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.

December 2015 and early January 2016 digest

Social club and Lakeside lease saga
Unresolved.

@PaulMavroudis @LAthanasakis @MartinFoleyMP @tom_kalas @johnerenmp @rwynnemp @smfc should have some good news in the week to come

— Tony Margaritis (@sthmel) December 3, 2015

When is the AGM on?
Every year this thing gets later and later. Now I know that there is obviously the issue of the reunification of the women and stalling for time to announce the building of the social club, but we have got to get back to the point where an AGM is held in November, a point in time where the financial details are still half relevant. The delay is also exacerbating the breach between those who have the ear and proximity of those on the board, and those who do not. Here's hoping that in future we get back on schedule with these things - here's hoping also that the AGM is not held on a school night, in attempt to rush the proceedings.

Friendly news
There are a number of friendly games coming up, as the season proper approaches. At the present time none of these will include South Hobart, as they have pulled out of their planned to trip to Melbourne this week (though I believe that they will be here next week to take on other opponents). Instead this Friday evening we will be hosting Eastern Lions at Lakeside. I won't be there, as I have other things to do.

This Sunday at the early kickoff of 11:00AM (reserves at 1:00PM), we'll be taking on Knox City out Egan Lee Reserve in Knox. I won't be there because it's in the fucking public transport black hole that is Knox. Then on Wednesday, we'll be playing against Box Hill United once more at Lakeside. I might go to that.

On Friday February 5th, we will be travelling to Sydney to take on Sydney Olympic for the 'Bank of Sydney Cup', at Kogarah Oval. On Sunday February 7th at 3:00PM, we will be playing Sutherland Sharks at Seymour Shaw Park. As per last year's pre-season trip to Adelaide, I won't be able to make this trip, this time due to ongoing concerns with the condition of the posterior hyaloid of my right eye. 

Season 2016 start date
The fixtures for NPL Victoria's 2016 season are out, and have been updated on the blog. The season will begin on the weekend of February 19th/20th/21st/22nd. Our opening match against Heidelberg is the only match on that day.

There's a lot of blocks of multiple home and then multiple away games. On the plus side, we've at least partly moved away from the Friday night experiment. A lot more of our Friday games in 2016 also seem to come up against Melbourne based AFL games, which probably won't help attendances, but we'll see.

Player movements and contract statuses
Mathew Theodore has been signed up for another season. Including the four new signings, that makes 19/20 of the available spots on the squads - though of course some of these players, like Luke Eyles, may be put into the under 20s squad. No firm word yet on Andy Kecojevic or Jake Barker-Daish, though the latter has reportedly been released.

Assistant coach Dimi Tsiaras has resigned from his post, in order to focus on his business and family.

• Nikola Roganovic (assume signed on for 2016)
• Mathew Theodore (signed up for 2016).
• Kristian Konstantinidis (reportedly signed up for 2016)
• Luke Adams (reportedly signed up for 2016)
• Cody Martindale (reportedly signed up for 2016)
• Nick Epifano is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Iqi Jawadi is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Michael Eagar is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Milos Lujic is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Leigh Minopoulos is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Tim Mala is contracted until the end of 2016.
• Chris Irwin has a two year contract with the club; it is unclear whether that contract finishes at the end of 2016, or 2017.
• Stephen Hatzikostas is contracted until the end of 2017.
• Brad Norton is contracted until the end of 2017.
• Luke Eyles been signed until the end of the 2017 season.
• Chris Taylor has a long term contract with the club, believed to be five years.

Players signed until the end of the 2015 season.

• Andy Kecojevic

Players with unknown contract statuses

• Jake Barker-Daish (probably released)

Gone

• Andy Bevin (Team Wellington)
• Thomas Lakic (Oakleigh Cannons)
• Fraser MacLaren (Dandenong Thunder)
• Dane Milovanovic (Hong Kong Pegasus)
• Nick Morton (returned to South Hobart)
• David Stirton (Port Melbourne)

In

• Zaim Zeneli
• Marcus Shroen
• Jason Hicks
• Matthew Foschini

South Melbourne Hellas match programmes

I may be the king of starting a thousand minor and/or major projects and never finishing any of them, but here is something that I've managed to get through over the break. Having recently received a number of match programmes from the mid 1990s (courtesy of Roy Hay), I've scanned, uploaded and created a section for them on this blog.

The stuff from the 1993-1995 era is the most interesting. The magazine at the time has the most interesting and original content of what I've uploaded so far, including a letters section. In contrast, the 1998/99 era is more laden with advertisements, but all of it is interesting insofar as the match programme portrays the way the club sought to portray itself to its own fans and the wider public who happened to stumble upon it - two demographics which didn't necessarily have a good deal in common.

As usual, feel free to download and share these items with your fellow Hellas fans and Australian soccer history buffs. If people have items that would fill in the gaps, they would be most appreciated, whether you've scanned them into a pdf file yourself, or whether you'd prefer me to do it. Just contact me, and I'll try and arrange something.

Peter Filopoulos' piece
Worth a read if you've missed it. Among other things, it talks about how the club bought its first computer.

Flare incident at Lakeside Stadium
As noted by Southpole. 

Ethnic past artefact - 1985 Knox City All Nations Cup Greek team book

Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the download link to the full document.

This is the front cover to the book. The back cover is the other
half of this photo, which I can't be bothered adding to this piece.

I shared this a few weeks ago on Twitter and a couple of forums, to a staggeringly muted response. These things happen, but I still would have liked a few more people to care not for my sake, but for my brother who doesn't even like soccer, but who scanned the whole thing and made it into a PDF as a favour to me (my tech skills are crap, and my Linux machine and scanner don't talk to each other).

Former Socceroo and 1960s South Melbourne Hellas player Ted Smith gave this book to me during an FFV history committee meeting. It's a 49 page book all about the Greek team that would play in the Knox City Soccer Club's world cup tournament, which is better known as the All Nations Cup.

Some twenty years after the Laidlaw Cup - a similar tournament which seemed reasonably popular for awhile until the early 1960s - the All Nations Cup saw local players play for teams allocated to their national/ethnic heritage. It's interesting to read in this book the different perspective of multicultural influence on Australian soccer by the chief organiser Tony Kennedy, which considered the different teams playing alongside each other as a strength, and not a weakness. The problems with this approach however are evident a little further down in his piece - that the VSF's attempt to take over and run the competition ran into trouble when they starting including nations that were at that time unrecognised.

Despite all the Greek language material in the book, the player profiles are all in English, and there are plenty of South players, former South players, and would be South players in the squad. There are so many that I can't fit all their names into the label facility on the blog because it only allows 200 characters to be used. Damn over long Greek names. There are also photos of South coaches Manny Poulakakis and John Margaritis, and even a couple of early era red V wearing South Melbourne Hellas photos.

A photo of an early 1960s South Melbourne Hellas team, as found in the book.
The Greek caption reads: The great 'Hellas' of the 1960s.

There are a heap of sponsors as well, and you have to wade through a fair portion of the book to get to the actual content. Still, these things are just as important for showing demographic changes in the Greek community in Melbourne, as it applied to employment, social interests, and even where the main commercial centres were at the time. The Lonsdale Street stereotype for example is nowhere to be found, but neither is the present Oakleigh dominance. It's majority inner city and inner northern suburbs.

Rather than having me upload each of the 49 pages individually, I recommend that you head to this link to get access to the entire document, which you can download to your own device.