Episode 91 - Tony Persoglia, and recent acquisitions of Victorian soccer history archives

Download and listen to this episode here.

Oh boy, lots of technical problems from Paul's end this week. 

Paul is joined in hosting duties this week by Football Victoria History & Heritage Coordinator, Tony Persoglia.

We begin the show by cleaning up some sundry details. Mark Boric retired, but keeps pumping out material! And while Greg Stock is updating OzFootball's National Soccer League archive, what are we going to do with the pages with match comments like the ones here? And we also look at the perils of updating pages and links that are used as references on Wikipedia, which may be the only reference to certain overseas players and their time in Australia. Also, a proposal to maybe get a professional librarian to do a little seminar on how to use Trove better. And finishing with an update on the state and tour game data set and archive update.

In our main segment (best watched maybe on the Facebook stream), Tony talks about the recent soft launch of Football Victoria's history page on Facebook, and the acquisition of photo archive, and hopefully of Victoria's Soccer News. Tony talks about a Hakoah Melbourne archive; a Spotswood (1910s and 20s) cache; the collection of the late Luciano Fioravanti, whose collection spans much of the history of post-war Italian-Australian soccer in Melbourne;, and finally, the archive of Dino DeMarchi, the Juventus (Melbourne) legend of the 1960s.

In our final segment we have 100 Years Ago Today, where Paul's laptop with Windows 10 is just about to keel over and die, and thus we are obliged to rush through Tasmania playing against Victoria a hundred years ago.

Episode 64 - Non-English language materials on Trove

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin this week by noting that not only is the Football Writers Festival on in Sydney in just a week and a half's time,  but that FNR will also be streaming the event - more news on this as it comes to hand. 

Mark Boric is close to accomplishing a significant milestone - his quest to archive every edition of Soccer Action.

Massive praise coming Tony Persoglia's way from Ian, for helping salvage from digital oblivion some of Ian's articles for Football Victoria from back in the day. Here's hoping that the refreshed FV History page is the sign of better things to come.

Also, the State Library of Victoria is set to reopen on November 19th, which is good news for those who want to get back in there and research - although one suspects there will be space and time restrictions announced closer to the reopening date.

We look at Paul Hunt's struggle to find details of a Tasmanian cup final from the past decade, which allows Paul Mavroudis to go off on his incrementalist tangent again. 

Thanks to Trove aficionado Tim Sherratt, we've become aware not only that non-English language Australian papers are coming online onto Trove, but also that Tim has also set up a map site which allows to see what Trove newspaper materials cover different parts of Australia. 

(Paul adds a gripe about the National Library of Australia's refusal to participate in sharing his decades in the making breach of copyright)

This week we also acknowledge Greg Page's posting of this wonderful Reg Date frame at the Queen's Wharf Hotel in Newcastle.

In our main segment this week, Ian takes up the task of looking through non-English language materials on Trove, focusing on recently uploaded materials from the German and Italian collections. For the German language, Ian tries to figure out what the correct terminology would be for the word football in German, and how the relevant German language press would differentiate between soccer and other football codes.

For the Italian part of the discussion, we look at early Melbourne Italian club Savoia, and some of its participation in 1930s Melbourne soccer, including its 1933 founding, and participation in 1939 in the Northern Juniors competition, and a match report from that year. But we also look at some of the surprising items which get reported - like this table soccer tournament at Footscray's Capri cafe in 1957.

Paul also ponders about the future of non-English language uploads to Trove, and the problems that may arise - including the scanning and text recognition of compressed type non-Latin scripts (whether Greek or Cyrillic or Chinese), as well problems with scripts with ample use of diacritics; but also how useful will languages with significant changes to orthography and vocabulary be to contemporary researchers without those skill sets

In 100 Years Ago Today, we look at a lonely grave site for a pioneering early Queensland player;  skip quickly through the never ending Newcastle season; take a quick glance at hospital fundraisers; celebrations for the end of the junior season in Fremantle; and still in Western Australia, a junior Australian rules body complains about not only the soccer threat, but the lack of support from the most senior Aussie Rules body in the state.

Episode 61 - Tony Persoglia, History & Heritage Coordinator at Football Victoria

Download and listen to this episode here.

Ian is unavailable this week, due to interference from construction related ambient noise at his lockdown locale, and thus Paul is joined in hosting duties by George Cotsanis.

During the clean-up we look at Mark Boric and friends sharing the document love as they are wont to do, with particular focus on this program for the 1967 match between Sydney Prague and Sparts Prague. Apart from looking at the program on its own merits, we also look at how many of these programs end up in the United Kingdom, when in Australia they seem to be thin on the ground. We then follow up with George and his recent interviews, as well as his role in unearthing lower league Victorian soccer photos and ephemera from the 1950s and 60s, particularly from the now long-defunct Heidelberg club (not the club now known as Heidelberg United).

