Episode 46 - Rale Rasic; Copyright; Match programs

With apologies for Paul's apparent lagging in this episode which causes some distortion at times.

Download and listen to episode 46 here.

On this week's episode there's some interminable waffling at the start about pandemic restrictions being ramped up in Victoria.

Then to the Mark Boric Express. where this week Mark has been uploading match programs sent to him by George Cotsanis. It includes 1970s programs from Victorian club Croydon City, 1990s/2000s programs from fellow Victorian club Altona City, and National Soccer League programs from clubs like St George and Sydney City. This bit includes discussion on what the differences between these programs tell us about the clubs that produced them - ranging from Croydon's informative product, Altona's more homespun, humorous production, and the internal decline evident within Sydney City's mid-1980s single-sheet programs.

We also note Paul's uploading (finally) of St George's silver jubilee booklet from 1982.

We also look at two related matters which were raised separately on social media over the previous two weeks or so. The first related to a query made on the Australian Football Before the A-League page on Facebook, where one of that group's member asked how to get access to Mike Cockerill's early National Soccer League writing. Paul's answer to that question was as follows:

• If you are a member of a tertiary institution (or know someone who would be willing share their access), you can get access to Australian news databases - unfortunately, while these databases are usually excellent for material post-2000, before that date they steadily become less useful. 
• A subscription to newspapers.com (which is a part of the Ancestry group), which will set you back about $75 for six months for the subscription package which includes the site's two Australian newspapers - The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
• A subscription to something like the Sydney Morning Herald's archive service, which covers 1955-1995 - but which is very expensive, with a variety of plans ranging from $15 for 24 hours access, to $395 for a year's access. (a similar service exists for material after 2006 onward, with similarly a high cost)
• For the eras in which Cockerill was writing, the only free option is visiting your local State Library.

Linked to that question is why can't the public freely access archival news material after 1954? The answer lies in US legislation from the early 1990s which extended copyright terms. When Australia and the US signed a free-trade agreement in 2005, this effected copyright law in Australia, and effectively set the line at 1954 for material that was effectively protected by a grandfathering process; and that does not necessarily that once we hit the year 2026, that materials from 1955 will become copyright free en masse.

We finish off by reading from the sole known extant copy of a pre-World War 2 edition of Victoria's Soccer News, as examined and uploaded by Mark Boric. Released during the 1924 season, we focus in particular on the testy relationship between the editor of Soccer News, and a club press representative, arguing over who's responsible for the apparently parlous state of the Victorian soccer press.

After the break Paul reviews The Rale Rasic Story (as told to Ray Gatt). We look at the way the book (which was published in 2005) covers:

• Rasic's experience growing up in an orphanage in Yugoslavia, during and after World War 2.
• The progression and eventual stalling of his professional playing career.
• Rasic's arrival in Australia, and his transition to coaching, including his place in the world as just one of many expatriate coaches from Yugoslavia who end coaching in far-flung corners of the world.
• The ongoing subpar state of Australian soccer in terms of playing, training, and administrative qualities
• The intricacies of Australian soccer politics, including within the Australian Soccer Federation, between the various state federations, and among other interest groups.
• The book's emphasis on Rasic's psychological approach to coaching - in terms of player management, motivation, and preparation - as opposed to the tactical approaches he used.
• We also look at what the book skims over or leaves out entirely - which for Paul, unfortunately includes only brief mentions of the club scene in Australia (especially after Rasic loses the Socceroos job), as well as complete stonewalling on what happened during Rale's Canberra Cosmos tenure.

In this week's final segment we go to 100 Years Ago Today, where in Toowoomba there's a "town vs country" match involving places just three miles out of the aforementioned town; in Ipswich we marvel at the depth of the coverage; while in South Australia, we're surprised that there's any coverage at all, and why has it just seemingly appeared out of the blue? And we finish off the episode with the weekend Melbourne scores.

Episode 37 - Club death, St George, Moorabbin City; Mark Boric

Download and listen to episode 37 here.

Ian's out of the studio again, so Paul is joined by Mark Boric, of the scanning and uploading of Australian soccer documents fame.

After summing up - in person! - what's he's been up to, we segue into 100 Years Ago Today, where preparations for the 1920 season are getting underway in Sydney, Brisbane, Ipswich, Boolaroo, Killingworth (complete with chocolate waltz), North Adelaide, while Geraldton prepares to play another visiting ship, and Pelaw-Main reports problems with cabling.

Against the background of previous discussions on the show about soccer ceasing or dying in certain areas, the threat of the COVID-19 virus to sport, and last week's discussion on the demise of Footscray JUST, we then move into an attempt to discuss the various ways in which soccer clubs have perished in Australia. We also try something a bit different - attempting to solicit calls from our audience to discuss the ways in which they experienced the demise of a club.

It's not an entirely successful affair - we get just one caller - but we're called by Robert, a former St George Budapest supporter who discusses what it was like to watch the decline of one Australia's great clubs firsthand - from the club's glory days of the 1960s, through to declining crowds (and attempts to go mainstream) in the 1970s, even as the club had half the national team which went to the World Cup; the occasionally successful NSL years, with still diminishing crowds, and then ignominious exit from the NSL in 1991.

We discussed how in a way, St George is the archetypal example of the decline (and for some, demise) of an ethnic soccer club - a strong, but short-lived migrant push, successful teams, and a conflicted but still more than half-hearted attempt to go mainstream which ultimately. We also noted that St George's story has been told several times - by Johnny Warren in Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters, by Les Murray in By the Balls, and to a certain extent by Joe Gorman in The Death and Life of Australian Soccer. 

But through our discussion with Robert, we also touch on one contentious fact - St George isn't dead. And yet, for most of its one time supporters, culturally the club is dead, despite a legal entity still persisting in the upper tiers of NSW soccer. We therefore pose the question - when does a club actually die? It can't be merely a legal criteria, but one also tied to names, personnel, culture, colours and a sense of feeling.

And thus we do a bit of a rushed inventory of Australian top-tier clubs which have perished and how; mergers and takeovers; broke during the NSL and because of it; broke shortly after leaving the NSL; reformed and thus still alive for those who wish it so; tenuous legal arguments which won't convince anyone of their veracity; variations where some claim the club died, others claim there is legitimate continuity, and where they both may be right; and the dying and revival of successor clubs to represent the regions.

We don't have enough time to get too deep into other examples of clubs dying - due to war; expulsion; loss of ground; hostile takeover or uneven merger; works teams with no works; women's team which never properly belong to any club; regional and representative teams; kick about teams which got serious and organised for a short time, but which ended up folding as their first generation fell away.

The final segment is taken up with Mark Boric relating the strange demise of Moorabbin City in the 1990s, and the effect it had on him living through that demise. Mark had hinted at this story before, but here it is now in the open - the strange confluence of an old-fashioned "player-run" Melbourne soccer club, the fading English power club trying to get ahead of the curve, and decades-old personality clashes that scuppered not just Villa's attempt to set up an academy in Australia, but also contributed to the club that it was partner closing its doors. The players and committee were scattered far and wide, some lost to the game, and what little memorabilia was left mostly saved by Mark, and uploaded onto his blog and YouTube.