Book Review - Patrick Mangan's Offsider

I really should have got around to reviewing this years ago, when I first read it, but having re-read it on the bus back from Canberra recently, it seems like as good as time as any to finally get a post up about it.

Mangan was a soccer journalist back in the 1990s (at this point in, while he's still in the writing/editing/publishing game, I don't think he's in soccer any longer), but this book is mostly about everything that happened before that. While Mangan does detail some of his experiences as a soccer journo, mostly working on the old Soccer Australia magazine, most of this book is centred on Mangan's childhood and adolescence as an English immigrant Arsenal fan shunted to rural Victoria.

Think about that for a minute - you're a kid who's just got the taste for football and the Arsenal in the early 1970s, living just minutes from Highbury, and all of a sudden you're in Swan Hill. Much of the book's charm then is in how Mangan and his brother John concoct ways of keeping in touch with Arsenal and soccer more generally, from Swan Hill to Horsham to Ballarat.

From week old screenings of English football on television to three month old copies of Shoot! magazine, Patrick and John are nothing if not resourceful and determined to keep up with football. The most interesting part of these efforts were the attempts to create little handmade zines, which were even used to spread the love of soccer to classmates. Mangan's family and close circle become evangelists for the game, even (re-)introducing a soccer club to Horsham

Offsider is an usual book not just for its setting, but because of its source. It's not about a famous player, it's not about an official or backroom shenanigans and political turmoil - it's the story of what it was like to follow soccer in rural Victoria, in the pre-digital age. Calling Offsider an outback Fever Pitch does neither book any favours. While part of the narrative core is the same - the travails of following a largely mediocre Arsenal in the 1970s and 80s - the tone of Offsider is entirely different. The style is genial and charming. There is angst there, sure, of adjusting to a new country, a new culture, and leaving everything familiar behind, but nothing too severe. Though the book occasionally digresses into the 1990s and early 2000s, it does something unusual for an Australian soccer book published post-2005 (it was published in 2010) - it doesn't go into any detail on the post-NSL era of the game. To be fair, while this is an entirely within its thematic remit, it's reassuring that the book doesn't feel it needs to go there at all.

I feel (with likely little supporting evidence, but that's the thing about feelings as opposed to evidence) that there is perhaps a tendency in Australian soccer writing and historiography to go for the big picture at the expense of the particular and individual, when the experience of the game is too fractured for those takes. Where we should be going then I think, is in focusing on smaller, more targeted works like this - the net effect then would be to create a mosaic of experiences and interpretations. More works like Offsider, which are aware of their distance from the centre of power, and that the game is not just about close proximity to power and influence, are an important part of Australian soccer's story.

For South Melbourne Hellas fans, the book contains a couple of neat moments - a section dedicated to the day Malcolm MacDonald played against St George at Middle Park, and a photograph of British comedian Frank Skinner with a Lakers scarf. Otherwise, this is recommended reading for material for any Australian soccer fan, and especially those who support Arsenal.

Ten Years Gone

For Joe Gorman and no one else, notwithstanding the public nature of this reluctant salvo.

While I was somewhere between Canberra and Holbrook on a Greyhound coach, Joe Gorman asked me via Twitter to write a story on this event. This was made difficult by a number of factors. My laptop battery threatening to run out of juice; the woman in front of me who wanted to push her seat back down into my crotch; and the fact that now, ten years apart, these two dates - 16/11/2005 and 16/11/2015 - are not momentous moments in time for me, but rather signposts from which to ponder everything that’s happened in between. Under the circumstances, that's probably the most 'bitter' thing anyone can say, which doesn't fit the desired mood of most of Australian soccer's recollection and experience of the event. That I think it's based on a cultivated, carefully thought out point of view and not some sort of reactionary bitterness will not make me feel better about writing about this in any way. It is what it is, which admittedly is not a very academic explanation.

