel.

What I found most interesting then were the things outside Johnston's time at Liverpool, beginning with his Newcastle upbringing.  If Newcastle (and its southern counterpart in the Illawarra) are often thought to be among the holy cradles of Australian soccer, then what is often seemingly left out of those hagiographic discussions is the ethnic quality of the game there.

And in this case one is not talking about those we usually consider as 'ethnic' in Australia, but rather that invisible ethnicity in the form of the British migrant. It may be true that I will overstate the case for the invisibility of the British soccer character as it applies to the Hunter and Illawarra regions, but I think there's also some validity to the notion that the soccer in these areas is considered far more 'Australian' than the post-war 'ethnic' boom period scene; that Britishness and Australian-ness become conflated ideas.

For his part, Johnston is forthright not only about the British upbringing he had personally, but also about the British character of Newcastle soccer. This is amplified for him by his family history and personal experience. One of Johnston's grandfathers was from Edinburgh; his father, like other young soccer players in the region, went to Britain and tried to become a professional footballer, but failed. Johnston also ties that sense of Newcastle soccer's British qualities to the fact that the aforementioned British character was also bound to a British working class character.

Indeed, through establishing the book's narrative in this way, Johnston is at pains to emphasise his own sense of Britishness, one bound up with the game as his forbears knew it and as he himself experienced it in the Hunter Valley. In that sense there is a pervasive sense of Anglophilia in this book, at least it relates to soccer, It is why there is a skewed and narrow sense of what Australian soccer is to Johnston, one that takes little account of the changes that occurred outside out of the 'heartland' soccer areas like Newcastle, and which transformed the character of the game.

By the time Johnston's career has taken off, he is in England full-time (except for that brief stint for Newcastle KB in the NSL), and thus has very little to say about Australian soccer as a whole. Australian soccer then for Johnston is an experience largely left behind once he succeeds in securing a contract at Middlesbrough.

But Johnston is also keen to emphasise the Australian qualities of his upbringing, especially that of a rural/regional lifestyle, full of activities other than soccer, including skateboarding (he even takes his skateboard to England) and surfing. And yes, Johnston does come to that bit about 'surfing for England', and his explanation has much legitimacy to it, or at least more nuance than the vitriolic response that his offhand comment has seen him endure over the years.

Johnston is a good student, but restless. That restlessness is channeled into his football via a manic commitment to fitness, and relentless pursuit of improving his technique by himself in England. One of the harsh lessons that Johnston learns early on is that in the cold and lonely existence of the wannabe professional footballer, there are few friends, and that it is truly dog-eat-dog. Whatever else one might think of Johnston, one can't fault his determination to overcome his initial failure and his technical limitations as a footballer, and succeed regardless.

(In that sense there are parallels between Johnston's attitude and view of himself as a footballer with Paul Wade, the ironically British born player who came to define and be defined by his utter commitment to Australian soccer).

And then Johnston goes to Liverpool, and apart from the usual tribulations of injury, media, managerial and playing intrigues, Johnston seems to be having a great time (yes, there is an account of how the 'Anfield Rap' came about), living the dream playing for one of the most famous clubs in the world, and one at the peak of its power. So I breezed through those parts, remembering little of them, until the point where Johnston's sister falls ill and he retires from the game in order to help care for her.

It's a little irritating then that the book stops at the end of Johnston's playing career, so we don't get to learn about what happens next - which for Johnston includes a continuation of his pursuit of photography, a run-in with bankruptcy, and his invention of Adidas' Predator boot. But it's a well produced (plenty of photos, excellent page design) and well written book, full of Johnston's personality, and worth picking up if one come across it. I read it in bursts at the State Library, a nice hardcover thing, though I assume there's a paperback version somewhere out there

Some thoughts on Joe Gorman's 'The Death and Life of Australian Soccer'

The book is out now, and is widely available at chain
  and independent booksellers. It's also available as an
 ebook. The paperback retails at about $32 in stores

Warning: this piece contains some minor spoilers. Also, it's not really a review, more of a very ragged meandering through the book's themes and other stuff, partly because I can't hold together a coherent narrative to save myself, but also because I was told (probably rightly) that I couldn't really review a book I was in. Also I've been writing this while holed up at home because I've been sick.

