Episode 90 - Overseas guest players in Australian soccer, with Jason Goldsmith and Lucas Gillard

Download and listen to this episode here.

Paul is joined on the show this week by Jason Goldsmith and Lucas Gillard, the authors of Be My Guest: Football Superstars in Australia, their new book about overseas player guests stints in Australia. Together, we discuss the book's genesis; the research methods and obstacles (with a shoutout to the scanners and uploaders and historians among us); what the guest players themselves remembered of their time in Australia; the motivations of the clubs and players involved; the moving stories of those who unexpectedly played alongside some of world football greats; the dawn and dusk of the guest player stints in Australian soccer; and so much more, across the opening two segments of the show. 

Fair to say, Paul highly recommends this book!

Jason and Lucas stick around for 100 Years Ago Today, where we begin with the Melbourne scores; the footballers at Osbourne House are doing well; and finally, letter writer 'Enthusiast' has some pointed remarks for both the New South Wales state team, and the Queensland state selectors; an article from Adelaide looks at the merits of the various football codes, finding good in all; and Queensland's lady footballers are going to play their match as a curtain raiser to an Australian Rules match - why? Probably because of attitudes from soccer authorities like this.

Episode 76 - Heather Reid, Marion Stell and "Women in Boots"

Download and listen to this episode here.

No Ian Syson in the studio tonight, or even via Zoom, and no co-host rustled up either. What is Paul to do other than channel his 2015 uni lecturer self? So Paul puts on a brave face, and dives into what else, but a monologue on trying to identify a problem seemingly ignored by most people practicing the art/hobby of Australian soccer history - that it's not just the game's institutions who ignore or pay mere lip service to Australian soccer history - the great mass of Australian soccer lay community also does the same.

There are great amount of approaches and motivations for those undertaking historical work to do with Australia, almost none lacking validity or nobility... and yet, what's the end game, other those of us engaged in this process looking at each other's work, and mostly failing to engage the Australian soccer community outside our particular interest group?

How do we connect with a culture that seems to exist - and contentedly so - without the burden or gift of knowing of Australian soccer? What if Australian soccer is successful, and popular, without ever needing to resort to deep or even shallow discussions or references to its own history? What is the role of the rare amateur and (rarer still, professional) Australian soccer historian, and their efforts to tell stories, compile statistics, collect memorabilia, and curating archives?

Paul finishes up by wondering if what is really needed for the great mass is not history, but a myth - a unifying story (whether real or not), that allows Australian soccer's participants to feel connected to something (a story, rather than a history) that's bigger than themselves. How you would even concoct such a thing now, when everything is disparate and fractured, is left for another time. 

In the middle segment Paul chats with Marion Stell and Heather Reid about their book Women in Boots: Football and Feminism in the 1970s, which is a predominantly oral history of the first generation of international Australian female soccer players. In the discussion Paul, Marion, and Heather discuss:

• The research methods involved, including oral histories (with all their potential pitfalls), as well as the scrapbooks maintained by the players and their families.
• The twin stories of Australian and New Zealand women's soccer, which grow separately and intersect throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
• The influence of migration -and specifically Englishness - on the fledgling women's soccer scene, for both better and and for worse.
• The often humiliating fundraising efforts required to enable the players to travel interstate and overseas.
• The patronising, sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic media coverage
• The awareness or lack of awareness of the feminist political movements of the time among the players, and their response to it.
• The poor training, funding, facilities, etc doled out to the women.
• The nature of personal relationships - including the frequency of which male coaches and personnel around women's football, who became involved with female players; but also the attitudes to lesbianism within the women's football scene.
• All this, but also much more, including the ordeal of women footballers simply trying to find a suitable pair of soccer boots in the 1970s, and the way many of them came to cherish their pair of boots.

Paul closes out the episode by having a brief chat with FNR producer and presenter Josh Parish about the announcement from SBS that the network will be shutting down its The World Game portal and brand. Paul and Josh discuss the history and influence of the The World Game; the decline in SBS' football offerings over a number of the years; the unknown fate of the portal's archive of reportage and commentary; and the effects on football journalists and the Australian soccer public of having one less outlet solely dedicated to soccer.