The second leg of the 2005 World Cup qualifier I watched at home, with my dad, at what is now my old house, which itself has been demolished by its new owners. What struck me most about the game at the time, apart from the unaffected joy I felt, was just how lucky we were. I've not bothered to watch the game again, and doubt that I ever will (nor do I have any plans to watch the highly esteemed documentary on the game), but it seemed that every piece of luck that had deserted us over the previous 32 year stretch had been condensed into this game. Being short sighted even with three inch thick lenses, I sat up close to the TV, hoping that we’d win, glad that we did, with no misgivings. In that sense it feels like a lifetime ago, though for me at 32, it’s only one third of a lifetime.

On the way back home from Canberra, I re-read Patrick Mangan’s Offsider, partly for the sake of my stuttering doctoral thesis, but mostly to pass the time instead of staring out the window at the repetitive landscape. In that book, Mangan occasionally branches out from his childhood and adolescent support of Arsenal to talk about watching and covering the Socceroos and Australian soccer during the 1990s. For a book published post-2005, a relative boom period for Australian soccer books, it includes a strange omission – it fails to mention November 16, 2005 at all. Its narrative falls short, and so the book takes no political position on that or any matter for the way the sport would turn out. In its own way, leaving out that date sums up the problem better than most writings on the matter have done – that there was a before and an after. To that I’d add that there was a during, an 'in the moment' quality which we will likely never touch again.

I don't want to change people's experience of the occasion, and to be honest, I couldn't do it no matter how hard I tried - and goodness knows I've tried to get my spiteful (but also annotated) review of Tony Wilson's Australia United published in at least two different print journals. A little reluctantly then, I thumped out a couple of thousand words trying to figure out how I got to this place, especially when I'd started off somewhere very different - but apart from being self-vindicating and awfully precious, it was also nothing that hasn't been seen here before. It was just another version of the chief subtext of what I've been doing for nearly eight years. The position of chief unofficial cultural surveyor of the South Melbourne Hellas exodus years is possibly a fate worse than the exodus itself: every Sunday night or Monday morning during the season writing a report, competing with SMFCMike for the title of de facto voice for the Lost Cause. And while I have a personal aesthetic interest in artistic failure, especially as it relates to failed albums and novels, I'm not so attached to the concept of failure that I can't appreciate success, especially that which happens on the sporting field. But I digress.

Since its achievement, November 16 2005 hasn't just been celebrated for its own sake, but also taken up as justification for everything that has happened since. Of course that makes sense, but it’s a sense that relies a lot on a hard, remorseless kind of logic. Realistically, winning that game didn't guarantee anything that came after it, but it did make it easier for that future (which is now also inevitably part of our past), to happen. Having said that, it would be beyond appalling if I was to say that I would exchange a win on that day for a different sort of future, one that would also have no guaranteed positive outcomes for whatever barrow I'd have ended up pushing. If I did, I'd be no better than those who have retrospectively celebrated the Iran '97 failure because it hastened the end of the NSL and Soccer Australia. It should also be noted however that the quality of one's personal ethics can't and shouldn't really be measured on whether you refuse to stoop as low your opponents have done.

Ten years ago, November 16 felt almost uniformly glorious. Ten years on, it feels like a different event, something which my memory and experience has found to be tainted. The feeling I have then is that there are two November 16s. There is the one that was lived in that moment, and the one that was appropriated, or in far lesser cases, discarded, for political reasons. For most Australian soccer fans, especially those that were in the thick of it that night at Stadium Australia, nothing can sully the memory. In that sense, that night and the 2006 World Cup campaign are perhaps the last moments which remain untainted by Australian soccer’s sectarian tendencies.

As time has gone by, the notion for me that November 16 and the national team could be something that would remain untouched by the factional wrangling has proven to be untrue. This is not to say that either side is right, or that coming to this position was inevitable. Let it be each to his or her own on the matter. For those of you out there on whichever side of the fence you stand, who can still tap into the joy of that night, enjoy it. Aside from one or two stirrers looking for some fireworks - one of them rather unexpected - most of what I've seen on social media has been focused on the joy of the day, and little beyond that. Maybe the people I follow mostly happen to be reasonable folk, and thus I avoided the worst of the new dawn triumphalism; or perhaps I've just avoided the seedier parts of the internet; more likely most people have a bigger capacity to just let things go, at least as far as this event goes. More power to them.