Before I begin there are two clarifications that I need to make about this review. The first of these is for those of you who have not read yet the book, to keep in mind that your reviewer and an element of his writings and ideology is a part of this book, used as a vehicle for explaining Gorman’s thesis. The second point is that I have read this book before; not only in the discussions over several years with Joe which have helped inform and influence it – though to be absolutely clear, what is presented here is very much Gorman’s own argument, based on his own thorough research – but especially its draft form which was a little longer but otherwise near enough to the finished product.

The point of that preface is to say the following: I admit that I was almost in tears reading what would become this book the first time around, and having read it in its completed form now, I grieve again for what has been lost so far and for what will likely be lost soon enough. I also felt that it would upset people, especially on our side of the bitter/new dawn ledger, because unlike in his journalism Gorman does not go out of his way to appease our sensitivities especially regarding our future prosperity and relevance. As for the people on the new dawn side, if they get upset at anything in this book, they always have the comfort of being able to revel in Australian soccer now being designed in their image.

For whatever optimism a follower of one of the 'old' clubs might hope to elicit from this book, it is quickly dashed by its opening gambit. Yes, the book’s title tells us this will be the case. Yes, we know the National Soccer League is already doomed, having seen it die (or be murdered) first-hand. But the opening section, in illustrating the before and after of Marconi’s rise and fall in as stark a form as possible – the classic documentarian’s technique of juxtaposing images of a paradise turned into a ruin – there is no getting away from the pall which will only darken over the course of The Death and Life of Australian Soccer’s 375 pages.

The book covers much more than the NSL, by looking at what came both before and after it. Rather than seeking to confine itself to the 27 year window of the NSL in isolation, the book seeks to tackle much bigger fish. Gorman’s main questions are the perennial ones. First, how did ‘ethnic’ become a dirty word in Australian soccer? Second, why has Australian soccer internalised its hatred of ethnicity in this way? These are the nagging questions for both soccer and Australian society at large. They are important for what happened after 2004 in Australian soccer, and the rhetoric put out that the 'problem' of ethnicity was meant to have been solved once and for all. For Australian society at large, the question is at what point should the rights of migrant communities (especially non-English speaking ones) to have self-determination and control of their own affairs be curtailed.

Though ethnicity has been the perennial question in Australian soccer, and by extension in academic analyses of the game, in recent times new ideas have been pushed toward the middle (especially by Roy Hay) about how the structural flaws of the game's governance were as important as ethnicity to the game's historical woes, and that these structural flaws are an under-appreciated element of the Australian soccer story. Gorman’s book then tilts the scales back to the ethnic question, but in a more sophisticated way than has often been done before. Previous discussions have often been superficial, couched in terms of the self-interested politics of the game itself. Gorman seeks to address the matter of ethnicity as it manifests in Australian public culture independent of soccer, at the same time as it becomes a dirty word within soccer.

We arrive then at the core problem of ethnicity and how Australian society should be organised. Should different ethnic communities be allowed a measure of self-determination, or should they be expected to assimilate? If it is the former, how much freedom should they be allowed? Can they have a presence in national affairs in a scheme and style which does not acknowledge the assumed cultural, economic, and political centrality of Anglo-Celtic Australians, and perhaps even seeks to challenge that dominance? In no other sphere of Australian life has the dominance of Anglo-Celtic culture been challenged in quite the same way as it has been in Australian soccer thanks to its often unrepentant ‘ethnic’ quality. For a game already considered to be foreign to Australia, the ethnic takeover of the game – within the governing bodies, but especially in just sheer numbers on the hills and terraces – doomed the sport to a unique kind of obscurity, one where it was simultaneously popular among its constituent communities and yet invisible to mainstream Australia.

(And in that regard, I am only interested in discussing Australian soccer from after 1945, and if Ian Syson wants his pre-1945 stuff to be included in this debate he should hurry up and publish his book on the matter.)

There is no way Australian soccer can fight back from this position under an overtly ethnic format: not in its early 1960s glory days, not by the late 1970s when the NSL was formed out of fear, not hope, and certainly not through the withering and erratic decline of the 1980s and 1990s. While the formation of ethnic soccer clubs could have been seen as migrants making a commitment to Australia in a different way, instead it was seen as an anti-Australian maneuver. This is an understandable view to take from people outside the game, but the problem was that people within the game also saw it this way.

