Episode 30 - Lee McGowan and the Matildas; remembering Pim Verbeek; ball boys

Download and listen to episode 30 here.

On this week's episode, fill-in co-host for Ian Syson, Tony Persoglia, is sick, so we've co-opted Lee McGowan - who was in the studio to talk about his book anyway - for the whole hour.

We begin as we usually do, by noting the progress of the Mark Boric Express, which this week saw Mark meet up with Greg Stock somewhere in the middle of the regional Victoria to make an exchange. Check out Mark's Twitter feed for news of his updates, or head straight to the where all the goodness ends up.

The former Socceroos coach Pim Verbeek died last week, and we have a segment which covers the somewhat perplexing (to Paul, and a few others) reaction to Verbeek's passing - someone who was arguably largely unloved across the board during his time as Socceroos coach from 2007-2010. Yet as news of his passing came to light last week, there was a respect shown online for Pim that seemed to surpass mere sincere condolences for his family and friends. We look back at how Pim came to be Socceroos coach (including a diversion into the man he beat for the job, one time coaching wunderkind Philippe Troussier); his blunt, honest manner on the quality of the players at his disposal, and the quality of the A-League; the still mystery laden disaster of the Socceroos' opening game of the 2010 World Cup, and the reaction to that at the time; and the ways in which perhaps those in the media and football administration got to see a different side of Pim than what the public did.

(see also Bonita Mersiades' piece remembering Pim Verbeek)

We also noted that a new sports museum has opened in the small town of Rochester (about 180kms north of Melbourne), specialising in sports apparel from the 4,000 item strong collection of John Forbes (not the poet), who worked at Puma for 24 years. The museum probably specialises in cricket and AFL merch, but it's not known what soccer material the museum has in its collection - so if that was the main purpose of your visit, it'd probably be best to call the museum in advance. The museum is open on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10am to 4pm, and at other times by appointment. The museum doesn't have a website, but it does have a Facebook page.

In 100 Years Ago Today we look at the big announcement that the English are investigating the possibility of sending a team to Australia and New Zealand in 1921 - provided the 'dominions' can stump up the cash; more soccer folk playing cricket in the summer, this time in inner-Melbourne; some confusing same-day articles in the Wollongong press, which seem to contradict and/or supersede each other; and the brief story of one K. McCredle, a Sydney schoolboy who was a talented cricketer, and before that a talented soccer player - before his school, Sydney Boys High, discontinued its soccer program.

(see also this 2009 piece by Spiro Zavos on The Roar about the decline of rugby at Sydney Boys High, partly replaced as a sport of choice by soccer, but also due to, *cough* demographic changes *cough*)

After that extended opening, we chat to Lee McGowan about his and Fiona Crawford's new book Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football (published by NewSouth), a discussion  which covers, among other things:

• The early days of women's soccer in Australia, especially in Queensland.
• The difficulties involved with researching women's sport in Australia.
• Buried histories, broken continuities, and the predominance of relying on oral histories.
• The difficulties faced by women's soccer in this country -covering funding, infrastructure, wages, injuries, but most of all, a deficit of respect.
• The difficulty and necessity of building a culture which can withstand innumerable setbacks and overcomes many obstacles, while somehow leaving a legacy for the following generations.
• The need to avoid imitating male sporting cultures, all while acknowledging the positive effect many men have had on the Matildas and women's soccer - but also emphasising the need to develop and promote female coaches. referees and administrators
• And of course, the development of the Matildas from obscurity in the 1970s to mainstream, well-loved brand in the 2010s.

The episode also makes the occasional detours into football literature, ball boys, and Terry Venables.

Episode 28 - Bonita Mersiades; Fairfax Media photo collection; Soccer in the Communist press

Download and listen to episode 28 here.

We begin the show by noting Mark Boric and Greg Werner's efforts in getting 1980s editions of Australian Soccer Weekly uploaded on to Mark's site.

We then move to an expansion of the discussion from the previous week on record keeping, noting the failures of both clubs and governing bodies in taking basic record keeping seriously.

Paul discusses the overlooked (by everyone, including himself) 20th anniversary of South Melbourne's win in the inaugural Oceania Club Championships, which were held in Fiji. This segment includes some chat on the tournament itself, a classic Soccer Australia administrative error, but also a recently uploaded Greek language audio recording of the tournament final, as broadcast by Melbourne based Greek-Australian radio station 1422AM 3XY Radio Hellas.

Then Paul promised to get up a website for the show, with a lightly annotated episode guide, in about two weeks. Would he be able to follow through?

Then a brief chat about the 'Acraman game'. a game of some kind of football played in South Australia in 1854.

We chat to Bonita Mersiades, to discuss the acquisition that collective effort by a range of organisations and individuals has secured the purchase of Fairfax Media's photographic collection - including some 19,000 soccer photos. Bonita takes us through the process of becoming aware of the collection being up for sale; the history of the collection itself; the FBI indictment involved in an earlier change of ownership of the collection; the range of photos in the collection, and how much it does or does not crossover with photos in the Schwab and Shorrock collection at Deakin University; the copyright status of photos in the collection; and the eventual plan for housing and displaying photos from this collection.

