South of the Border - a South Melbourne Hellas blog: Worlds of Football Conference 2012

Worlds of Football Conference 2012:

From Paul Mavroudis

Here it is, finally, a little late, no pictures (I'm sorry, I just couldn't be bothered), but finished.

The conference's theme this time around was 'Heritage, Communities and Cultures'. Of course, within the scope of that topic there was much wriggle room, but the narrowness of some of the papers, principally the AFL club related selections, left me cold. However, there were several worthwhile papers also given, and some good rapport had with the other delegates. My handwritten, notes, where I took them, are pretty crappy, and thus this rundown will not be as good as my notes on the previous conference. The further on you go, the more likely these notes will also suffer from the exhaustion of the long and crowded schedule.

Your Schizophrenic Heart

Melbourne Heart FC v Newcastle Jets FC, Sat Nov 24 Bubbledome.

If Sigmund Freud had written Country and Western songs he might have penned a little polka, ‘Your Schizophrenic Heart’. And latter-day, wanna-be Nick Hornby’s could have cited the song as a way to convey the inexplicable experience of watching Melbourne Heart FC play football: shit one week; sugar the next.

But he didn’t. And so we must try to dissect the Heart unaided by cultural analogy to work out just where they are going wrong.

Like a cracked record I keep repeating my diagnosis:

1. They are good and largely steady at the back – though odd lapses means that a largely underworked Bolton is yet to keep a clean sheet this season. The goal by Adelaide last week was plain dumb deflected luck – albeit assisted by a poor pass from Colosimo, whose probably damaged brains were being kept in place by 6000 stitches in his head and a big fuck-off bandage administered early in the game.
2. They are solid coming out from midfield. Thompson is good and Gerhardt understands his role in getting the team moving forward from the back. Behich is vital and provides energetic inspiration from left back. At least two goals this season have been direct results of his gutsy efforts.
3. “Now we have the ball up this end (ie the front third), what do we do with it?” seems to be the regular cry of the Heart attacking midfielders and forwards. Only Victory and Roar have felt the power of a pumping Heart that has been able to move the energy all the way up the field. Other games Heart has been a headless and scoreless chook. Last week by all reports, Heart was pathetic.

To be fair, the availability of personnel has been as issue. Even so, Heart has played both fabulously and crapulously without its talisman, Fred. It has had the players on the park who can do the job, but structure and effort have let the team down. It is no co-incidence that when Garcia had his best game (further up the field than usual) Heart were glorious against Roar.

This game will be the first chance to see the now-settled Garcia team up with a fresh Fred returning from injury. Their combination and precisely where they are deployed on the field will be the keys to whether Heart can get a result. If Aloisi gets the planning right and the players are committed we could be in for a cracker.

Not having seen Newcastle play this season and only having heard of one item of interest emanating from the Hunter (Heskey Time™), the only observation I can make is that Newcastle have also not yet kept a clean sheet, being even more porous than Heart. The loss of well-performed goalkeeper Mark Birighitti will only make the Jets’ net look all the more inviting for the Heart forwards. At the other end Heskey’s failure to score last week in a bad loss to Phoenix may well have piqued his (and his team’s) appetite for goals.

So the game is poised and goals are likely. Judging by the stats, Heart are due to score two goals and the Jets three but I can’t see Bolton picking the ball out of his net three times – that way madness lies.

Mmm, that's some good sports rorting right here!

South of the Border - a South Melbourne Hellas blog: Mmm, that's some good sports rorting right here!: Firstly, this post is going to have some really bloody long sentences. I hope none of my students read this. Secondly, I must declare that...

The Calm and the Storm

Soccer reporting in Melbourne and Perth, 1908-1914

This is the text of my Worlds of Football Conference II conference paper to be delivered today at the MCG. It borrows substantially from this post on Perth Soccerphobia and also relates to my recent posting in the 38 reasons Australians shouldn't play soccer.