In some respects this story can only be told by an Anglo who was not a follower of the NSL. Everyone else is too close, and likely being ‘ethnic’, only able to see the issue from the inside. Gorman’s point in the early part of the book that he and his dad, otherwise committed soccer people, only went to one NSL game is the perfect (or near enough to perfect) vehicle for exploring this issue. It presents a change from Gorman’s usual work in his journalism on soccer. There he was obliged to obliterate or obscure himself as a narrator in the great journalistic tradition, giving off the vibe of neutrality and getting his politics across by choosing which quotes to use and from whom. That gave Gorman an always plausible get-out clause should any interview subject say anything particularly egregious or objectionable or outright insane – an unusually plausible possibility in Australian soccer. Here instead we have a reassertion of Gorman’s own character, playing the role of the de facto Anglo representative.

Goodness knows that putting it like that reveals the situation's deep seated problems of anthropological neutrality, but I've never done any undergrad sociology units, and the sociology books (both pro and anti sociology) I've scavenged over the years have mostly remained on my shelves.

What balances out Gorman's Anglo-outsider perspective more than anything is his framing much of the early analysis through the experience of Andrew Dettre, a man more or less the opposite of Gorman. Where Gorman is young, Anglo and situated firmly in the role of a journalist, Dettre is (by the end) very experienced, foreign-born, and not merely a journalist but also an activist. It is an activism not limited to soccer either; Dettre had grand schemes for Australian society as a whole, and a hope that soccer could be a vehicle for driving that social change. This is an important aspect of the work. Dettre had grand and sometimes contradictory ideas about soccer, but these were tied to grander ideas about what the nation could be. They reflected his own political feelings but also his experience as a refugee and migrant. This intellectual outpouring spanned several decades, pseudonyms, publications, and literary styles. Much as Gorman would wish he could write a biography of Dettre’s incredible life, such a book would never sell. Setting a quasi-biography of Dettre within a biography of Australian soccer therefore makes sense.

But as unique as Dettre is as an Australian soccer intellectual, he did not emerge or write from within a cultural vacuum. One of the things Gorman does here is rescue the Hungarians and their contribution as a collective to Australian soccer from under the weight of the more visible Italians, Croatians and Greeks. (It also takes, or rather I hope it will take, at least some of the heat off those latter groups who often get the entire blame for the failure of the NSL and the 'holding back' of Australian soccer). The Hungarians differ from many of their more well-known rival and contemporary ethnic groups. Their immigration numbers were smaller and centred on two very short bursts of migration. They were also more likely to have been educated, less prone to forming ghettoes, and through St George Budapest, made the sincerest attempts of all the ethnic clubs to broaden their fan base.

But even though they provide much of the intellectual and conceptual heft for soccer and the NSL to move forward, Dettre is not exactly like the other Hungarians. His intellectualism crosses over into an elitism that creates a distance between himself and his audience, including other journalists. The broadness of his thinking, the depth of his feeling, and the scope of his ambition is at times overwhelming. The social marginalisation of soccer further curtails his ability to transform Australian society, and it is no great accident that he has his greatest (albeit qualified) successes when he works for the Whitlam government.

There may be those while reading this book who will attempt to trace what effect if any that Gorman's reading of Dettre's work and speaking with the man himself has had on this book. Gorman may think otherwise, but I don’t see much if any stylistic influence resembling Dettre’s in Gorman’s work. That is unavoidable in a sense, not just for the length and dedication of Dettre’s career to this cause, his intellectualism, and Dettre’s learning English as a second language; but it is also because Dettre was never only looking back but also always looking forward. When Dettre ceases looking forward with any optimism, it effectively marks the end of his involvement with the game. To that end the most visible influence Dettre has on Gorman is in declaring an end to things. In the 1980s Dettre writes obituaries for the game, for the soccer press, and for the hope that ethnicity and soccer might create a pluralist Australia. Here, Gorman writes the obituary to end all obituaries, seeing a sort of end of Australian soccer history. What else is there to write about in Australian soccer, especially in terms of the present anodyne, Anglicised arrangement?

As the book comes to a close, Gorman becomes outwardly sentimental. Not that he has treated everything that has come before as simply a matter of facts, but there is a further disintegration in the veneer of objectivity. Among the tragedies for Gorman is that individuals initially left behind by new football could be reintegrated into the new world, but not the cultural and organising structures that created those individuals. This affects not only those who were affiliated with those past structures, but also those who currently belong to groups which resemble in their self-organisation – mostly accidentally – the structures of the past. If Gorman writes an elegiac 'end of history' for ethnic soccer in Australia, knowing that the Anglo establishment and those who have joined them have quashed any hope for even a minor revival from new migrant communities, he does not fall far from Dettre's late era manifesto.

