Episode 70 - Greg Stock on the late Frank Parsons

Download and listen to this episode episode here.

Ian's incapacitated this week, so he's doing the show from home. In what Paul complains is an over-long opening segment, we take a quick look at the initial effect of Facebook's ban on Australian news sites from an Australian soccer perspective.

Then - was Melbourne's 1920s Preston club a district club, or was it based on ethnicity, namely Lancashire identity? Then after a bit more dawdling around promoting upcoming Fairplay Publishing books and an incident with an exhausted player in Perth in 1952, and look forward to Queensland's Wynnum club looking forward to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Ian gets excited about a possible revolutionary discovery about the origins of football as we know it( Australia. Then some thoughts on a tennis manuscript Ian's been reading.

The finally it's time for 100 Years Ago Today, where we start in Newcastle and West Wallsend; the South Australians being challenged to a soccer match by the touring English cricketers; a meeting of ships in Tasmania; the Victorians are reporting on overseas football; new clubs are sporting in Brisbane; and preparations are being made for the new soccer season in Perth.

In our middle segment we chat with regular guest Greg Stock on the passing of Frank Parsons, former player and administrator. Little remembered today, Parsons was a leading striker in New South Wales in the 1940s and 50s, and later an important administrator in the transition from the old NSW regime to the new Federation setup. Greg talks about Parsons scoring proficiency - perhaps second only to Reg Date at the time - which led to both state and national representation, but also  controversy with how that representative career ended. We discuss Parson's later life, and the reasons for his current obscurity compared to some of his contemporaries, and the cultural forces which have made it more difficult fo know about pioneers like Parsons. 

We finish this segment with a quick word about the passing of former Socceroos coach Joe Venglos, whose long coaching career began in Australia in the 1960s, where he managed Sydney Prague, New South Wales, and the national team, where he introduced tactical innovations to Australian football that otherwise passed the local game by. We note that the central European influence of coaches and players like Venglos has largely been been forgotten in the 50 years since the peak of Hungarian, Czech, and Austrian influence on Australian soccer.

For Greg's interview with Parsons from 2008, see this link.

We close off the show with Paul talking about a book he read on the day of the show, the Archie Thompson biography What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger. Seemingly pretty much consigned to the bargain bins soon after its release, Thompson's biography is a mix of his life story (up until 2010) and his motivational life and playing philosophy. Paul notes that while some of Thompson's views on modern medicine, as well as his performance as a current special comments man for the A-League have led to contemporary soccer audiences dismissing his points of view - it's worthwhile digging into this book for its historical coverage. Thompson's career spans the later NSL and early A-League eras. In the former, he plays with a ra discard egional team, a fully-professional team, and a leading ethnic team; in the latter, he is one of the first totem players for Melbourne Victory and the A-League, around which that club and competition builds its identity.

Ian observes that Paul seems to be increasingly obsessed with stories like Thompson's (and Tim Cahill's)  which include unusual origin stories, which diverge from more familiar pathways to professional football in Australia. Thompson's cultural background (New Zealand/Papua New Guinea), his childhood in regional centres like Lithgow and Bathurst, not known for being soccer hotbeds, and the fact that Thompson gave up soccer in his teens all provide material for an unusual and important story. One can skim over the more "philosophy" Thompson's attention to detail on various teammates, and the process of climbing the long-ladder to success makes for a worthwhile addition to the Australian soccer biography canon.

Episode 60 - Official and unofficial songs; the nature of soccer in 1880s Melbourne

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There's always new stuff on Trove, wouldn't you know? Then there's the clean-up, including the way that our little network helped a previous guest with finding out information about a little known league from Melbourne's far-eastern suburbs in the 1950s. 

We also have a ramshackle discussion about Australian club songs - not post-match victory songs, but rather official and unofficial club anthems - prompted by a discussion on Twitter on the Canberra Cosmos' supporters CD. We look at the existence of such as songs as:

• Newcastle KB
• Canberra City
• Sydney and/or Melbourne Croatia
• APIA Liechhardt
• Melbourne Victory's Terrace Punk Band
• and several others.

And the different motivations for creating official and unofficial songs depending on the era of Australian soccer.

We finish up the first segment by looking at a photo of people kicking a soccer ball at Gallipoli - what are they doing?

In 100 Years Ago Today, we take a lengthy look at a big fundraising soccer match in Mount Barker in South Australia, and the social events held thereafter, while also wondering why there's no match report for the men's vs women's match; and we head to Sydney where the season just seems to be dragging on interminably, and thus we discuss comparing the length of a typical soccer season in Sydney to its rugby league counterpart; then to Newcastle, where  the long-drawn-out soccer season has seen Adamstown's cricket team forfeit matches; then we run out of time to talk about everything else because of poor time management.

