Episode 79 - Dylan Arvela and Woonona's 2020 championship

Download and listen to this episode here.

Interminable married couple banter. Some news on the Merewether soccer Anzacs honour board. Then Ian follows up on his research on Footscray Thistle player and Victorian representative George Macaulay, which included meeting George's children, and taking scans and photos of Macaulay football memorabilia - including medals and member ticket booklets. We try to figure out where one of the photos with a scoreboard "G.B.P." on it - Paul thinks maybe the Motordrome. Ian tries to sum up what we've learned about Macaulay and the people he played alongside, and how he seemed to be lost to local soccer - and the ways in which the pre-WW2 soccer culture doesn't necessarily follow through to the post-war period. Also, how Melbourne soccer seems afflicted by a lack of depth, and a lack of native-born players to help carry the culture into second and third generations.

After the break we chat with journalist Dylan Arvela, about his book  A Drop in the Ocean: the story of Woonona's Illawarra Premier League championship, (available for purchase via Amazon). which covers the titular club's unexpected 2020 title run. Among the things we discuss are the history of Woonona, and its comparative lack of success; the current power balance within Illawarra football; what football was like under Covid conditions; what's more important, a league title or grand final win; is it a championship or a premiership?; how different clubs value different titles in terms of importance; the nature of the rivalries of Wollongong soccer; a dramatic final day of the league season; and what else Dylan has lined up to write next. 

(also Paul gets to talk about driving around Wollongong's northern suburbs soccer grounds with Travis Faulks).

We finish with a brief edition of 100 Years Ago Today, where finally we have some news of the Melbourne season, and we finish off with the segment's first ever reference to the Northern Territory, with the arrival of the Geranium in Darwin.

Episode 77 - Athas Zafiris on soccer-soldier Joseph Bilbie; Andrew Howe on NSL promotion and relegation

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Ian is back in the studio, and has an explanation for why he wasn't available the previous week. His reasons don't impress Paul. But there's a bit of Adelaide content here to make amends for failing to keep up South Australian quotas. Ian also reminisces about listening to Paul's hosting the previous week.

Then the clean up, with due acknowledgment of the wonderful archival work being done by Mark Boric and Greg Stock. Paul goes on with his fascination with the menus of Australian soccer gala dinners of days of yore. Then a digression into one time professional golfer and golf announcer Jack Newton, and the soccer content in Newton autobiography, including oppressive attitudes to soccer from some Sydney schoolmasters when Newton when was growing up.

We're also joined by Athas Zafiris of the Shoot Farken website, to discuss a piece he's written about Joseph Bilbie, early 20th Century soccer start in Minmi, and World War 1 soldier. We talk about the background to this research; Bilbie's story; the impact of Bilbie's death on the local community in both civic and soccer senses; and the wider stories and lessons which can be drawn from the involvement of soccer personnel in World War 1. We also look at the way in which we don't always acknowledge the way soccer was embedded in certain Australian communities at the time, being overwhelmed by the media presence and propaganda of other football codes.

In our second (and as it turns our, final segment for this week), we're joined by Australian soccer's statistician-in-chief Andrew Howe to talk about how promotion and relegation worked in the National Soccer League. Right away we clear up one of the biggest misconceptions (yes, there was pro-rel in the NSL) - but we also get into the nuances of how the NSL's promotion and relegation protocols worked; its similarities to the re-election process in England's Football League prior to 1986, which included evaluating teams coming in and out based on financial and other criteria; how the lack of nationwide second division made promotion and relegation that much more complicated, including the complicated playoff systems of the late 1980s; the teams which rejected the chance to move into the NSL; and the eventual reasons why the NSL abandoned promotion and relegation in any form.

Episode 1 - Soccer and war; What should we call the game?; George Donikian;

Download and listen to episode 1 here.