But it is worth remembering that many of those who ran and followed the ethnic clubs were in some important ways not so different from their mainstream Australian sporting counterparts, in that they were bound to a safe and conformist conservatism, something which must have frustrated Dettre immensely. Because for all the praise (if that's the right word) you can give to the NSL for its diversity compared to other sports, for large periods of time the NSL itself was at best only a narrow multicultural experiment, limited mostly to clubs formed by migrants from central and southern Europe. While on the field it had a truly global diversity, off the field it had limited interest to people not directly connected to the scene. While there were enough people from those constituent ethnic communities to sustain them, this was not an issue; but soon enough those communities started drifting away.

In time the greatest betrayal of the ethnic clubs, if one can use such a provocative term, comes not from their own or the governing bodies' incompetences, nor the disinterest of the general public who had no obligation to follow them, but from those younger supporters who turned their back on their fathers’ clubs. It is a provocative assertion, and I do not believe Gorman is making it as strongly as I am, but there is more than the suggestion that without the intervention of ethnics inside the game towards change, things may not have ended up in the direction they did. The sons of the immigrants left the old edifice to die, either by leaving the game completely or joining in the new world.

This is the most profound demographic shift of them all, and it is my assertion based upon reading this book that it is more important than the hordes of juniors and their parents, the midweek indoor and futsal players, and the silent majority who even now show no interest in local top-flight soccer, preferring instead late nights and highlights packages from overseas leagues. For all the failure of the ethnic clubs to tap into new audiences - including the spectacular failure of St George, who tried harder than anyone to branch outwards - the inability of the ethnic clubs to hold on to their core support is what ultimately dooms them; growth for most of them is non-existent, and even for the best of them only incremental.

Gorman doesn't put all the blame for this on the ethnic clubs - there is much in Australian soccer and Australian society that they cannot control, and the self-loathing of those governing the game also drives people away - but nevertheless the crowd numbers speak for themselves. Without the ethnic communities growing out of their clubs and the ethnic scene, without those supporters jumping across to new broadbased franchises or moving towards mainstream Australian sports (or leaving the game entirely), it would not have been so easy to dislodge the pre-eminence of the ethnic clubs. The desire of soccer to mainstream itself was tied to the desire of migrants to mainstream themselves, a funny thing in itself considering persistent political and media fearmongering about ethnic ghettoes.

(As an aside, one observance and one unrequited desire. The observance is that perhaps summer soccer was the greatest mistake ever made by Australian soccer authorities, because whereas when the various football seasons overlapped people were forced to choose which one they would attend, when there was no overlap it became easy to have one's cake and eat it too. The unrequited desire is for someone to write a book on the cultural history of Saturday morning foreign language schools, which would include reference to being hotbeds of street soccer.)

The arrival of Perth Glory showed what was possible in a previously unrepresented market; Adelaide United cemented the idea, because it sprouted from the topflight corpse of Adelaide City Juventus; Melbourne Victory colonised its market in a way no other team has; and Western Sydney Wanderers finished off the job, bringing Australian soccer's migrant heartland over en masse to the A-League. Some would interpret this as evidence of the migrant soccer fans evolving to the next stage of becoming Australians, but it can also be interpreted as them assimilating and subsuming their differences into a larger amorphous whole.

It also does not take into full account those examples where broadbased clubs fail, with my thoughts on this usually going toward Brisbane Strikers. Some of the blame is put onto the notion that it was wrong to expect a league with any ethnic representation to succeed, the comparison being made by Lou Sticca of the ethnic clubs being dirty water that only serves to pollute the clean water of the broadbased clubs. I guess he only came up with this analogy after the clean water of broadbased Carlton SC got dirtied by its association with the dirty water of the footy club. But if there's one thing which comes through, is that as rubbish as the management of most of the clubs ethnic and non-ethnic was in the NSL, it was the ethnic ones which survived and still survive, whereas most of the non-ethnic ones carked it quick smart.

Oh Joe, why not something about Morwell Falcons? There's so many nooks and crannies to discover about Australian soccer, and you talk about Australian soccer moving away from a democratic and meritocratic paradigm, but the Falcons only get passing mention in your book! They came from a town of fewer than 20,000, built a nice boutique stadium and social club, earning their way through the league system while other people - you know who you are - were and still are banging on about some dump called Geelong and when it will get its act together. But I digress.