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 65 - Lawrie McKinna's Political Football; Australian soccer's optimism

Download and listen to this episode here.

By the time this post is up, the Football Writers Festival will have come and gone. Then there's the usual brief spiel on Mark Boric, and the lifting of restrictions on in person library visits.

We look at Tim Sherratt's list of non-English language newspapers on Trove. Wel also take a very quick look at the soccer references on a new database, Digital Pasifik.

Then a digression into a non-soccer project of Ian's - namely an Australian rules project called "make footy great again" - which leads to an odd discussion about how such an equivalent discussion work within the context of Australian soccer. You can see the bit that Ian's reads out abut the optimism of Australian soccer in 1913. Do we always look forward to better times, as opposed to "footy" always looking back to a mythic golden age, and both rugbys already being assured that they are and always have been,

In 100 Years Ago Today we look at a report on crowd violence at English football matche; s; a report on soccer and betting and wowserish anti-working class attitudes to soccer supporters, also from the UK; a report from a game between Bowen and the crew of the HMAS Melbourne, and what that report might indicate about why so many ships seemed to be inclined towards soccer; and the soccer finals at last in Newcastle, with a bonus supplementary photo from the 1960s of a later grand final.

In the final segment Paul looks at Lawrie McKinna's autobiography Political Football (as told to Adrian Deans). Paul looks at:

• McKinna's upbringing in Australia and Scotland.
• His unorthodox rise through the ranks of Scottish football, eventyually becoming a professional with Kilmarnock.
• The nature of Scottish football at the time - ncluding the revelation to Paul that even in the top-division, there were teams made up of semi-pros.
• The particular conditions of Scottish football which would see players like McKinna try their luck in Australia.
• McKinna's time as a player in Australia at a variety of NSL and state league clubs, and the often less than stellar conduct of those clubs towards players - especially injured ones.
• McKinna's transition into coaching, first as an assistant at Sydney Olympic, and later as head coach at Northern Spirit and Central Coast Mariners - and his eventual move into the corporate side of the game, as well as a move into local politics.
• The insights into the final seasons of the National Soccer League, the transition into the early A-League era, and the difficulties of being a small club with limited cash.

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 31 - Les Street & Aussie rules grounds in Oz Soccer; Paul Connolly's 'The Mighty Bras'

Download and listen to episode 31 here. 

Tony Persoglia is still ill, so tonight Paul is joined in hosting duties by Jason Goldsmith, previously a guest on the show.

On the catch up we play our usual tribute to Mark Boric and his collaborators, and the great scanning and uploading work they're doing. We look at the apples and oranges comparisons made about Ange Postecoglou's J-League title success and the success of other coaches - and yes there are references to snake emojis. 

In 100 Years Ago Today, we critique the batting techniques and temperaments of Geraldton's soccer players... but does it even matter if their cricket match is going to be interrupted by a surprise soccer game; take a look at Eurosnob material in the Adelaide press; check out combination fundraiser and bragging rights matches still being played so late in the year in Newcastle; and finish up at Lithgow, where the local schoolboys are playing for what sound like some very nice trophies

After the break we chat with Les Street about the use of Australian rules football grounds for Australian top-flight soccer grounds, especially in the southern states. During the conversation we sweep across the country from Western Australia to Tasmania, covering grounds old, new and demolished, and grounds which were at least built to be nominally multi-sport venues. We also look at the reasons why some Aussie rules grounds were used by soccer - and why some were perhaps underused. We also cover issues such as pitch alignments, surface conditions, cricket wickets, spectator amenities and sight-lines - and we find that there's been so many "footy" grounds used for top-flight soccer, that we neglect to mention even obvious ones like Victoria Park!