I’ve spent the past four years examining the digital newspaper archive in the NLA’s Trove collection. I have been interested in the newspaper reporting of soccer through the years, particularly in Melbourne and the other states colonised by Victorian rules in the late 1800s. I am working towards a genealogy of rhetorical figures or tropes (positive, negative and neutral) used to describe the game over the past 150 years.

The material presented here is derived from a limited archive in terms of dates (up until mid-1950s) and variety. Only the Argus (and a few suburban papers) in Melbourne have been digitised by the NLA.

These newspapers regularly articulate a cultural rejection of Soccer as an appropriate game for Australians. This rejection is conveyed via tropes that echo down through the years, many of which go back to the first flowerings of the game in Australia – something that might be reflected on by contemporary utterers of such criticism. They belong to a long tradition, one which has continually figured soccer as a new and foreign game for the past 130 years.

The rhetoric of refusal comes in phases:

1. Initial response (1883-1914)

Tend to be technical criticisms and observations of the game. They are also individual judgements about the kind of people who play it. There is also a sense in much of this criticism that this feeble game is not worthy of expending too much energy on. Let them play their game. They’re not troubling anyone.

2. Cultural-political (1905-1939)

The second phase of reception tends to be much tougher in its criticism. Layered onto the attitudes of phase 1 are cultural-political tropes. Generally, soccer is seen as a “wicked foreign game” as Roy hay has noted. Crucially, the rise of these criticisms also co-incides with the onset of ground allocation stress, initially in Perth and then spreading to the rest of the Australian rules states after ww1.

There are two further phases.

3. Post ww2 xenophobia (1950-1970)

This is a period of massive influx of European migrants during which an at times xenophobic community is confronted by significant cultural and sporting difference. These tensions come to a head in the 1950s in Melbourne with a serious moral panic created around soccer’s presumed intensions to smash footy. No longer is it “let them play their game”, it’s “let them play in the gutter.” For many people it is war.

4. Post 70s

In this phase soccer is no longer a cultural ‘secret’. The broader community is aware of the game as never before.

• Participation figures are rising
• First World Cup Qualification
• Broad consumption of English football via television
• NSL is the very first national league in any football code.

Important to remember that one phase does not replace another. Most of the tropes echo down the years to add their voice to more contemporary rejections. Moreover, there are other voices some of which are supportive and inclusive.

This paper focuses on the transition period between phase 1 and phase 2.

When soccer reformed in Melbourne in 1908, after its long hiatus, the Australian football environment had changed. An age of relative innocence was over and competitive, professionalised football codes had emerged from late 19C amateurism.

The rhetoric of nation and nationalism had changed the way football codes were perceived and reported. The promotion of Australian rules shifted from being a simple cultural preference to an act of cultural-political duty. The Australasian Football Council had in 1905 established a propaganda wing of its organisation and, having misappropriated the term “national game”, set about converting the rugby states (and New Zealand) to the so-called indigenous game, Australian rules. Taking the long view this is the process that gave us the farce of Izzy Folau.

Perth

In the West soccer and not rugby was the focus of Australian rules authorities and I think it’s accurate to say that Perth in the early 1900s witnesses the first substantial flowering of soccerphobia in Australia. The pressure of ground allocations and the perception that English school masters were forcing Aussie kids to play soccer resulted in a great deal of tension between the games and their journalistic mouthpieces. A series of nasty inter-code battles in Perth added a layer of ideological and political objections to the kind of observational journalistic judgements of soccer that predominated in Melbourne’s football coverage.

In 1900 The Daily News in Perth published an article rehearsing some of the older prejudices: Australian rules represents a better, middle road; soccer is an unpopular game with little merit, promulgated by and for British immigrants. Its tone is reminiscent of the early Melbourne responses, disparaging without being vicious.

A year later The Inquirer & Commercial News raised the stakes. ‘Follower’ wrote:

an insidious attempt is being made to instil a love for the British Association game into the hearts of the schoolboys in this colony . . . . But the Australian game is the national one – the very name proves that – and it is the one that should be taught the schoolboys of Australia . . . Let the lovers of the British Association play the game they were taught in the old country, but not interfere with the boys born in Australia, whose natural leaning is to play the Australian game.