Then there is the intervention of the players. Many of them were born and raised within the ethnic club system at the game’s most prestigious clubs, and thus they understand intimately the cultural framework of the game. The players become militant after being exploited for too long, and quickly become the best organised, the most professional, and the most ideologically consistent faction in Australian soccer. If there is an argument to be made about structure predominating over ethnicity as a means of examining the fortunes of Australian soccer, it is via the players becoming a new force which disrupts the decades long tug of war between the governing bodies and clubs.

There are plenty of moments in this book which will generate debate. Among them is Gorman’s belief of the sheer folly of promotion and relegation and a second division, asserting them to be anathema to Australian sporting culture. Gorman also says, more or less, that promotion-relegation cannot happen because the A-League was not just an attempt to make a successful sporting competition, but about overturning an entire system of being. Gorman argues that before the A-League was even formed that it existed as a ‘state of mind’, with the idea being that it would transcend, but not reflect Australian soccer; that all the rough edges would be smoothed out, and that the game would be gentrified. For a sport which had spent so long not doing what it was told, this is the ultimate victory or betrayal depending on which side of the side of the debate you come from.

And has not South of the Border talked about the wilful embourgeoisement of the game in Australia? Some of it has been done on an individual level (fees, extra coaching, making little Johnny/Johnette feel special), and some of it has been done on a macro level, for example moving to modern stadiums that the teams cannot afford but which look good. And always linked to that, the attempt to shed any links to the past, including the self-loathing of soccer governing bodies' past and present and their revulsion of being linked with SBS. Not that SBS is an ideal commercial partner for any sport except those like the Tour de France, but much of the commercial limitations come from them being associated with ethnicity and the game's past by sponsors, the 'mainstream' and worst of all, Australian soccer fans.

Under such a framework, finances and commercial viability are almost of secondary concern. Those arguing for promotion and relegation have to not only successfully argue that the idea stacks up financially, they also have to argue convincingly that the current system as it has been set up can and must be overthrown, and that soccer need not follow what the other Australian sports do. Considering how hard so many people have worked to make Australian soccer as much like the other 'traditional' Australian sports as possible, this will be no mean feat. It would be, as Gorman argues here, a case of soccer returning to its old guise of trying to change Australian culture instead of fitting in.

Another lesson to be learnt is that soccer in Australia expects the momentum of goodwill to sustain it, and when it does not, it starts acting reactively. Bursts of interest due to World Cup qualification (now considered a fait accompli process rather than a do-or-die event) or cream of the crop touring teams disguise longer bouts of stagnation. Spurts of heightened interest and engagement do not have the same value as consistency of interest, the kind which sustains the two major codes of football. And while the NSL was certainly not immune to acting haphazardly to its rotting stagnation, neither is the A-League and the current FFA regime safe from its own inability to truly entrench itself among the likes of the NRL or AFL, as opposed to transient competitions like the NBL or Super Rugby, whose teams have little to no local connection and no consistency of feeling, and more precipitously, no communal corporeality. Gorman raises doubts about the meanings of many of the current A-League franchises, implying a soft underbelly which would not be able to survive truly testing times.

I have long argued however that this vagueness can actually be a strength and an appealing quality for many. There is just enough clarity about who these A-League franchises are – usually the team from ‘here’ – and more than enough ambiguity so that ideological and emotional connections are free to be construed in any which way different supporters like. People are free to adopt a level of commitment that for the most part is theirs and theirs alone, and not dependent on a greater whole. And while one could point out the fact that should these entities run into trouble that they would cease existing rather than carry on in a lower league, even though the ethnic clubs have often continued, for most people who care to think about these things they too have stopped existing. 

Gorman is right to suggest that the ability to decide for oneself how committed one is to a cause means that at any moment one may simply choose not to be as committed. A book such as this by its nature is interested in those who are engaged with the game in ways aside from its recreational aspects. Thus you have among the many players, administrators and journalists people like the statistician Andrew Howe, and the late zine editor and agitator Kevin Christopher, whose presence also plays at adding colour to the Anglo spectrum. But it is missing the great mass of people, the silent majority, those who make home economics style decisions - insofar as their decision making is based around the allocation of their limited leisure time and money - about how they will follow the game. While those people are essential to the success of any mass sporting entertainment product, those people do not spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about what Gorman has long considered the most niche of topics in Australian soccer, discussions which take place in equally niche environments: the abandoned terraces of state league clubs, and the dank corners of #sokkahtwitter. 