In the final segment we take a look at a hidden gem of Australian soccer books, Paul Connolly's The Mighty Bras, Connolly's 2010 memoir about his first seven years coaching of the Brunswick Zebras senior women's team. This is the ultimate sweet-natured - but not saccharine - grassroots soccer story, about a bunch of women ranging in age from early 30s until early 50s, who suddenly find themselves playing organised soccer despite most of them having next to athletic background, let alone a soccer background. They are neither the pioneering women of yesteryear, who sought out soccer and made it their own (in the broader sense against men’s disapproval, and the disapproval of other women, establishing their own controlling body as well as clubs; neither are they (for the most part) part of the maturing of the girl footballers who had begun to swell junior numbers. 

The book focuses on the team's 2009 season, but also goes back to earlier games and season, covering the high, lows, and middles. When this team started, it was the only senior team for either gender at Brunswick Zebras – the senior men’s wing didn’t start until 2006, and perhaps unusually, the women's team has continued through to 2019. The book provides a snapshot of the kinds of opponents they faced, from across the city, and the conditions that these women played in, and under. The books also looks at the different motivations of the different teams (youth vs age, winning at all costs vs fun), and Paul’s motivations in being their coach. Perhaps most keenly observed, apart from the various characters in the book, are the difference between the expectations of men’s football (even “social” men’s football) and senior women’s football, as well as the culturally entrenched (though not unchangeable) psychological differences between men’s and women’s teams. 

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 27 - Roberto Pennino; Superga air disaster; Record Keeping

Download and listen to episode 27 here.

In this episode we cover the deficiencies in record keeping in Football Victoria's state league leading goalscorers and its best and fairest tallies, and ask who's responsible for maintaining the game's records.

We also look at the based-on-an Aboriginal war-cry chant used by the Queensland state team in 1925, and the relationship of Aboriginal kitsch to Australian soccer.

Ian brings up his segment, which is called "Short Memory", on the eternal forgetting of the game - that is, the habit of soccer forgetting its history. Ian reads from his blog, which you can read here.

The main part of the episode is dedicated to a chat with visiting writer Roberto Pennino, who has written books (published in Dutch and Italian language editions) about the Superga air disaster, which in 1949 claimed almost the entirety of playing squad of the great Torino side of the 1940s. (Roberto has also written a book about Dutch footballers in Italy, in Dutch).

We also manage to get some chat about the research on Dutch-Australian soccer clubs which Roberto is helping Adam Muyt with. (Adam is also in the room off mic in the final segment).

Episode 25 - Our favourite books; maps; Alec Barr and hit and run drivers

Download and listen to episode 25 here.

In this episode we look at Mark Boric digging out the history of the Scots-Australian soccer journalist from the 1950s-1980s, Alec Barr, and Barr's history as a player, journalist (and his bias against certain clubs, see also here), and convicted reckless driver, after he killed two journalists in a car accident.

We discuss the progress of Paul's Australian soccer cultural map, and especially the Brompton Speedway in South Australia, and Ted Rowley's relationship to that one-time soccer ground and later speedway.

Ian then pines for Joe Gorman, and Gorman's absence from Australian soccer writing.

The bulk of the episode is spent discussing a listener's suggestion about what Australian soccer history books we recommend. Ian couldn't keep himself to five, so he preempted his five choices for the radio by putting up a longlist before the show.

For the record Ian's five books mentioned on the show were:

• Soccer in New South Wales, 1880–1980, by Phil Mosely
• Soccer Anzacs: The Story of Caledonian Soccer Club, by John Williamson
• The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe: A History of Aboriginal Involvement with the World Game, by John Maynard (updated in 2019)
• A History of Football in Australia, by Roy Hay and Bill Murray
• The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, by Joe Gorman

Paul's selections were the following, with links to reviews by Paul where available:

• The Death and Life of Australian Soccer, by Joe Gorman
• Green Gully Soccer Club: 50 Years, by Peter Desira and Richard Curmi
• Offsider (later re-released as The Loneliness of the Long-distance Gunner)
• Keep It Simple, Stupid, by Peter Goldsworthy
• Captain Socceroo: the Paul Wade Story, by Paul Wade and Kyle Patterson

Another item to look at, though a little out of date now, is Roy Hay's Bibliography of Australian Soccer.