No longer is the soccer commentary merely about unpopularity, peculiarity and foppish British-degeneracy; tropes of cultural struggle, propaganda, resistance, insidious brainwashing, and interference with children have entered the discourse. The tautological and absurd argument: ‘We’ve dubbed the game Australian Football: which proves that it’s the national game: which means that schoolboys should play Australian rules,’ inadvertantly exposes the exclusory nationalistic politics of the very act of such a naming.

Soccer retaliates with rhetoric of its own. This back and forth lasts until the war.

The final word from pre-war Perth goes to ‘Boundary’ in the West Australian. Writing in 1914 about the issue of foul play in Australian rules, he claimed that those “at the helm do a lot, but they cannot accomplish every thing. Therefore they desire the co-operation of all well-wishers in tabooing the foul player, and anything that would tend to hinder the progress of soccer.” Foul play needed to be cut out because it was damaging the game. But bizarrely, the integrity of Australian rules is seen as being secondary, in this construction, to the greater purpose of hindering soccer’s progress. The syntax of expression makes it clear that at least some Australian rules journalists had so internalised the rhetoric of the code war that the battle against soccer is presented as the primary goal of Australian rules supporters and journalists alike.

For the first time we start to see football prejudice as more than simply the bias or taste of a journalist or correspondent. It has become what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’, a structured attitude of preference, taste and discrimination generalised across a community. Journalists and editors now have a role in conveying a particular sporting opinion in much the same way as they would be expected to hold a particular kind of political opinion, depending upon the newspaper’s policy. The only difference was that in much sports’ coverage in the southern and western states there seemed only one policy.

Melbourne

Even though soccer was quietly getting on with the business of growing after its reorganisation, the Melbourne press and the VFL seemed not to take it as a serious threat. It seemed worth neither talking up nor talking down. The older tropes of peculiarity and Britishness sealed it off from both serious consideration and viscious condemnation and the Melbourne ‘hosts’ could afford to give the ‘guests’ a courteous welcome. The Argus’s ‘Observer’ wrote in July 1910:

Although the British Association game is being played now by a good many clubs in Melbourne, and it is the particular game which excites the wildest enthusiasm in England, the same difficulties that hamper the Australian game in Sydney, and the Rugby game in Melbourne, will prevent its becoming really popular. At the same time, there are always in the community enough Englishmen trained to that particular game to constitute a few sides, and keep it going. In their special spheres, each game can afford to treat the others as in the hospitable and courteous light of guests, but anything like serious rivalry does not to my mind, come into the question.

The Argus claimed that though “British Association football was gaining popularity, it was not clashing with other sport, because those who played it would not spend their time on any other kind of football.” While it was seen to have no claims on Australian rules footballers (boys or men) or spectators, and while grounds were not an issue for dispute, soccer carried on unmolested.

Despite a flourishing eight-club and two-division competition the Argus failed to take the game seriously on a regular basis until 1913. In 1912 the reports are sporadic and even Victoria’s mauling of Tasmania on the hallowed turf at the MCG failed to generate a great deal of column space. The game fared little better in the first part of 1913. Match reports were sparse and usually minimal even though the papers sometimes acknowledged a substantial interest.

Standing out from this meagre trend was an example of what today might be called a ‘feature article’. In July 1913, a long piece was published expressing surprise and wonder at this game being played in Melbourne’s midst. While it referenced the peculiar, the unestablished and the exotic, it nonetheless reined in some of the other conventional prejudicial tropes. It allowed the game some quality and popularity and supportively bemoaned its lack of an enclosed ground.

“Soccer,” the more popular of the British games of football, has established a fair footing in Australia in the last few seasons, though, like every other exotic, it must have a hard battle to hold its own in public esteem with a purely local and long-established game, to the points of which Australians are bred from infancy. With the steady inflow of people there is increasing room for an old-world game, and some twenty teams are now playing under British Association rules in or about Melbourne, considerably hampered, of course, by the fact that there are few, if any, enclosed grounds with level turf at their disposal. The annual match between teams representing England and Scotland, played on the Fitzroy ground on Saturday, had about 4,000 enthusiasts watching. It was an excellent opportunity for realising the merits of the game.