Closing out the first segment of this week's episode, is a quick overview of the Australian Dictionary of Biography - what it is and how it works. We also traipse through the soccer content on the ADB site, including not only the limited biographies of 'genuine' soccer people (such as Sam Papasavas), but also at the many fleeting references to soccer in biographies of people who seem to otherwise have very little to do with the game. For the many English and Scottish born migrant subjects who were passionate or interested about the game in their home nation, but who seemingly lost touch with it once they settled in Australia, there is seemingly a theoretical thread to be drawn of some sort. Then again, as pointed out by listener Paul Hunt after the show, entries such as that on the Anglican bishop Robert Snowden Hay, while mentioning Hay's soccer prowess in England for the leading amateur club Bishop Auckland, fail to mention Snowden's significant involvement in Tasmanian soccer during the 1920s.

Our guest this week is occasional co-host and recurring guest Tony Persoglia, who has recently taken up the role of History and Heritage Coordinator at Football Victoria, a part-time paid role. We talk to Tony about:

• the long-path to get to this point - recommendations, surveys, and COVID
• the probable novelty of such a role being established at an Australian state soccer federation.
• whether the creation of this position will prompt other state federations to follow suit
• the kinds of things that Tony will look at, including hall of fame, life membership, scores and tables, 
• oh, and posting of regular history articles like this one on the New York Cosmos visit to Victoria
• and so much more, of course.

On 100 Years Ago Today, we find Geelong soccer games that Roy Hay wasn't aware of; go to Gnowangerup and Tambellup-Ongerup, in south-east Western Australia, for some sexist football banter; then across to Sydney for a match between two teams of referees; plans for a New South Wales tour of New Zealand; the Catholic papers looking across the sea at sectarian tensions in Ulster, and a football related riot that isn't this one;  and finally ground allocations in Brisbane and surrounds.

Episode 58 - All about Arthur Prinsep, with special guest Garry Mackenzie.

Download and listen to this episode here. 

After trying to clamp down on Ian's banter, Paul loses the battle this week, and by some measure.

Mark Boric and Greg Stock have shared the financials from the 1967 tour of Australia by Manchester United, which leads to a quick discussion about the connection of the late Dean Jones to the 1999 tour of Australia by the same club. 

We look at Tony Persoglia's creation of a Wikipedia article on Victorian player and administrator Frank McIver - and some of the problems with creating Wikipedia pages in terms of 'notability' criteria, as well as the lack of reliable statistics in Australian soccer. This leads on to a social media discussion posted by Jason Goldsmith, asking who were the non-Australian and non-Socceroo goalscorers before the NSL -with Western Australia's Johnny McInroy being among the pick of the bunch.

We also revisit the gazette discussion from last week's show, where we look a little more deeply at what's included in that part of Trove (injuries, bankruptcy, winding up orders, soccer pools, anti-siphoning legislation), but also the disadvantages in terms of a lack of context - such as what exactly prompted the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to seek the winding up of South Melbourne Hellas circa April 1998 - and of course a whole host of clubs at national, state, and regional levels. Oh, and Paul's gripe about 'soccer' being changed to 'football' continuing to cause problems.

For 100 Years Ago Today, we're joined by recurring guest Garry McKenzie where we begin in Queenslands with the Brisbane vs Ipswich game, and check in on the Corinthians social events; then down to Sydney for an update to the Australian Trustees Soccer Football Association competition, which we talked about at length back in episode 43; then to South Australia, for a charity match between  two Adelaide teams, and as a curtain-raiser a team of female soccer players and a male team (in skirts); and finally, resolution to Weston and their being forced to host their Gardiner Cup game in Sydney; and we finish off the segment with Ian finding out the nuanced truth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's thoughts on Australian Rules football and its merits compared to other football codes.

In this week's final segment, Garry takes us through his ongoing deep-dive into the colourful life of early Australian soccer identity Arthur Haversleigh Thoby Prinsep. In this lengthy segment Garry covers Prinsep's:

• Prinsep's comparatively brief connections to early Australian soccer (1880s), across several cities and states (Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Dunedin), which included playing, refereeing, and administration.
• Prinsep's position in the timeline of the sequence of early Australian soccer (in Melbourne and Sydney) moving from a middle-class game to a working class one.
• The exaggerated and often false claims about not just Prinsep's soccer pedigree, as well as countless details he claimed about his life and accomplishments.
• Prinsep's family connections, as well as his relatives own claims to greatness, as well as their proximity to famous artists of the 19th century.
• Prinsep's multiple pseudonyms and assumed identities
• Prinsep's multiple interactions with both civil and criminal courts
• His reputation as a bigamist, cad, bounder, and scoundrel
• Prinsep's literary and dramatic output.
• The value of studying Prinsep's life - especially the way his ongoing social notoriety makes him one of the easiest people in early Australian soccer to actually find out and trace throughout their life in and out of soccer.