If you're wondering what happens at the end of the show, I get rudely interrupted by people in the control room outside bursting in with an unsolicited and frankly rude barrage of noise celebrating a Socceroos goal against Nepal.

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 17 - Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia; Dinmore Bushrats

Download and listen to episode 17 here.

We celebrate George Costanis getting brought into the inner-sanctum of Roma... withh noting erroneously that he'd been flown over by Roma to hand over precious film reels.

We move on to Mark Boric, who'd written a short piece on the history Dockerty Cup, the final of which was being played that week in Melbourne.

We note that the Australia Cup trophy, salvaged from oblivion, will be donated permanently to the Caroline Springs (formerly Sunshine) George Cross club.

Then Garry McKenzie has prompted Ian to dig through the archives and perhaps reevaluate assumptions about early South Melbourne soccer (with clarification of the difference between Emerald Hill and South Park). And was soccer the punk rock of 1880s Melbourne sport?

Then 100 Years Ago Today where we do our usual trawling through 1919 Victorian soccer results. Then up to Queensland and Musgrave Park and Pineapple Rovers. Then to Western Australia and the burgeoning florid rhetoric of the code wars - with a particular emphasis on the effects of nationalism on our sporting preferences and loyalties.

Following the break is a discussion with Scott Morrison and Garry McKenzie on the revival of the historic Ipswich club Dinmore Bushrats - an unusual discussion going back into the depths of time and dealing with very recent events, and dealing with the difficulties of maintaining historical memory over such a large span of time.

In the final segment, Garry Mckenzie sticks around to join Paul and Ian in a very thorough analysis of Peter Kunz's Chronicles of Soccer in Australia:The Foundation Years - 1859-1949, an important book defined by its sense of overwhelming ambition. We look at:

• The book being both unique in terms of its ambition, but also typical of Australian soccer historiography in that an author, going it alone, saw a gap in the existing knowledge, and tried to fill-in the sprawling void of knowledge.
• A rundown of the book - charting the status of soccer across the states through the decades.
• Women's soccer and international tours.
• Kunz revealing a sense of British identity, including one independent of blase notions of coal-miners; the effects of works teams in suburban areas; and the ways that British ideas of professionalism clash with Australian ideals of amateurism.
• The transient influence of visiting (merchant and military) ships to Australian soccer.
• The technological limitations of the project in terms of it being a book and not an easy-to-update online database, especially for its list of catalogue clubs.
• The catalogue of over 2000 clubs making up the final third of the book.
• Its drawbacks, including a lack of referencing, and a sense of overreach of being too eager to claim certain dates and games as being soccer instead of other football codes
• The problems of using the date '1859' as a starting point.
• Its errors and the way they've come about - perhaps due to a lack of a methodology chapter and literature review. 
• That in spite of drawbacks, it's an incredible book that should be treated first as a prime example of a labour love; the book is magnificent, but many of its assertions must be handled with care; and that triangulation of details remains an imperative.
• The book is a correction to the over-emphasis on post-1945 soccer.

Episode 13 - Adamstown Rosebud's 130th anniversary; Leopold Baumgartner

Download and listen to episode 13 here.

Apologies for another week missed. But we're back for another episode with a lot to clean up.

We start with little bit about the soccer exhibition at Deakin University in Geelong, highlighting what's available in the Schwab and Shorrock collections at Deakin.

Then Ian and Paul wonder about Mark Boric's collection and the long-term security of the database, and whether it would be better if someone with money and clout came into secure the future of the collection. But remember what the Meat Puppets said? "Who needs action when you've got words".

Ian talks about progress on his 'First Kicks' project. Oh, the complications of delineating between suburbs, cities, towns, villages, and the passage of time that changes them.

And the rivalry between the George and George Cup and the Beaney Cup for importance in 1880s Melbourne.