The show concludes with a lengthy discussion on the coverage of soccer in Tribune, the official newspaper of the long defunct* Communist Party of Australia.

Among other things, we talk about Tribune's political motivations in covering Australian soccer; the familiarity of its writers with both the game of soccer, and Australian soccer's internal politics; Frank Hardy making comment on the game's prospects in Australia compared to the 'traditional' football codes, including digression into a discussion on cultural nationalism; the newspaper's interest in tours from teams from the Soviet bloc; the focus (in Melbourne) on singling out the Croatian community for purported links to the Ustashe movement; the newspaper's decline in covering soccer, alongside thew newspaper's own decline;

The discussion also covers the newspaper's extensive photographic collection, which like the rest of the relevant material exists outside of copyright (we speculate as to why, without touching on the proximity of the SEARCH Foundation, which is reputedly the trustee for the archives of the CPA and associated parties since the CPA's early 1990s dissolution). It should also be noted that the archived material from Tribune spans only from the 1930s to the 1970s, even though the newspaper existed both before and after those dates.

(*it should be noted that the organisational history of the Communist Party of Australia, especially claimant successor organisations, as well as the history of Tribune itself after the mid-1970s, is a very complicated affair - so if we muck up some of the history, we should be forgiven)

Episode 21 - Jason Goldsmith and Surfing for England; Paul Nicholls; Mt Isa

Download and listen to episode 21 here.

Oh, nuffies and public libraries.

And we recount the famous soccer people we overlooked from the previous week's Spencer Gulf discussion.

Ian thanks Garry McKenzie for wrecking his life, having found soccer references and photos in Mimag, the official publication of Mount Isa Mines. What are the ramifications for how Ian (and the rest of us, I suppose) understand Mt Isa's soccer history? Listen also to the weary bitterness creep into Ian's voice as he talks about the overwhelming isolation of living in Mt Isa...

And then opines about his upcoming Newcastle trip, and what he hopes to achieve while touring the Hunter.

Then Ian reads out an extract from 'The Bonds of Empire: Sydney 1925', a creative non-fiction piece sent in by Paul Nicholls - an attempt to create a mythology for Australian soccer.

After the break, we talk to Jason Goldsmith, the author of Surfing for England a book about the best players never to have played for the Socceroos. We cover the following:

• Craig Johnston, the originator of the term 'surfing for England' - a term that's become infamous and unfairly so.
• Tony Dorigo, and why he didn't get the stick that Johnston did for not playing for Australia.
• Andrew Durante and interesting decisions about citizenship, where the convergence of career progression and other motivations meet.
• The different international football situation in the 1980s - no international breaks.
• The Serbs and the Croatians, and the questions about loyalty asked of some and not of others.
• The Tim Cahill story - and the story of how his eligibility became a cause celebre for Australian (and later worldwide) soccer.
• The irony of trying to exploit the existence of players with multiple eligibilities, whereas once we railed against it.
• The idea that Christian Vieri could've so easily become a concreter in Sydney's western suburbs.
• The incredible story of Sasa Ilic, and an ambush of Ian Syson.
• How many Western Australians should make the cut for the revised edition?

I don't know why, but Ian's microphone isn't working during early parts of the segment with Jason.

We finish the episode with 100 Years Ago Today - Victorian results; Toowoomba and the tensions of returned servicemen not wanting to play for services teams after the war; and finally to Newcastle.

Episode 5 - Bonita Mersiades and Fairplay Publishing; how to use Trove

Aussie soccer administrator and now media mogul Bonita Mersiades had a
 chat with us about her Australian soccer publishing effort Fairplay Publishing.

Download and listen to episode 5 here.

We begin with our weekly clean up, where Paul corrects a heinous error he made the previous week.

We also pay tribute to the Queensland historians who are doing some good work, including some work on Goodna and Woogaroo, and the hunt for various Fletchers.

Paul promises to try and get a website up in the new year.

The 100 Years Ago Today, where there's not much going on in the off-season, but we start with Newcastle with a post-season affair, which was a sombre affair in the wake of another war death, though the war is nominally over. We look at the language of the relevant article, its ordinariness, and the role of women at the time.

Then we cast aspersions on our audience, based upon their states.

After the break, we chat with Bonita Mersiades, the founder of Fairplay Publishing, an Australian publishing company specialising in soccer stories. We talk about

• the impetus for Bonita to found the company.
• the difficulties in being an independent publisher in Australia.
• some of the books that Fairplay is looking to publish.
• learning curves, and the collapse of Australia's main independent book distributor.
• why won't mainstream publishers put out more Australian soccer stories?

In the final segment, we take a look at Trove, the National Library of Australia's online archive. We look at:

• what Trove covers in terms of regions, content, and eras
• Trove's limitations
• what to look out for when doing online research on a service like Trove - for example, awareness of the political and editorial lines within newspapers
• the perils of 'digital narrowness', and being of the social context your research is located in
• how to tag articles
• poor scanning of the text - and the ways you can work around this obstacle
• for soccer, the game having different names across different eras
• the importance of learning search techniques
• the problem of discerning who these writers are
• the benefits of registering an account on Trove