In the final segment, we revisit the 1880s in Victoria. A few episodes ago, Ian looked at new discoveries which pushed the supposed end date of the first phase of Melbourne soccer a little further than previously assumed; now to the 1880s, where Ian has found more games, and more kinds of fixtures (including north vs south of the Yarra games). We also start discussing the demographic make-up of 1880s Melbourne soccer, including people such as the future premier of Victoria, Thomas Bent, and the what the membership numbers mean in terms of how the soccer club operates within playing and social spheres. Oh, and speculation on the possible effect of the 1890s economic depression on the kinds of people involved with Melbourne soccer at the time, as well as how social class shaped early Melbourne soccer. There's also horse riders complain about soccer goalposts, and the public usage of the precinct known as Yarra Park.

Episode 15 - Soccer club nicknames; Newcastle (looking for foundations); battle over public spaces

Download and listen to episode 15.

In this episode Ian falls down the wormhole of Sid Grant and Harry Hetherington's 17 volume History of Soccer in New South Wales on Mark Boric's site.

We also quickly covered the uploading by some pseudonymous character of footage from the 1982 Coppa Italia final in Melbourne - as broadcast on SBS, and commentated by Laurie Schwab - and the value of these items, and the difficulty in finding them and preserving them.

Ian notes that he and Roy Hay have each contributed a chapter to the scholarly text The Early Development of Football.

Then comes 100 Years Ago Today, which includes some discussion of the phrase "soccer rules".

After the break is a discussion of certain Australian soccer nicknames (especially in New South Wales), which followed on from a discussion a couple of weeks prior. Listener Graeme McGinty wrote in to explain why certain flowery names were chosen, and Ian read this letter out on air. McGinty's letter suggests the "pretty" names were chosen to disassociate themselves from either (Protestant/Catholic) sectarianism, or from the harshness of the industrial work many soccer players would have been involved with in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Ian segues into looking at the foundations of Newcastle soccer.

Then in the final segment we wade dangerously into contemporary issues by looking at Melbourne Victory's attempt to acquire a lease for land at Footscray Park, by trying to steer the conversation towards the historic difficulty that soccer has had in obtaining grounds at the margins of councils, or on the worst public land. Paul refers to in particular to Schintler Reserve chapter (in other words, the struggle for soccer to access land in Footscray) in John Kallinikios' Soccer Boom. 

But we also look at the concept of passive recreation; and then taking that further by looking at the comparable historic situation at Middle Park and Albert Park, using Jill Barnard and Jenny Keating's People's Playground as a guide for how people interested in this topic should broaden their ideas of us and them when it comes to public space in Melbourne.

Episode 10 - Greg Downes and international women's soccer; Melbourne Victory and Footscray Park

Download and listen to episode 10 here.

We begin the show by discussing Aussie rules historian Rhett Bartlett's personal funding of the scanning of The Richmond Guardian newspaper on Trove, and the practical and ideological possibilities - good and bad - of historians self-funding of work which would ordinarily be left to governments.

Then we get rapped on the knuckles - justifiably - by our New South Wales listeners, for our ignorance of who the writer "Celtic" was. Paul chooses to lay the blame

Then 100 Years Ago Today, where the soon to be famous segment sting begins to emerge from the primordial ooze, and where we travel to Toowoomba, Woonona, Thirroul, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Jervis Bay. And hipster soccer balls!

Then we chat to Greg Downes about women's international football, in the lead-up to the women's World Cup, and the increasing popularity of women's soccer both at home and abroad. Greg delves into:

• the origins of Australia's participation in international women's soccer 
• another missing trophy
• how the teams funded their overseas trips
• the messy way that international diplomacy sometimes got in the way of overseas participation 
• the restrictions placed on women's soccer by male governing bodies
• the logistical obstacles for players to make their way into the national team - fundraising, remoteness from NSW and Queensland's dominance of women's soccer.

And then Greg makes a guess as to who will win the tournament... did he get it right?

Then Ian tries to resuscitate his Sacred Sites segment by calling it Grounds For Discontent. The segment focuses on social media interactions regarding Footscray Park and Melbourne Victory. Is it an issue that's a bit too contemporary for a history show? Can you be ambivalently antagonistic? I mean Ian does manage to eventually get into the history of Footscray Park and soccer. Oh, the persistent problem of grounds - we trawl across the issue across states! And how should (and are) private and public sporting clubs treated differently, and what are the historical resonances between historic disputes over professional sporting clubs vs (nominally) amateur ones?

We finish the show by looking very briefly at the issue of triangulation - reading beyond one kind source, and corroborating trends and facts by looking at a wider variety of material. This is prompted by Paul's reading of a book on the Glebe Rugby League Football Club, which almost entirely omits the existence of soccer in Sydney to puzzling ends, though perhaps not as much as the Melbourne historian Marc Fiddian's near complete overlooking of soccer in history on the Brunswick Street Oval.