Episode 4 - Les Street; Falcons Park; John Jaap; Woogaroo

Download and listen to episode 4 here.

We begin with a bit of housekeeping, including book launches, and some feedback to the soccer in schools discussion from the previous week. There's also some feedback from Mark Boric on our Prahran segment from the week before. There's also some feedback on Paul Nicholls on an old trophy, and Twitter's @jgrb on being surprised that Paul's voice was more manic than lugubrious.

After the break, Ian asks the question what was the first game of soccer in Australia, with Paul looking for a scapegoat for the NSW centrism inherent in the assumed answer of Parramatta 1880. Ian then gets into one of his favourite topics, the 1875 game of soccer at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum under the guidance of John Jaap, the Asylum's director. The discussion expands into the idea of the "motivating individual" who establishes and promotes soccer in a region or community, and without whose contributions the initial urge to play soccer may either not occur, or merely become a spark that fails to ignite.

(For the Bertolt Brecht poem, see 'Questions From a Worker Who Reads'. For earlier articles by Ian on the Woogaroo game, see this and this).

The discussion moves on to two 1879 games of soccer in Tasmania and the influence Captain Edmond Meyer Tudor-Boddam, an intimidating personality who attempted to push the cause of soccer against competing options. We come to the conclusion that the importance of Parramatta 1880 is its role as the beginning of organised competitive or continuous soccer, something that a tradition can traced be back to.

Les Street spoke to us about one time national league ground Falcons Park.

We then cross to Les Street parked on the side of the road somewhere near Kongwak in South Gippsland. Les is Australia's leading expert on Australian soccer stadiums, with a particular interest in documenting the grounds used in Australian top-flight soccer. We mix a discussion of Falcons Park, the Morwell Falcons' ground, as well as including some gunzel chat.

We discuss Morwell, Gippsland in terms of economic terms, and the unusual factor that despite being a coal mining region, soccer doesn't seem to exist in the same way that it does in other coal mining areas like Newcastle. We also discuss Paul and Ian's guided tour of Morwell with Don Di Fabrizio from back in 2009. For those wondering about the fate of the Eastern Pride sign that Les mentions:

Was removed about five minutes after we were expelled from the NSL.

If only the council was so quick to help the club as it was to remove anything Falcons-related as part of an insane vendetta to wipe the sport out of the region in the early 2000s. They almost succeeded.

— Sebastian Hassett (@sebth) October 23, 2019

We move on to the complicated story of how Morwell actually got into the NSL, and the complicated, contrived, and comical nature of promotion and relegation in the National Soccer League at the time. We finally get into a discussion of Falcons Park - and Paul gets to do his stand up routine gag about Italian weddings in Morwell.

We wrap up the episode by foreshadowing a discussion on Trove, the National Library of Australia's archive of online and digital resources, including its magnificent newspaper database.