And this was meant in good faith, because the author followed up with a comparative analysis that pointed out soccer’s qualities rather than put it in a poor light against Australian rules. Indeed, Australian rules might be able to learn something from the game with some study. Instead of chuckling quietly about heading, the author celebrated it as an impressive skill.

The wonderful thing is to see men jump into the air, receive a round ball, heavier than ours on the crown of the head, and direct it just where they want it to go; the other point that impresses one is the remarkable accuracy with which the players kick the ball in all sorts of positions that would be impossible and disastrous to Australians. They meet it is it flies feet high in the air and drive it a long distance considering the shape and weight of the ball; but, of course, there is no drop kicking, and only in the case of the goalkeepers an occasional punt. The beauty of the game is its combination. Wanting what we call “system” it would be nothing, and the longer you watch it the more you appreciate that point. Men are always playing for position, rarely if ever “bullocking” it. The best of our men might learn a lot – develop entirely new and desirable points in the Australian game, by seeing a few matches at “Soccer.”

This article seems to signal a change in mood, inaugurating a tendency to publish substantial match reports, culminating in the Dockerty Cup final report in October 1913 which began: “The match at Middle Park on Saturday between Yarraville and St. Kilda attracted a large crowd of spectators, who were treated to a fine exhibition of football.” It captured some of the game’s excitement and tension, describing Yarraville’s 4-3 win at the death as a lucky one.

In June 1914, another long piece in the Argus seemed to amplify all of the positives of the previous year’s feature article. It spoke to the popularity and growth of soccer in Melbourne at this time, acknowledging crowds of sometimes between two and four thousand down at Albert Park. By comparison the weekend after this piece was published 3,568 spectators turned up at the MCG to see Geelong beat Melbourne, though this figure does seem to represent a lower crowd than was usual. Perhaps the long trip from ‘Sleepy Hollow’ reduced visiting numbers.

It is written by an outsider, one brought up on Australian rules but who is sympathetic to soccer. He sees it as a migrants’ game, even though locals are starting to get involved. Victoria’s strength in a recent intercolonial game against NSW was very much determined by its being made up of experienced migrant Scottish and English players as against the callowness of the native born from the north. Soccer is seen to be technically skillful, a “pretty” and “clever” game lacking the corruption of professionalism that has poisoned the “Australian game”. Moreover, it has a referee who tends not to interfere and is respected. This latter point leads to the fascinating implied claim that Australian rules is a hotbed of corruption and match-fixing.

Seems that some things never change!

This article is possibly one of the first ‘sleeping giant’ articles published in Melbourne. Rarely, if ever, before has the game been described in such glowing and growing terms by a Melbourne journalist. Not only is it optimistic, it gives a solid foundation for such optimism. It is a game changer, or at least signals the fact that the game has changed to the extent that the Emerald Hill Record report on 1 August was nothing out of the ordinary. Yet it represented a massive change from the muffled silence of years gone by: “The semi-finals of the Dockerty Cup attracted a large crowd to Middle Park, chief interest being shown in the game between Thistle and St. Kilda.” The Argus breathlessly followed the four scoreless hours of the Dockerty Cup final and its replay between Thistle and Northumberland & Durhams without so much as a peep of complaint that no goals were registered.

Soccer again was on the edge. But this time it was on the edge of entering the mainstream of sport coverage in Victoria. While it had grown rapidly in Melbourne, other cities around Australia experienced similar levels of interest and participation. In every major city there was a bustling, energetic and growing soccer competition forcing itself into the consciousness of population via a media that was either doing its duty or was forced to acknowledge the game through various forms of pressure.

Nothing could stop it now.

Indigenous Footballers: the game is at your feet.

A version of this article was first published in the Melbourne Heart fanzine Schip Happens.