With Ian and Paul being novice radio presenters, the first episode of If You Know Your History on Football Nation Radio was guided by George Donikian. After a brief introduction of the background of the show's hosts, the show's premise is put forward - to talk about the hidden history of soccer in Australia; to talk about soccer's ordinariness in Australia - that it has been a normal part of life in Australia for a very long time; but also to explore the extraordinariness of Australia - the stresses and travails it has had to endure as a sport and cultural product; to explore the cultural embeddedness of the game, or its lack of cultural embeddedness. The way that the game forgets both recent and old histories, and soon forgets them again.

We discuss the limitations of analysing Australian soccer solely through the lens of migration, especially continental European migration; that a fixation with such an analysis obscures the histories of soccer as it existed before the arrival of those migrants, as well as obscuring the histories of regions where soccer had become culturally entrenched, or of groups who had to overcome or exist outside the cultural dominance of those kinds of migrants in Australian soccer.

We move on to one of the 'problems' of research into soccer and football in Australia - the assumption that soccer was the only game which used a round-ball, when in certain eras different football codes also used round balls. But Paul also opines on the manifesto he came across a few years previously of 'keeping local histories, local' - the idea that local people are more often than not the best equipped to preserve and display their history, as opposed to historians from remote/centralised institutions; that as valuable as it has to have centralised historical expertise, it is even better to be able to find ways to increase the skill level of amateur historians across the board.

(for brief further insight into this idea, see Paul's summary of the keynote speech at the 2012 Worlds of Football conference, made by Kevin Moore, who was then Director of England's National Football Museum)

After the break, there is a discussion on what to call the game - should it be 'football' or 'soccer'? Ian makes the argument for the use of the term 'soccer' for the purposes of clarity - there are many football codes in Australia, and linguistically flattening the term 'football' to inherently mean 'soccer' would create an ongoing issue of clarification of terms.

George then digresses into a brief anecdote on the changes of the names of the different football codes in his own career as a newsreader.

(see also an old piece from Ian from 2012 which creates the framework for merely using the word 'football' doesn't necessarily work, and that the ideological push by some people involved with soccer to commandeer 'football' as the name of the game is based on some ahistorical ideas; sadly, the Martin Flanagan article, about whoever owns the term football subsequently owning the future, quoted by soccer people in several places, seems to no longer be available online).

Paul's opinion on the matter is that there has also been a deliberate campaign of shame directed at the term 'soccer' both from outside the game, but also from people within the game, and that this latter source of historical revisionism also seeks to flatten the experience of the game when it was known predominantly in English as 'soccer'. But also that the other football codes have divested themselves to a degree of the term football, using names such as 'AFL' or 'NRL' as the de facto name of the sport, especially in new markets.

(see also Joe Gorman explanation for why he used the word 'soccer' in his book The Death and Life of Ausrtralian Soccer: "I use the word “soccer” deliberately. Of all the things this book seeks to do, understanding the past is the most important. The lexical shift from soccer to football that occurred in 2004 might have brought us in line with the rest of the world, but it betrays our own history. (2017, p. 6)

One of the key points is that the the name 'football' belongs to the code which has won in its respective territory - Ian says 'it is the name you get for winning the local battle', while Paul adds that 'football... is a loaded term embedded within a culture'.

Then follows first appearance of the 100 Years Ago Today segment, and a game played between Maitland and Newcastle representative teams; the relaxed nature of the game in the region, and the 'obviousness' for local labour organisations using soccer as part of their recreation activities; acknowledging, however obliquely, that even though this episode was broadcast on Remembrance Day, on the same date a hundred years earlier the news of the Armistice being signed would not have been known yet in Australia.

Then a brief digression into the idea of digital narrowness - that modern digitally focused research amplifies the possibility that researchers would find only the material they are looking for, and missing out on the social context the game existed in. Also a discussion on the problem of archival newspapers using pseudonymous writers.

We finally get into a discussion about Australian soccer and World War 1. Includes talk of: Irymple; The Soccer Ashes, still missing for decades; the cost of war to Australian soccer proportionally; the idea that soccer may not feel like it is Australian enough to participate in the modern pageantry and co-option of World War 1 commemoration by other football codes; the discomfort some may feel about trying to venerate the connections between sport and war.