Then 100 Years Ago Today. The Spanish flu is on the wane. The code is regenerating. And first to Broken Hill, where the local soccer folk are trying to get the game going again. At the centre of things are working people and trade unionism, and an interesting fellow named Reg Rapley. Then to Melbourne, where league competition is finally getting underway... almost. That's followed by a soccer/rugby league double header in Newcastle... and how things have changed since then.

After the break we speak with John Connors from Adamstown Rosebud, on the club's 130th anniversary. We delve into the club's early days and the social context the club existed in - covering class, religion, and other clubs of the same vintage - before moving on to discuss the club's war dead.

The discussion is capped off with a look at Adamstown's short-lived tenure in the National Soccer Leagye in the 1980s - an era which brought surprise glory, in the form of an NSL Cup win (and another missing trophy); but also disaster, with the club's then significant wealth squandered on just three NSL seasons.

In the final segment, Paul looks at The Little Professor of Soccer by Leopold Baumgartner, a classic of Australian soccer publishing.

The book covers Baumgartner's life from his early days in Austria, until the near the end of his playing career. It's a bit of a let down that the book doesn't go beyond that, as Baumgartner remained engaged in soccer in various guises for the rest of his life, especially coaching junior soccer.

The first half or so of the book centres on Baumgartner's youth and pathway to professional soccer in Austria - which was still a semi-professional pursuit. Baumgartner talks about his trips with the Austrian national youth team, and club trips touring South America, where the somewhat naive sounding narrator marvels at the cross-national bonhomie of European youth football but also note the grinding poverty he encounters in Latin America

These overseas tours eventually lead to Baumgartner and players of his ilk, migrating to Australia to play for clubs like Sydney's Prague and Hakoah clubs. Of course this leads to the mess of Australia being kicked out of FIFA for not paying transfers to the European clubs. But the imports at least bring advanced tactics, preparation and skill to Australia, as well as boosting crowds.

Baumgartner plays for a variety of clubs and undertakes a variety of roles, but if there's one thing which irks him it's football politics. The pettiness of internal club politics, and the incompetence of federation officials really get up Baumgartner's goat.

The lasting impact of this book is a strange one - the collective memory of the culture that this book talks about is gone. Many of the clubs are dead; the rest, even the strongest, a mere shadow of what they were. A book that begins so full of naivety and hope ends with the sobering warning that Australian soccer in the late 1960s is already on the decline, and that something must be done to arrest that downward turn.

The book is long out of print, but you can download a sneaky scanned copy here.

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.

Episode 9 - Religion and Australian soccer; 'Playing for Australia' review

Download and listen to episode 9 here.

As Ian was staying in Hervey Bay in Queensland over the previous week, he decided to have a look at the history of soccer in Hervey Bay and the surrounding region. Digging deeper into the story of soccer in the town of Howard, the point is reiterated that the game's fortune's, especially in rural and regional Australia, are closely tied to the fortunes (and existence or otherwise) of certain industries. That expands into a discussion on analogous comparisons with migration, and then with other sports and migration, and Ian's heroics in New Zealand soccer... and the eventually back to discussing the relevance of certain kinds of mining to soccer, and not others.

We then move on to discussing the poor historical research of the new Macarthur A-League team, which claimed that football was first played in the region in 1947.

Then 100 Years Ago Today, with apologies to the Spanish flu infected week before. Religion is the theme of the week - Rechabites, Catholics, Protestants, church leagues, among others - including references to the sections on religion in Phil Mosely's Soccer in New South Wales 1880-1980. Paul asks the question, why do some religious groups seem to favour soccer more than other religious groups? Have soccer historians focused too much on class, migration, and occupation at the expense of religious affiliation, when looking at historical sporting preference in Australia?