In the annals of football in Australia, Indigenous soccer players seem few and far between. Given the contribution of Indigenous athletes to other sports, this is to be lamented. Yet we shouldn’t underestimate the Indigenous presence. Five Aboriginal Socceroos (six if we count John Moriarty who was selected but never played) and eight Matildas settle that argument. Adam Sarota, James Brown, Jade North, Travis Dodd, Tahj Minniecon, Kyah Simon and Lydia Williams are just some of a growing band of Indigenous footballers making a tremendous impact.

David Williams is another. Heart’s left-winger recently had the honour of scoring the opening goal of the A League season! Born in Brisbane, David has already had a substantial career: three seasons in Europe with Brøndby and two Socceroo caps are other highlights. At 24 he has much of his career in front of him.

I spoke recently with David about football and the role of Indigenous players. While he played a number of sports as a kid and showed potential in Rugby Union, he followed his older brother into the beautiful game. He attributes his successes in the game to his “strong family support”.

David Williams on the cover of
Schip Happens, 9 Nov 2012

David acknowledged the tendency of Indigenous athletes to avoid soccer or leave the game as they mature, gravitating towards Rugby League or Aussie rules. He believes soccer “is a game with so much to offer them” if they are open to its possibilities. He also claimed that “those Indigenous players who stay with football tend to excel” – a tantalising point that raises the question of how much we lose when Indigenous players like Adam Goodes or Preston Campbell go to other codes after substantial junior soccer careers.

Indigenous footballers are hard to find in soccer's past and they don’t represent a sizeable grouping in the contemporary game. Yet the game’s future is inexorably bound with the need to embrace and nurture Indigenous football talent. David is an FFA-appointed Indigenous Ambassador and is keen to pursue this goal.

But Williams is not simply part of a new phenomenon. He is also the latest in a long straggly line of Aboriginal players. In 1952, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that “James Mulgrave, a 19-year-old aboriginal, may soon be playing first-grade Soccer for the Bankstown club. Only two or three aborigines have played in major Soccer in N.S.W. during the last 20 years. There is none playing major Soccer in the State at present.”

The article raises more questions than it answers: who were the two or three others to play the game in that period? Were there Indigenous players in other regions at other times?

About the only substantial evidence of Aboriginal participation in soccer before the 1950s is the fabulous story of ‘Bondi’ Neal, a goalkeeper on the NSW South Coast and in the Hunter Valley between 1903 and 1912. The highpoint of Neal’s career came in 1909 when he kept for a South Maitland representative team in a 2-0 defeat against the touring Western Australians. Around 1912 “he left the coalfields for his native South Coast” and disappeared from the record. John Maynard claims that “Neal is certainly the most famous early Aboriginal soccer player. But whatever became of this legendary player has disappeared from both the archives and memory.”

And this is typical. We know Indigenous players participated but the existing evidence is so patchy that we cannot draw a complete picture.

A clearer picture is available in the story of Charlie Perkins, who started to be noticed as a 15-year-old senior footballer in Adelaide in the early 1950s. He subsequently tried out for First Division clubs in England before playing a season with Bishop Auckland, one of England’s great amateur sides. He played first grade in Sydney for Pan-Hellenic upon his return.

Charles Perkins in action. Source: John Maynard,
The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe, p. 51, from Australian
Soccer Weekly via Paul and Colin Tatz.

While Perkins was a genuine star of the game he is perhaps remembered as a curiosity. His game of choice might be explained via his radical political orientation and his ‘difference’ from other Aboriginal sportsmen. The attitude adopted is: ‘Yes. He might have played soccer but he was a maverick.’ Well he may have been a maverick but he was not the only one!

Two other Aboriginal players of Perkins’ generation also had remarkable careers, first as footballers and then in cultural affairs. John Moriarty was the first Indigenous player to be selected for Australia and Gordon Briscoe followed in Perkins’ footsteps, playing two seasons in England. What makes this story all the more remarkable is that these three young men were residents of the same home for “boys of mixed Aboriginal descent” in Port Adelaide and they all played for the Port Thistle club.

