Episode 49 - The name of the game is...

Download and listen to this episode here.

Another week, another episode beset by technical problems. But we soldier on!

We note that Mark Boric's second-hand scanner has gone kaput, and that George Cotsanis is uploading the latest of his interview series to his My World Is Round social media pages.

We also note that Greg Stock has been updating the New South Wales and Tasmania sections of OzFootball.

Altona City senior squad, 1967.
Back row: Jim Mather, Billy Coles, Jim Balish, Bobby Milloy,
 Chris Kalamidis, Steve Herman, Craig Copley, Billy/Andy Rice.
Front row: Ian Roberts, Billy Wilkie, Mario Grego, Davie Cook,
Bernie McCluskey.
Source: Chrsitine Grego-Davis.

Paul begins the main part of this week's discussion by relating a convoluted story of artefact discovery, retrieval, recording, and identification - with a particular focus on nine photographs of the 1950s and 60s Victorian player Mario Grego. A fitter and turner by trade, was born in what is now Pula in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), before moving to Trieste and eventually to Australia. A defender, Grego's career included stints at Footscray Capri, Footscray JUST, an Altona City, representative duties with the Yugoslavia side in the Laidlaw Cup, with a possible temporary stint at an early version of Triestina (today's Essendon Royals. Paul looks at, among other things:

• The joys ad frustrations of accidental and serendipitous discoveries.
• The holders of such artefacts not realising the worth of said items, nor that there are people and communities interested in them.
• Problems with identification (and implied problems with copyright).
• The difficulty in translating passive social media "likes" into more serious engagement from both individuals and clubs.
• The tantalising (and yes, frustrating) prospect of more such material being out there in cupboards and boxes.

After the break, in the wake of a trademark tribunal ruling that included the assessment that Australian Rules is not the only type of football played in Australia, Ian and Paul revisit the matter of word "soccer", and the history of its usage in Australia. These are issues we also covered to varying degrees in episode 1 and episode 7. This time we look at several aspects of the issue, including:

• Briefly, what the trademark tribunal had to say on the matter.
• The contested origins of the term "soccer".
• The cultural importance of the term "football" in Australia, to demonstrate cultural centrality.
• The nature of the word's introduction to Australia, both in terms of timelines, but also where it was most heavily used - initially seemingly a Western Australian phenomenon
• The usage of the term in times and places where there was no organised soccer in Australia.
• Soccer being both a word/term that has been forced upon, but also chosen by Australian soccer to define and distinguish itself.
• The transition from being football clubs, to soccer clubs, and back again - as well as the politics and marketing considerations involved with those decisions.
• The "Socceroos" name, and Australian soccer fans who hate the term soccer.
• The word "soccer" becoming a verb in certain contexts, especially in Australian rules football
• The Heroes of Waterloo song "Soccer, Soccer"

Finally, we wrap up the show with 100 Years Ago Today, where we travel to Weston, where we begin to realise that teams protesting results in Newcastle and its surrounds seems to be exceptionally common; we check in on the boy scouts of Kogarah; look at the death of a racehorse; and note the 150th anniversary of the first game played by the Port Adelaide Football Club, by casting doubt on what kind of football they were actually playing.

Episode 46 - Rale Rasic; Copyright; Match programs

With apologies for Paul's apparent lagging in this episode which causes some distortion at times.

Download and listen to episode 46 here.

On this week's episode there's some interminable waffling at the start about pandemic restrictions being ramped up in Victoria.

Then to the Mark Boric Express. where this week Mark has been uploading match programs sent to him by George Cotsanis. It includes 1970s programs from Victorian club Croydon City, 1990s/2000s programs from fellow Victorian club Altona City, and National Soccer League programs from clubs like St George and Sydney City. This bit includes discussion on what the differences between these programs tell us about the clubs that produced them - ranging from Croydon's informative product, Altona's more homespun, humorous production, and the internal decline evident within Sydney City's mid-1980s single-sheet programs.

We also note Paul's uploading (finally) of St George's silver jubilee booklet from 1982.

We also look at two related matters which were raised separately on social media over the previous two weeks or so. The first related to a query made on the Australian Football Before the A-League page on Facebook, where one of that group's member asked how to get access to Mike Cockerill's early National Soccer League writing. Paul's answer to that question was as follows:

• If you are a member of a tertiary institution (or know someone who would be willing share their access), you can get access to Australian news databases - unfortunately, while these databases are usually excellent for material post-2000, before that date they steadily become less useful. 
• A subscription to newspapers.com (which is a part of the Ancestry group), which will set you back about $75 for six months for the subscription package which includes the site's two Australian newspapers - The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
• A subscription to something like the Sydney Morning Herald's archive service, which covers 1955-1995 - but which is very expensive, with a variety of plans ranging from $15 for 24 hours access, to $395 for a year's access. (a similar service exists for material after 2006 onward, with similarly a high cost)
• For the eras in which Cockerill was writing, the only free option is visiting your local State Library.

Linked to that question is why can't the public freely access archival news material after 1954? The answer lies in US legislation from the early 1990s which extended copyright terms. When Australia and the US signed a free-trade agreement in 2005, this effected copyright law in Australia, and effectively set the line at 1954 for material that was effectively protected by a grandfathering process; and that does not necessarily that once we hit the year 2026, that materials from 1955 will become copyright free en masse.

We finish off by reading from the sole known extant copy of a pre-World War 2 edition of Victoria's Soccer News, as examined and uploaded by Mark Boric. Released during the 1924 season, we focus in particular on the testy relationship between the editor of Soccer News, and a club press representative, arguing over who's responsible for the apparently parlous state of the Victorian soccer press.

After the break Paul reviews The Rale Rasic Story (as told to Ray Gatt). We look at the way the book (which was published in 2005) covers:

• Rasic's experience growing up in an orphanage in Yugoslavia, during and after World War 2.
• The progression and eventual stalling of his professional playing career.
• Rasic's arrival in Australia, and his transition to coaching, including his place in the world as just one of many expatriate coaches from Yugoslavia who end coaching in far-flung corners of the world.
• The ongoing subpar state of Australian soccer in terms of playing, training, and administrative qualities
• The intricacies of Australian soccer politics, including within the Australian Soccer Federation, between the various state federations, and among other interest groups.
• The book's emphasis on Rasic's psychological approach to coaching - in terms of player management, motivation, and preparation - as opposed to the tactical approaches he used.
• We also look at what the book skims over or leaves out entirely - which for Paul, unfortunately includes only brief mentions of the club scene in Australia (especially after Rasic loses the Socceroos job), as well as complete stonewalling on what happened during Rale's Canberra Cosmos tenure.

In this week's final segment we go to 100 Years Ago Today, where in Toowoomba there's a "town vs country" match involving places just three miles out of the aforementioned town; in Ipswich we marvel at the depth of the coverage; while in South Australia, we're surprised that there's any coverage at all, and why has it just seemingly appeared out of the blue? And we finish off the episode with the weekend Melbourne scores.