Episode 51 - Too many Sandringhams, not yet enough clarity

Download and listen to this episode here.

On this week's episode we begin with the clean-up, where Mark Boric is uploading some team sheets. George Cotsanis is still pumping out the interviews. We note that listener Simon Reynolds has sent in a request that we talk about inland northern New South Wales soccer.

Ian then moves on to talk about a small batch of aerogrammes from the 1950s, wherein there is correspondence between an emigrant Englishman and his friend, discussing soccer in Frankston, including via the medium of the soccer pools. Who knows what other correspondence is out there in the archives?

We also look at a question posed to us by a listener on twitter named "Ewok Hunter", about the claim by a New South Wales Christian FA that in the 1970s they were biggest association in the southern hemisphere. We also quickly consider a topic query by Garry MacKenzie, asking about Australian soccer memorabilia (especially novelty/limited edition/collectable material) and how to gauge the material and monetary value of such items.

After the break we welcome Michele Rowse to the show. Michele is the current treasurer of Melbourne's Sandringham, and she asked the question of whether the club she is a member of - which was founded in 1947 - has any connections to any of the several clubs named Sandringham which played at various times in Melbourne competition during the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. As part of the process of trying to find it out, we discuss:

• What constitutes continuity in a soccer scene like Melbourne's, where clubs often fail to persevere between one or two generations of players. 
• The historical nexus between the Brighton, Moorabbin, and Sandringham clubs, and whether the establishment 
• What the nature of the "soccer impulse" was in the bay-side suburbs in and around Sandringham, and how it differed from that of clubs from other parts of Melbourne. 
• Important people involved in the founding and otherwise of the various clubs named Sandringham.
• The Bingham family - or at least persons with the surname Bingham - including Harry, Les, and Don who were involved with clubs named Sandringham at different times, and which may provide some sense of organisational continuity.
• The champion Scots player George Raitt, who played for Melbourne Thistle, Victoria, and Australia, who was involved as with two Sandringham iterations as a committeman after he retired from playing.
• The effects of two wars on clubs named Sandringham, forcing them into recess which it appears that neither came out of.
• The difficulties of searching for material on clubs named Sandringham, in lieu of limited or truncated online materials.
• But also issues of nomenclature - especially the difficulty doing searches for "Sandringham" and "association football" because of the existence of the Victorian Football (aussie rules) Association's Sandringham club.

Finally, in 100 Years Ago Today, we look at the Melbourne results; we look ahead to the north vs south game in Tasmania; look at some lengthy missives from Sydney; a cross-code extravaganza involving New Souht Wales and Queensland; and we finish up the segment by looking at a curious article from Melbourne about hockey, which has us asking - how is it that Victorian know enough about soccer to use some of its parlance and refer to its tactics, while holding the simultaneous position of knowing nothing about the game?

Episode 32 - Francesco Ricatii, Matthew Klugman, & Italian-Australian soccer fans

Download and listen to episode 32 here.

Our final episode for 2019 sees the return of Tony Persoglia after illness to co-host the show.

We look at the Mark Boric Express, where the lid on Mark's scanner has cracked. Still, he's pushing on with the scanning and uploading. We note that one of the more interesting/diverting elements that Mark uploaded during the week was an extract from the Brisbane soccer publication Go Soccer, which included a series of a potential names and logos for what would eventually become Brisbane United, and later Brisbane Strikers.

George Cotsanis has uploaded the film reel footage of the second leg of the Australia vs Israel World Cup qualifier from 1969, thus completing the uploads of the various film reels he bought last year.

We also note that Chris Jack - the son of Australian soccer journalist David Jack - is considering distributing his late father's collection of football pins. Chris is planning on photographing and setting up a catalogue of the pin collection, and interested parties should keep tabs on Chris' social media accounts for updates.

In our final 100 Years Ago Today for the year, we look only briefly at Newcastle Catholics; we troll Ian Syson with a 100 year-old Sunderland result; and we get some closure on the match between the crew of the visiting wheat ship, the David Lloyd George, and the local soccer players of Geraldton - whose cricket game from the previous week was postponed to accommodate the soccer match.

We conclude the segment by taking a brief look at the epithet "the simple game", which appeared in a December 1919 article in English rugby league, and which is used sparingly in both positive and negative ways by different writers.

In our middle segment, we talk to Francesco Ricatti and Matthew Klugman, who have co-authored a couple of academic papers of interest:

• Connected to Something’: Soccer and the Transnational Passions, Memories and Communities of Sydney's Italian Migrants, from 2013
• Re-Creating Home and Exploring Away in New Cities: Italian Migration and Football Codes Within Australian Urban Centres, from 2019

(As these are papers published in academic journals, in general they are not available to the general public, but if you would like a copy of either of them, just drop Paul a line)

Primarily an oral history project, Ricatti and Klugman's collaboration looks not just at Italian-Australians' involvement within Australian soccer, but also how that involvement with - or in some cases, distance from - Australian soccer shaped their non-soccer lives, and their understanding of what it means to be Italian, Australian, and Italian-Australian. The discussion covers, among other things, questions of identity; individual and community agency; the ways in which attachment to different sports created differing ideas of 'home'; different experiences of Italian-Australian soccer on the basis of gender, class, and age; the difference in the supporter types between Brunswick Juventus, Marconi, and APIA; and the interaction of Italian-Australians involved with soccer with members of other ethnic communities involved with Australian soccer.

In our final segment, we go through the results of an impromptu call-out to our friends and audience to see what historical projects people were looking to work on. And we got a great response - books, websites, blogs, databases, stats projects, maps, archives, kit projects, archives, digitisation - there's so much going on, with ample scope for collaboration across the projects. Best of all, there's evidence that the show has become one of the key nexus points in sharing the passion for Australian soccer history research.

We finish off with thanking a whole bunch who have helped make the show in 2019.