Episode 40 - Italian merger flowchart; making sense of records

Three magpies in Paul's front yard.

Download and listen to episode 40 here.

This episode begins by not starting with the Mark Boric Express. Ian and Paul raise the possibility of the discussion point of Australian soccer clubs which also have teams in other sports. Maybe we'll revisit this at some time in the future. Then there's the search for any memorial for Wally Tunn at Toorak Park... nothing there. Then we raise the matter of Australian soccer cartoons and comics, and the possibility perhaps of setting up a database to collect and sort them out. We note that the NT Army News is now online... it might be worth looking for the soccer references.

We look at Mark Boric's processes as he tries to figure out as complete a record as possible for the 1925 Victorian Division 4 season. Ian follows this up with the sketchiness of Victorian results from mid-May 1920, and Paul briefly spiels on the theory of incrementalism. Ian then expounds on an unusual case of public transport protectionism in 1933 in Leeton, near Griffith - and how soccer players were caught up in a strange legal mess.

In the second segment (which people who aren't watching the stream will not get full value from), we look at Paul's attempt to update the infamous Victorian Italian club merger flowchart. The original version of the family tree is now lost, but the second version of the flowchart, which dates back to 2012, has earned its own rare sort of online infamy. Paul posits that what started as a joke on Victoria's soccer-forum.net - mostly at the expense of Melbourne's Italian community and especially the fracture of the once mighty Brunswick Juventus - might actually be a useful way of tracking club histories and trajectories. Indeed, Paul argues that the idea of the soccer club family tree could be applied across the country, especially in parts where Australian soccer has had a long but fractured presence. We look at Paul's work-in-progress attempt at an update and expansion of the work. The flowchart helps prompt some interesting questions - why does Melbourne's Italian soccer community stop supporting as a collective in the way that other (major) ethnic clubs do? Where do all the fans go? Why does Brunswick Juventus lose fans, even as Italians set up a multitude of smaller, lower-tier, "neighbourhood" clubs?

In our final segment we go into 100 Years Ago Today, and the gradual increase in teams in the Melbourne competition; to Fremantle; and then to Moora, about 150 miles north of Perth, where the soccer club has gone defunct with enough left in the club kitty to buy everyone a beer. But where did the soccer players end up? You may be surprised... Then to Hobart, and what seems like a spirit of cooperation between soccer and Australian rules... Ian and Paul wonder what's caused this spirit of bonhomie? And finally to Minmi, with a severe point deduction, and working and pay conditions at the local mine.