Me having lunch with Joe Gorman somewhere in Ballarat earlier this year
 One of the things which will probably go unremarked about this book is
 Joe's use of literary depictions of Australian soccer. While I can't take credit
 for anything else which appears in this book (except the bits where I get
quoted or paraphrased, which is mostly stuff from here anyway) I will
take credit for introducing Joe to that literary material. Even better though
was Joe using other stuff that he found in Soccer World, including
work by Dettre, former Socceroo Ray Richards, and children's writer
David Bateson. I do hope it prompts people to read that kind of work,
especially David Martin's The Young Wife. Photo: Ian Syson.

So while I may have some qualms about my portrayal in this book, leaning as it does towards an almost untenable miserableness, I can nevertheless understand my being included in this book. Gorman’s interest lies in two types of people; those who were involved with running the game, whether they felt something for it or not; and more importantly, those who have thought and written deeply about the game, whose emotional devotion is much harder to question. But I am wary of being depicted as a victim; partly because if indeed I am a victim, I am not the only one.

In that sense my inclusion in this narrative is validation of two things; that I have thought deeply about the game and written about it in that way; and that I have felt deeply about the game, and that whether I am right or wrong on the matters which I discuss, there is a purity to whatever agenda I may have. That purity of feeling is not exclusive to me though. Still, seeing yourself in print in any format, let alone what is likely to be praised as a landmark book on Australian soccer history, is enough to make one feel a little anxious. It is an anxiety based not just around what strangers will think of you, but also what those who know you will think of you. In my case, the worry is that I will be interpreted (through no fault of Joe's, really) as being the definitive voice of old soccer in its current guise.

The bit where I come into the book has largely gone
unremarked upon so far, except for a friendly bit of
banter relating to my resembling one of those guys who
 loses interest in a band he likes when the band becomes too
 popular. Without arguing too vociferously against such
 a portrayal, because there's probably some latent truth to
it, it did remind me of a bit in Simon Price's biography of
the Manic Street Preachers. When the Manics break through
commercially with their fourth album Everything Must Go,
  their concerts start attracting boorish Oasis and Britpop
listening types in addition to their then loyal and very
alternative audience. Basically the two types can't stand
each other, and eventually the feather boa wearing, zine
writing original fans, who had supported the band through
 thick and thin up to that point, start drifting away.
It's a great book by the way, I highly recommend it.

Lest anyone get ahead of themselves on that front, I have made it clear on many occasions here and elsewhere that I have never sought to claim such a mantle, and that South of the Border has always been about offering a place for any South fan to put pen (or cursor) to paper (or screen). That South of the Border has had limited success in that is beside the point - we have published a diversity of voices, including non-South voices - and have attempted to solicit contributions from the South public, mostly to little avail. So it goes.

Problematic then for me within this analysis is that amid Gorman’s gentle evisceration of Anglo-Celtic Australians (especially those of a pro-multicultural bent) for their refusal to engage with ethnic soccer, the absence of the British migrant is perplexing. It is all the more confusing because of oblique references made to the Englishness of Perth Glory’s Shed – the acceptable kind of ethnicity for many of those in Australian soccer who otherwise wanted to purge ethnicity – as well as noting the flood of British players who were involved in the early parts of the NSL. But British migrants and especially the English, whose numbers collectively outnumbered every other migrant group combined after the war, are otherwise nowhere to be seen.

Likewise those people who ran the clubs and especially those first generation migrants who followed those clubs are also greatly under-represented. Indeed one of my fellow South Melbourne supporters noted upon purchasing the book that I was in the index far more than long time South Melbourne Hellas president George Vasilopoulos. Though it fits in with the way Gorman has decided to tackle his subject, it feels like a massive lacuna that will never be filled. Players, younger supporters, journalists, administrators are all there, as are those who went on to found the ‘broadbased’ clubs during the NSL, but not those who were there at the beginning of the ethnic soccer club phenomenon. Some of these guys are dead, and I suppose that's a reasonable enough excuse. 

But there are still guys who are alive and kicking who probably should have been included in this. For a book that was going to end up with narrative and thematic gaps no matter how much was included, this is a major omission. Ironically, this fits in with Gorman's thesis of the Anglo rejection of non-Anglo culture, in that non-English language news sources and interview subjects are mostly absent from the book. One can't blame that on the author's monolingualism, because one would need reading proficiency in several languages to get across the thousands of column inches; either that, or a well paid research team to sift through the ethnic papers of record.

