Episode 4 - Les Street; Falcons Park; John Jaap; Woogaroo

Download and listen to episode 4 here.

We begin with a bit of housekeeping, including book launches, and some feedback to the soccer in schools discussion from the previous week. There's also some feedback from Mark Boric on our Prahran segment from the week before. There's also some feedback on Paul Nicholls on an old trophy, and Twitter's @jgrb on being surprised that Paul's voice was more manic than lugubrious.

After the break, Ian asks the question what was the first game of soccer in Australia, with Paul looking for a scapegoat for the NSW centrism inherent in the assumed answer of Parramatta 1880. Ian then gets into one of his favourite topics, the 1875 game of soccer at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum under the guidance of John Jaap, the Asylum's director. The discussion expands into the idea of the "motivating individual" who establishes and promotes soccer in a region or community, and without whose contributions the initial urge to play soccer may either not occur, or merely become a spark that fails to ignite.

(For the Bertolt Brecht poem, see 'Questions From a Worker Who Reads'. For earlier articles by Ian on the Woogaroo game, see this and this).

The discussion moves on to two 1879 games of soccer in Tasmania and the influence Captain Edmond Meyer Tudor-Boddam, an intimidating personality who attempted to push the cause of soccer against competing options. We come to the conclusion that the importance of Parramatta 1880 is its role as the beginning of organised competitive or continuous soccer, something that a tradition can traced be back to.

Les Street spoke to us about one time national league ground Falcons Park.

We then cross to Les Street parked on the side of the road somewhere near Kongwak in South Gippsland. Les is Australia's leading expert on Australian soccer stadiums, with a particular interest in documenting the grounds used in Australian top-flight soccer. We mix a discussion of Falcons Park, the Morwell Falcons' ground, as well as including some gunzel chat.

We discuss Morwell, Gippsland in terms of economic terms, and the unusual factor that despite being a coal mining region, soccer doesn't seem to exist in the same way that it does in other coal mining areas like Newcastle. We also discuss Paul and Ian's guided tour of Morwell with Don Di Fabrizio from back in 2009. For those wondering about the fate of the Eastern Pride sign that Les mentions:

Was removed about five minutes after we were expelled from the NSL.

If only the council was so quick to help the club as it was to remove anything Falcons-related as part of an insane vendetta to wipe the sport out of the region in the early 2000s. They almost succeeded.

— Sebastian Hassett (@sebth) October 23, 2019

We move on to the complicated story of how Morwell actually got into the NSL, and the complicated, contrived, and comical nature of promotion and relegation in the National Soccer League at the time. We finally get into a discussion of Falcons Park - and Paul gets to do his stand up routine gag about Italian weddings in Morwell.

We wrap up the episode by foreshadowing a discussion on Trove, the National Library of Australia's archive of online and digital resources, including its magnificent newspaper database.

Episode 3 - Missing trophies; Soccer in schools; Prahran

Download and listen to episode 3 here.

We begin with trying to figure out the current monetary value of the FA Trophy, donated to Australian soccer back in the day for interstate competition (and currently in the possession of Football Victoria). Back then it was valued at £250, a year's annual salary for a working man. As to the value of £250 in today's money, we got two estimates, one being  $40,000 (David Krunic) and the other estimate being as much as 60,000 (Andrew Howe).

Soccer historian and listener of the show, Peter Eedy, took the theme of missing trophies and ran with it, discussing a range of Queensland trophies. There was

• the 1961 Australia Charity Cup won by the now defunct Hellenic club of Brisbane
• The Hilton Shield played for from the 1920-1960s - also missing
• Late 1800s badges. 
• The Brisbane Charity Cup

We also noted Simon Smale's article about Brisbane City's missing NSL Cup trophy.

This week's main discussion focuses on soccer in schools, especially in the early 1900s. Moving across the different states, we look at how the growth in school soccer, and the responses it engendered from rival codes of football, is key to understanding the development not just of soccer, but also other football codes, and the rhetoric used against soccer in Australia to this day. Among the examples looked at are:

• Kogarah High School in Sydney, a new soccer area with a sudden growth of clubs
• Sydney's Marist Brothers high school, with a six teams in an internal competition; unusual in that it was a Catholic led soccer culture
• Perth, possibly the ground zero of a virulent strain of anti-soccer rhetoric which classed soccer an invader and a threat, and which set the ground for a code-wars view of soccer by Australian rules bodies, as opposed to one where soccer was seen a harmless novelty 
• Melbourne, where school soccer had the difficult task of trying to dislodge the already established take-up of Australian rules

Moving on from historic representations of school soccer to literary ones, we look at the the play and film versions of The Heartbreak Kid, and the centrality in both of teachers as ; we also look at the centrality in soccer literature of teachers as gatekeepers (for better and worse) for soccer; we also compare the effects that such 'motivating individuals' have on a local soccer culture in terms of creating a sense of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. These concepts are linked

(see also this from Paul's blog on the The Heartbreak Kid film and its connections to South Melbourne Hellas.)

We move on to a Sacred Sites segment, looking at the inner-Melbourne suburb of Prahran. Apart from featuring as a key soccer locality in Melbourne from the game's earliest days through until the late 1940s (and maintaining a club presence until the late 1980s), there are also these connections to school soccer. Prahran High School was the site of filming for The Heartbreak Kid; Ange Postecoglou was a student at Prahran High School, and where he set up teams in the absence of formal support; just a few years later Prahran High School (with future NSL player Ange Goutzioulis) were state champions.