Episode 84 - A look at the Football Belongs documentary (with Jason Goldsmith)

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We're back after a week's break... well, mostly. Ian's decided to take the rest of June off, so Paul is joined in hosting duties by Jason Goldsmith - and we get an update on his and Lucas Gillard's book Be My Guest. We also quickly look at Ange Postecoglou signing up as Celtic manager, and a missing section on Ange's Wikipedia page. We also get way out of the show's wheelhouse by discussing contemporary football broadcast arrangements.

We also look at Walter Pless' obituary for Tasmanian soccer great George “Chopper” Arnott. We give props to Greg Stock for his ongoing OzFootball work. We also note that Tony Wilson and Rob Heath, who are making the Ferenc Puskas in Australia documentary, are still looking for footage and photographs, as well as accepting tax deductible funding support via their Documentary Australia Foundation page.

Our main focus this week is the full length Football Belongs on Optus Sport. We look at the following topics:

• Who is this for? Who is this being addressed to – considering Ange’s comments about trying to force the game through to cultural centre stage, having it on Optus only, means its going to be seen by soccer football fans only - if "Football Belongs", where and how does it belong exactly? And will it reach the Eurosnobs within Optus' reach.
• The beginning and end with John Moriarty.
• The way the documentary resets the narrative of the past 15 years of Australian soccer and its immigrant/ethnic character.
• The breadth and limitations of its diversity - including the lack of almost any non-English language interviews. And no Jews!
• The general (and understandable) paucity of women in this documentary.
• The way the documentary demonstrates that the clubs within these communities are not just football clubs - they are community and social welfare organisations.
• The way that sometimes the use of non-football people (like Mario and Paul Fenech) detracted from the story.
• Craig Foster articulating the point that Australian soccer needs to utilise its demographic and cultural reach to change the very nature of Australian society.
• We also have some talkback callers throughout this segment! Very good point made by Paul Hunt calling in, asking when are going to start looking at stories like this from a football first, rather than ethnicity first perspective.
• The way in which the film ignores places and demographics in Australia where soccer has always belonged.

After the break we have another caller, asking about why the film shirks away from the matter of why communities have walked away from the ethnic soccer club milieu. Paul makes the point though, that the documentary is called "Football Belongs" not "Football Belongs?", and that the attrition of support for senior grade soccer in Australia goes across the entire country, in both recent and more established soccer strongholds.

And finally, 100 Years Ago Today, where there are a lot of articles discussing what sport is appropriate for women to play, but we’ll leave them until next week when we have Garry McKenzie on. We start off in Mackay, where a new local club is being formed; then head over to Bunbury, for an Australian Rules footballer with an unusual nickname; and then do a sort of deep dive into the Queensland state team's tour of New South Wales, where they fare poorly against against some of the local elevens, but do very well against the New South Wales state side; there's also a remembrance of the Victorian state team, and the hope that they would one day assemble a state squad once more, as they did prior to the war. We look at the different media perspectives of the tour, and some match reporting styles that could be deemed quite harsh on players by today's standards; we look at some of the curtain raiser matches played on that tour, and some sweeping changes to the committee overseeing soccer in the Kogarah district; and down south in the Illawarra, we have a no-show team, and a case of very poor hospitality by a host governing body.

Episode 52 - Tony Persoglia and the Victorian Football Club Archive

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin the episode with the clean up, noting that Mark Boric has been going through his personal archives, but also uploading match programs from Adelaide United's first season, which was spent in the final season of the NSL. 

And of course George Cotsanis is still pumping out the interviews.

More problematic - for Ian, at least - is the work of Garry MacKenzie. Garry may have found that John Jaap - the man who Ian had credited as being responsible for the 1875 soccer match at the Woogaroo Asylum - may not have actually been the person responsible for that after all. Jaap may have been ill and way at the time, and may also have been older than previously thought. It's a good problem to have though - another avenue of inquiry opened, and the reassurance that people are still engaged with that research.

Paul then launches into a spiel of sorts on the Wayback Machine, the perennially frustrating but still invaluable resource for looking at the history of the internet. Paul's discussions ranges from

• A very rough introduction of how to search for material within the database, using either exact web addresses, or carefully chosen key words.
• Dead ends, dead links, and workarounds which only sometimes work - and the many things which will remain out of reach.
• Old South Melbourne stuff that even Paul was not aware of including a column from then South coach Ange Postecoglou
• The need for patience and persistence, especially when one is unable to access videos and other documents.
• The ability to, that aforementioned persistence and patience, still be able find and salvage photos, match reports, histories, and all sorts of other details.

In our middle segment we welcome back Tony Persoglia to the show. Tony has just completed a massive update to the Victorian Football Club Archive on OzFootball. In this wide-ranging chat, we cover

• The original impetus to start the project
• What's included in this update - including an expansion of club entries, an index of clubs and names, club merger and split information, 
• The technological framework that underpins (and sometimes hinders) a project such as this.
• The possibilities and difficulties in applying the work done here to different sets - whether that be other states, regional areas, and for women's football.
• What's next in the immediate future for Tony's OzFootball work.

Finally, a packed 100 Years Ago Today. prefaced by a note by Ian on vagaries of searching through Trove. We begin in New South Wales and Uralla and a team from Bananaland; state team selection news from Newcastle; still looking ahead to the North vs South game in Tasmania; a strangely written but information rich item from Western Australia, which includes references to Perth to Wyalcatchem; more on the Queensland team's tour of New South Wales, this time on the south coast; and finally to Melbourne for the results, but especially two very different views of the same controversial incident.