There are unavoidable issues in the book, based around treating each state and region fairly, the experience of Indigenous Australians, and the story of women’s participation, or just as often, non-participation. As much as there is an ethnic vs non-ethnic issue which dominates our thinking on Australian soccer’s past, there is also a state vs state issue; the experience of the game varies so much between regions, and it is difficult if not impossible for people to feel they have a shared connection. Some of the sojourns Gorman takes to cover this stuff works well – I am thinking here in particular of the Queensland State League section – but others seem occasionally to be tacked on, or not to fit exactly, as if Gorman is trying to cram in as many things as possible. 

To an extent Gorman agrees with this, arguing early on that there is no possibility of writing a point-to-point history of Australian soccer, and he does well to include as many parts of the national soccer experience as he does; but one cannot help but feel that there were times when some states or regions or experiences which were not covered in depth or at all. And since most of the NSL was based around Melbourne and Sydney, it makes sense if more time is spent there.

Even though they are of value and worth including, the parts dealing with women's soccer can only hope to provide a taste of that experience. This is frustrating, because women's soccer, like other women's sports both in Australia and overseas, deals with many of the same issues of assimilation and self-determination; should women's sport work with or separately to men's sport? Does women's sport lose the chance to forge its own identity if its proximity is too close to men's sport? These are questions however for another writer to confront more fully.

The book is as much about what came before and what happened after as it is about what happened during. Therefore it scoots along at some points, while being more detailed in others. There are lacunas which will frustrate people, especially those who feel that their experience or their region is not covered in enough depth. Some people will want more of the specific car crash details of bad soccer governance and outrageous incidents, but the risk is that those will be seen as the main point of the story with the bigger issue of soccer's cultural positioning being lost. Focusing too much on these risks turning any analysis of Australian soccer into a freak show, which is fine for idle internet banter but less suitable for a serious book of history.

Of course the book could be twice as long, even more formidably detailed, and better for it in my opinion. But there is also the advice Stephen Hawking's editor gave him prior to publishing his bestselling A Brief History of Time: namely, that for every equation Hawking would put in, the potential audience would be halved. Thus a book written this way is also more accessible, written not only for the initiated and already interested, but for those for whom the NSL and the world which sustained it mean little more than folklore.

Dealing largely with documentary evidence and interviews, the book does not engage much with academic debates. It helps with the book's accessibility, but there were moments when an engagement with other books, such as Ross Solly's imperfect but important Shoot Out would have been welcome, if for no other reason than more explicitly tracing different political party relationships to the game; from Dettre and Whitlam's progressivism, to the NSW Labor Right faction's ethnic bloc backing Tony Labbozzetta (which vanishes when ethnic clubs need the most support), to the Liberals changing the game and its ethnic character into something more like their own ideal of the national character.

But the book does most things very well. It nails soccer's contradictory nature; its tendency for being both ahead of the curve (Dettre/St George/Canberra City/Newcastle KB) but also behind the curve (pretty much everyone in the game at some point). It gets that the conflict of sport has never been just business, especially not in Australian soccer, whose raison d'être was one of primarily self-proclamation and actualisation. It gets the conservatism of the ethnic clubs, and their reluctance to cede the one major bit of power and cultural influence they have in Australian culture, but mostly their desire to be left alone.

Its selection of quotes is very good, from Mark Rudan’s 'it was their job to fit in with us'; the description of David Hill as being to the right of Genghis Khan; the lead up to the 1997 grand final being like 'the wogs against Brisbane'; and Jesse Fink's denouncement of Ange Postecoglou when the latter became Brisbane Roar coach as offering nothing because Postecoglou is 'old soccer'. But even within the structure of the book, there will be quibbles about who was interviewed and why, and I think many of those quibbles could be justified. Remo Nogarotto gets much more time than Tony Labbozzetta. Kimon Taliadoros gets interviewed in his guise as the vanguard for the establishment of the player union movement, but he does not get asked about his later time as South Melbourne general manager, which would have yielded interesting information about South's late struggles to move between its past and an uncertain future. There is almost no mention of Tony Ising, which whether you consider him one of the great prophets or the most unnecessarily bitter man in Australian soccer, seems like a large oversight.

The early reviews have been positive about the book, albeit largely thin on detail. Australia’s most noteworthy soccer historian, Roy Hay, writing his first impression of the book has largely lauded it, with his necessary caveat about the lack of emphasis on the organising structures put in place in the early 1960s. Others have focused on Gorman’s belief that the idea of promotion-relegation and second division is folly, and that there are lessons to be learned from the NSL’s haphazard attempt to implement the former. Adam Howard has gone into much greater depth on that particular matter, arguing the point that while history can provide a guide and a warning, on this matter Gorman has misappropriated the details for his own defeatist narrative.

