RIP Hammy McMeechan

I was sad to hear of the recent passing of 1960s Slavia and Croatia player Hammy McMeechan.

Now Hammy wasn't a South player (more on that later), but I got to meet him once when me and Ian Syson were doing research.

I think that at the time, Syson was writer in residence at the FFV, and I was helping do some interviews. They were fairly ramshackle affairs, interesting, but without a specific narrative emerging.

One of the interviews was with Hugh Murney, which we talked about here. What I neglected to mention at any point after that interview, is that this discussion lead to one of the more crucial moments in Syson's quest to find soccer hidden Australian history, as well as inspiring me in my studies over similar terrain.

The Game That Never Happened - the day Slavia played a charity soccer match against a VFL XI - would have remained forgotten had it not been for our interview with Meechan. Without this meeting and this story, our research efforts would have taken a substantially different course.

We met him at Forest Hill Chase, a shopping centre straight out out of Kath and Kim. We'd been waiting there for a while, at some generic coffee and cake outlet. Eventually this bandy legged old bloke turns up, and we have a wonderful chat lasting, according to Syson at least, for about two and half hours.

We talked about his career, about that game against the VFL players, about what he'd done since his playing retirement - he was still a keen coach of junior players even in his latter days.

I remember impressing him with my knowledge of now obscure Melbourne clubs and their lineages - for once that OzFootball database work came in handy in the real world.

We politely disagreed about the future. He saw something good on the horizon, a new era for the game, a logical continuation of his footballing life. I saw, and I suppose still primarily see, the end of an era, with only a marginal place in the future for me and my club. But he never accused me of selfishness for having that view.

It's a pity that we never got to meet again. His one major regret from his playing career? That he never got to play for South.

“Don’t get me wrong, Ian,” he warns. “I had a fabulous and successful time playing for Croatia and I made many life-long friends there. But what I always admired about Hellas was the crowd: its size, its passion and its noise. I would have loved to have played there every second week with that crowd behind me for at least a season or two.”

For more information on his career, see Roy Hay's obituary on Goal Weekly.

Know Your Clubs - Olympic

Alright then, special treat for everyone today - everyone that is who didn't see this when I posted it on smfcboard last week. Courtesy of 4Flares, the following is a club profile on Melbourne's Olympic, one of South Melbourne Hellas's predeccessors.

A lot of names, some of which are apparently also related to Apollo Athletic, as stated in the article. From the little cross referencing I've been able to do so far I've been able to find that

• The late Nick Spartels was likely a boxer in the 1920s
• From another edition of Soccer News: Hector Hernandez, inside-left for Olympic, would be the only Mexican playing soccer in Australia. A Batchelor of Commerce, he is over here on a scholarship from the Mexican Government for the next two years, during which he hopes to obtain his Master of Commerce.
• We now know for certain that the Marmaras Cup was between the Olympics of Adelaide and Melbourne. The Melbourne and Sydney Hakoahs had a similar trophy they'd play for.
• (Sir) Eugene Gorman was a well known barrister in the first half 20th century Melbourne. The Greek Consul bit referred was an honorary title.
• In another 'Know Your Clubs' section, Park Rangers are mentioned as having been born off a split from the South Melbourne United Juniors in 1946. A Dockerty Cup winner, Park Rangers played in the Middle Park area for quite some years, before being taken over by a bunch of Scots (as mentioned to me by Hugh Murney) and moving to Kew. Later they became absorbed into what is now Moreland City. Does that make us related somehow? Up to you I guess.

Further to yesterday's digression on Michael O'Hara

A couple of readers have alerted us to this article. Very interesting stuff. This would have fit in wonderfully with my writing selves class last year.

Murney, Schwab, Nestoridis and International Jewry

So me and Ian Syson went out to Hugh Murney's place today, to talk about Max Sterne, the noted Australian stamp dealer and oldest registered soccer player in the state still going at 80 something (and not the Italian vet who developed an anthrax vaccine), but as sometimes happens we ended up going off on a few tangents, and we got to learn a fair a bit about Hugh's football story. And soccer-forum got a mention as well, for the North Caulfield on Sundays saga, whereby every team that plays against North Caulfield Maccabi must play even their home games on Sundays.

For those like myself, unfamiliar with Hugh Murney, he was a Scottish footballer who came out here to play for Hakoah in the mid 1960s after having played all over the place in Scotland, and then also played or coached at many places, and so I enjoyed having my knowledge of obscure and now defunct Melbourne soccer teams validated, as we talked about Albion Rovers (before the Turks took over), Kew Park Rangers, Sunshine City etc. One of those rare occasions where all that time spent working on OzFootball didn't go waste.

And we also talked about the great characters he's met along the way, Eddie McGuire tucking into a Scottish breakfast at Hugh's pub before the Scotland/Australia game in the 1980s, Manchester United, England and Scotland touring teams, with plenty of stories about drinking and tongue in cheek jokes about the meanness of the Scots and the Jews. And an unprompted bit about Kostas Nestoridis, and him scoring two goals from corners in one game, after having been drinking and playing cards the previous night until well into the next morning. Oh, and Footy Show (co)creator Harvey Silver's involvement in local Jewish football.

There's a hell of a story in there, or at least, hundreds of anecdotes worth collecting and preserving. But he gave us the name of one bloke writing a book, called Michael O'Hara, who's written this bizarre book about his time in MI6, of which the segment I've chosen talks about the great Hakoah side of the mid 1960s, and some other stuff. Fascinating game, Australian soccer.