Episode 10 - Greg Downes and international women's soccer; Melbourne Victory and Footscray Park

Download and listen to episode 10 here.

We begin the show by discussing Aussie rules historian Rhett Bartlett's personal funding of the scanning of The Richmond Guardian newspaper on Trove, and the practical and ideological possibilities - good and bad - of historians self-funding of work which would ordinarily be left to governments.

Then we get rapped on the knuckles - justifiably - by our New South Wales listeners, for our ignorance of who the writer "Celtic" was. Paul chooses to lay the blame

Then 100 Years Ago Today, where the soon to be famous segment sting begins to emerge from the primordial ooze, and where we travel to Toowoomba, Woonona, Thirroul, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Jervis Bay. And hipster soccer balls!

Then we chat to Greg Downes about women's international football, in the lead-up to the women's World Cup, and the increasing popularity of women's soccer both at home and abroad. Greg delves into:

• the origins of Australia's participation in international women's soccer 
• another missing trophy
• how the teams funded their overseas trips
• the messy way that international diplomacy sometimes got in the way of overseas participation 
• the restrictions placed on women's soccer by male governing bodies
• the logistical obstacles for players to make their way into the national team - fundraising, remoteness from NSW and Queensland's dominance of women's soccer.

And then Greg makes a guess as to who will win the tournament... did he get it right?

Then Ian tries to resuscitate his Sacred Sites segment by calling it Grounds For Discontent. The segment focuses on social media interactions regarding Footscray Park and Melbourne Victory. Is it an issue that's a bit too contemporary for a history show? Can you be ambivalently antagonistic? I mean Ian does manage to eventually get into the history of Footscray Park and soccer. Oh, the persistent problem of grounds - we trawl across the issue across states! And how should (and are) private and public sporting clubs treated differently, and what are the historical resonances between historic disputes over professional sporting clubs vs (nominally) amateur ones?

We finish the show by looking very briefly at the issue of triangulation - reading beyond one kind source, and corroborating trends and facts by looking at a wider variety of material. This is prompted by Paul's reading of a book on the Glebe Rugby League Football Club, which almost entirely omits the existence of soccer in Sydney to puzzling ends, though perhaps not as much as the Melbourne historian Marc Fiddian's near complete overlooking of soccer in history on the Brunswick Street Oval.