My stance being well enough known on the promotion/relegation issue, it is not for me to continue a debate I have little interest in, preferring to let that run its own course. But Howard's point about Gorman's apparent defeatist tone is worth picking up on. Because of its sense of finality, and its desire to declare a definitive end to the past, this book leaves the reader without any sense of how things might change for Australian soccer in the future. The history of Australian soccer has been one of constant upheaval, and yet there is an assumption made in this book that that process has ended, at least in ways that we are familiar with.

Recent events in the form of wrangling for control over the game and its future direction have shown us this is not quite the case; and while I do not think that the ethnic clubs are or could be the main drivers of any future change, to present them as likely having no meaningful future is too forceful of an assertion. But that is also very much a personal take, as I would like to think there is hope, however outrageous that hope may seem, and that our resilience in the face of all obstacles could one day yield a new direction. Maybe Gorman refuses to speculate for the sake of speculation, but the lack of optimism in the book rather than creating an empathy (the feeling that we are suffering together) for soccer migrants old and new will likely only engender a hopeless sense of sympathy (feeling bad for someone's plight, but not feeling that their burden is yours as well) .

It is the kind of thing which makes me wonder who is going to read this book, and what wider impact it will have. After all, how many reviewed and discussed the Hay/Murray magnum opus? The discussion on matters of books and history among the soccer community seems intermittent at best, and for the most part these discussions are reflective rather than inspiring a call to arms. It is unfair to demand something else from Gorman here, because while he is at pains to not try and diminish the ongoing survival of the old clubs, he cannot lie and say that they have a thriving existence. The dwindling few followers of the 'prominent' ex-NSL clubs who will read this book will be able to change little about the situation.

To be clear, no one doubts the sincerity of their - our - passion; after all, it takes a certain kind of moral hard-headedness to keep following a state league club in the way that we do. In the epilogue in particular, which finishes with a rewriting of a blog post I made - a post that I know back then struck Gorman as extraordinarily poignant - there is little hope. For those with the intestinal fortitude to keep following the old clubs, that moral certainty is also matched up with what is also a rare sense of duty. While I tend to think in the book Gorman’s tone is more realist than defeatist, those two adjectives when deployed in the way they have been here are not so far from each other. The fields have been sown with salt. There will be people who will rail against that view, possibly ignoring the argument’s nuances, but Gorman is at pains to point out the violent excision of one of Australian soccer's core attributes, its ability to harbour new migrants who bring their numbers, playing talent and novel organisational attributes. Neither is there any hope that another Dettre could emerge. From which community? From which medium? To say what, exactly, and to whom? It is remarkable that an Andrew Dettre even existed in the first place.

Those picking up the book who never experienced the NSL or ethnic soccer in full flight might better understand how we got to now, but soon enough they will probably be back at the A-League, that competition dreamt up not just to rehabilitate soccer in a benign sense, but to cleanse it. If the idea of ‘cleansing’ has potentially volatile and incendiary overtones – especially within an Australian soccer context! - it is hard to argue that this is not what has happened. Damnatio memoriae it may not be, but it is as close as we can get.

My chief concern with the book then is not with its content, which I broadly agree with and which I think has been written very well. Rather it is with what will follow it? Will people merely praise the book, cherry pick certain sections out of it, and then discard its lessons and deeper message about using soccer as a means of understanding Australian society? After all, while it is a book about Australian soccer it is also a book about ‘us’ as a nation. Gorman throws down the challenge to the current generation of soft-headed multiculturalists, but will they engage with this book in the way I believe they should?

The Death and Life of Australian Soccer is not a hagiography of the NSL or ethnic soccer. For those hoping for a celebratory tome about the NSL, its great matches, players and clubs, this is not that book. Gorman writes that he hopes that in time those stories will be written – but in the meantime he emphasises that something has been lost, and there is some empathy in that emphasis. It is hard to pin down what exactly may have been lost – perhaps it is the large scale generosity of spirit from the true believers, those who literally built their clubs from scratch, not dependent on wealthy benefactors; perhaps it is the chance for a different Australia to be promoted. If Gorman is not exactly channelling the grief of those left behind, he is at least channelling Dettre's disappointment.