We then move on to soccer resuming in Tasmania after the war, and noting the death JJB Honeysett, a key personality in Tasmanian soccer; and finally to Melbourne, where soccer is struggling to reconvene, with many of its players still absent,

After that we move on Paul providing a review of Trevor Thompson's Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia and World Football. Paul was impressed! With caveats! The discussion covers:

• Thompson's previous work, One Fantastic Goal, and the environment in which that was published
• The era the book covers, which is mostly the period between the war.
• The overwhelming strength of New South Wales soccer compared to every other state - with the exception of Queensland - and the tension that caused when it came to national team selection, especially when it came to picking teams during tours which spanned areas outside New South Wales.
• The club vs national team, club vs federation, and amateur vs professional tensions, and the centrality of private entrepreneurs to success of tours by overseas sides.
• The constant pining for England, and near permanent disappointment caused by a persistent Australian colonial lackey mentality.
• The lack of meaningful competition offered by New Zealand.
• The tours through South-East Asia by Australian national teams. 
• The strength of the book lying in its eye for particular details and anecdotes, such as the attempt to establish haka like war-cries.
• The chief weakness of the book being a lack of referencing.

Episode 7 - Lucianne Lauffer; women's soccer; Knox City

Download and listen to episode 7.

We're back after a four month absence, taking over The Pioneers timeslot.

We talk about what we did on our break. Ian talks up the Football Writers Festival, and being interviewed on Fox Sports for Anzac Day, The search for the Soccer Ashes also continues...

Ian revives his 100 Years Ago Today segment. Soccer is attempting to rebuild in Victoria, but efforts are stymied by ground access issues and players still returning from active service. But was soccer completely dead in Victoria, or just practically dead?

In Adelaide, they're seemingly a bit more optimistic about their shot term prospects of getting a competition started again.

We also discuss the development of the usage of the word "soccer" in Australian culture.

Our first guest of the year is scholar Lucianne Lauffer, who is attempting to recover the organisation history of women's soccer in Australia, linking her research to feminist movements. The discussion covers the difficulties of researching women's football in any sphere. The discussion branches out to the cultural marginality of women's soccer as a whole. We only touch lightly on Lucianne's research on Brazilian women's football.

We finish off by racing through Paul discussing a couple of books about Knox City Soccer Club in Melbourne. You can see Knox's 50th anniversary booklet here. The later update is available from Knox City Soccer Club.

Episode 2 - Australian soccer and literature; Extended trophy discussion

Download and listen to episode 2 here,

Rudderless without George Donikian's guiding hand, Ian and Paul cast off into uncharted waters. The first ten minutes meander with attempts to put forward a manifesto, or at least some sort of method - only committed listeners will find out if any of these regular segments actually materialise.

The whole world then celebrates Paul's finally getting his thesis passed. The thesis was about the relationship between Australian soccer and literature, and soccer and Australian literature,

• the difficulty about talking sport and the arts at the same time in Australian culture.
• the paucity of academic and community awareness of Australian sporting literature.
• the Austlit database, which is accessible via university databases for those in the tertiary sector, and via state library websites.
• the many ways in which the literature differs in its discourses from the ways in which journalism and mainline histories discuss the experience of Australian soccer
• the ways in which the literature challenges monolithic understandings of Australian soccer in terms of ethnicity and gender readings.
• the idea that demographers, historians, sociologists etc have not taken literature seriously when looking at the Australian sporting experience.
• an extended discussion on The Earth Cries Out, Harold C. Wells' novel on mining in the Hunter, which includes occasional snippets on soccer.

After the break, the discussion moves to missing trophies, and particularly Victoria's Beaney Cup, and the George and George Cup, and the sage of their theft, pawning, and involvement in court cases. The discussion also touches on the virtual disappearance of soccer from Victoria during the 1890s and early 1900s.

Then onto the Gardiner Cup, New South Wales' long-running knockout cup, and a discussion of the nature (and material value) of trophies, and the cultural difference between trophies and pennants. Then a discussion on the FA Trophy, which was donated by the Football Association for interstate competition in Australia, which was assumed missing... but is it actually?

And then onto the very well-known story of the fate of the Australia Cup trophy... and how soccer cultures evolve in the things that they care (and don't care about), and the ways in which people in the game take care of historical artefacts - and what happens to a club's trophies if the club goes defunct? And who is responsible for maintaining those artefacts? Oh, and that dreaded museum debate...