Episode 52 - Tony Persoglia and the Victorian Football Club Archive

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin the episode with the clean up, noting that Mark Boric has been going through his personal archives, but also uploading match programs from Adelaide United's first season, which was spent in the final season of the NSL. 

And of course George Cotsanis is still pumping out the interviews.

More problematic - for Ian, at least - is the work of Garry MacKenzie. Garry may have found that John Jaap - the man who Ian had credited as being responsible for the 1875 soccer match at the Woogaroo Asylum - may not have actually been the person responsible for that after all. Jaap may have been ill and way at the time, and may also have been older than previously thought. It's a good problem to have though - another avenue of inquiry opened, and the reassurance that people are still engaged with that research.

Paul then launches into a spiel of sorts on the Wayback Machine, the perennially frustrating but still invaluable resource for looking at the history of the internet. Paul's discussions ranges from

• A very rough introduction of how to search for material within the database, using either exact web addresses, or carefully chosen key words.
• Dead ends, dead links, and workarounds which only sometimes work - and the many things which will remain out of reach.
• Old South Melbourne stuff that even Paul was not aware of including a column from then South coach Ange Postecoglou
• The need for patience and persistence, especially when one is unable to access videos and other documents.
• The ability to, that aforementioned persistence and patience, still be able find and salvage photos, match reports, histories, and all sorts of other details.

In our middle segment we welcome back Tony Persoglia to the show. Tony has just completed a massive update to the Victorian Football Club Archive on OzFootball. In this wide-ranging chat, we cover

• The original impetus to start the project
• What's included in this update - including an expansion of club entries, an index of clubs and names, club merger and split information, 
• The technological framework that underpins (and sometimes hinders) a project such as this.
• The possibilities and difficulties in applying the work done here to different sets - whether that be other states, regional areas, and for women's football.
• What's next in the immediate future for Tony's OzFootball work.

Finally, a packed 100 Years Ago Today. prefaced by a note by Ian on vagaries of searching through Trove. We begin in New South Wales and Uralla and a team from Bananaland; state team selection news from Newcastle; still looking ahead to the North vs South game in Tasmania; a strangely written but information rich item from Western Australia, which includes references to Perth to Wyalcatchem; more on the Queensland team's tour of New South Wales, this time on the south coast; and finally to Melbourne for the results, but especially two very different views of the same controversial incident.

Episode 11 - Tony Persoglia & OzFootball

Download and listen to episode 11.

We begin this episode arguing or not arguing about whether there was any tension on the show the previous week.

Then a nod to the nascent scanning and uploading collaboration between Greg Stock and Mark Boric, which initially at least beefed up the NSW related contents on Mark's blog.

We segue into a discussion on the eminent football historian Tony Collins, and a particular episode of his own Rugby Reloaded podcast series (don't let the name fool you - the series contains material on a wider variety of football codes), which discusses the problems of trying to claim "historic firsts". 

Ian moves on to talking about his love-affair with Queensland soccer historian Garry McKenzie, and a piece written by sports writer John Harms about soccer in Goombungee.

Then the birth of the 100 Years Ago Today sting. Oh, and the relevant segment continues as normal, including having to read the paper to find out which train to take in Perth to get to a game.

Aussie soccer stats nerd Tony Persoglia could talk the leg off a chair
 - which is fine by us if he's talking about Australian soccer history.

We then interview Tony Persoglia, a statistician and historian who's mostly based around OzFootball. Tony has worked on OzFootball for a long time, and he takes us through the process of OzFootball's earliest days, the technical obstacles, and the nature of the gradually mainstreaming of the internet. 

Tony has also been working on a revamped version of the Victorian club database, a revamped version of Victorian league results and tables, Victorian players, and a new project detailing every player - men and women - who have played a topflight game in Australian. 

The discussion also covers the logistical and ideological issues with collecting stats and recording history in Australian soccer, especially with regards to the paucity of federation help at either state or national level - and the difficulty of sourcing women's national league stats. We also pay credit to John Punshon, one of Australian soccer history's most unsung heroes.

We finish off the show with a quick chat about Ian's "First Kicks" project.