Episode 54 - Tim Cahill's "Legacy"

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After an interminable amount of what Ian calls "banter" - including a digression into the what the first post on Ian's blog, which was about the morphogloy of the word "soccer" - we finally begin with the clean-up. This includes some feedback from Tony Smith on the "Basse Cup; Garry MacKenzie finds a history page dedicated to the early days of the University of Queensland Soccer Club in 1955, which includes a hefty Chinese and Asian influence from its overseas student cohort - the kind of thing which could help re-write or add nuance to narratives of ethnicity in Australian soccer. Paul Nicholls found a player who played in Scotland in the late 1800s who played in Charters Towers in inland Queensland.

Paul gives an update on establishing "collections" on Internet Archive - including the establishment of a National Soccer League match programs collection, and an Australian Soccer Yearbooks collection. This discussion gets diverted into a discussion about the merits and path forward for Mark Boric's blog-based library, and the fragility of anarchic and independent digital archives. But can we rely on system-less collection and hoarding? On the other hand, can we rely on federations and libraries?

In 100 Years Ago Today, we begin in Geraldton, where we try to figure out how big the local competition might be, and where does the soccer impulse evident there originate from?; then to Melbourne, for an extended discussion on the merits of changing the scoring system in Australian Rules, via the (re(introduction of a crossbar; a brief stop in Uralla; to Brisbane, where letter writer 'Spectator' discusses the merits of the scoreless draw he witnessed the week before; a Sydney point-of-view of the Queenslanders' tour; and finally skimming through whatever it is that's happening in Melbourne.

In our final segment, Paul looks at Tim Cahill's autobiography Legacy, where he looks at the story of the much-loved greatest of all our national team players. Topics covered include:

• Cahill's relentless obsession with football from a very young age.
• The near-complete sidelining of his sense of "Englishness" in favour of a "Samoan-ness".
• His difficult working class upbringing, which is discussed by Cahill with little sense of class consciousness.
• Cahill's working class and Samoan values of hard work, tenacity, and loyalty to those you care about.
• His junior years spent playing up an age group, before eventually hitting the "too small to play" brick wall.
• Cahill's years at Millwall including the nature of the club, its rites of passage, and the way Cahill was able to fit in within that culture.
• Cahill's change from lower-class Sydney kind to wealthy footballer with famous friends.