Briscoe claims that soccer was a blessing in that it helped him escape a racist society in which Aboriginal men had few options: “soccer lifted me out of that because the soccer fraternity encouraged me.” However, Briscoe warned recently that soccer has “forgotten Aboriginal people in its zest for self-development.” As he says, football in Port Adelaide relied on Aboriginal participation at a certain moment in time and when “we look to the future of Aboriginal people in soccer it is easy to be optimistic, but . . . the time is now ripe for the FFA to provide the support and the framework in which the passionate advocates and players of Indigenous soccer can succeed.”

Soccer can celebrate the fact that at one point in the 1950s it had stolen a march on the supposedly “indigenous” game. There were more Indigenous footballers playing first grade in Adelaide than were playing Aussie rules in Melbourne. Crucially, soccer now needs to work out how it lost contact with the Indigenous community.

From the age of nine, Williams played junior soccer for St George
Police Boys side in Sydney. He later joined the St George
Budapest squad and became one of their most valuable players.

No story about Indigenous footballers would be complete without reference to Harry Williams, perhaps the greatest Aboriginal player of all time (44 Socceroo appearances and 17 full caps). Like David Williams, Harry entered the game through circumstance and rose through its ranks through his brilliance and strength of character. He was “exposed to soccer by a friend across the street at six years of age. For me, it was just a question of circumstances. It just happened.”

The task for Australian soccer is to make sure that Indigenous participation not only keeps ‘happening’ through circumstance but is also nurtured and developed to its fullest extent through structures of support. It’s the key to the world game’s eventual success in Australia.

Much of the information from this piece was gleaned from John Maynard’s The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe, Magabala Books, 2011.

Heart on line in race to bottom

My preview that appeared in yesterday's Goal! Weekly. Glad my prediction was way off and that I worked the words Oedipal and frissons in.

Melbourne Heart FC v Brisbane Roar FC, Fri Nov 9 AAMI Stadium.

It’s probably too early for dire predictions but Melbourne Heart needs to produce some quality soon or face the prospect of playing catch-up football for the rest of the season. A loss to Brisbane Roar in the upcoming bottom-of-the-table clash would see Heart firmly ensconced at the wrong end with daylight and not goal difference separating it from the teams above.

Brisbane Roar has no basis for smugness either. Its own woeful run of results was only interrupted by the demolition of Victory at Lang Park in Round 2, the week after Heart’s derby win. Perhaps the Heart and Roar supporters could get a collective chant going, “Melbourne Victory: Can we play you every week?” Having said that, I get the feeling that Ange’s new improved team would fare slightly better against both cellar dwellers now the season is starting to get into swing and his team is beginning to click.

Clicking is not the problem for either of these teams. Heart has demonstrated how well it can fire time and again without being able to sustain its efforts or put the ball in the net very often. Last week against Wanderers it showed in the second half the kind of attractive football of which it is capable. But in the end a marvellous volleyed goal to Tadic was all the team had to show from its sporadic good work.

Heart defends well and also plays the ball out from the back reasonably well. It just loses its way as the goals near with a midfield that just doesn’t seem to work effectively and hard enough to get the job done. Coach John Aloisi must be sweating on the impending inclusion of Vinnie Grella to give his midfield the kind of creativity, energy and solidity it needs. And let’s face it, a midfield composed of Grella, Garcia, Fred, with Thompson and Dugandzic as a supporting cast intimates rich possibilities. Up front, Tadic, Macallister and Williams have all shown they can find the net. Let’s see how they go when this midfield gives them decent, frequent supply.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see Roar play this year but my sense is that they have been resting on their laurels to some extent. Last year’s grand final and this year’s Oedipal smashing of Postecoglou’s team have perhaps left the team a little too self-satisfied. Wanderers took the game to them in Brisbane and it sounded as if they had no response to the new team’s energy and commitment. Moreover, Roar’s guns have failed to fire. Over recent weeks Broich and Berisha have had nothing like the impact they and coach Vidošić might have liked.

Again it is way too early to panic but Vidošić must be starting feel the frissons of doubt creeping into his thinking.

After round 1 this season, this game held the promise of Australia’s best and most attractive team over the past two years taking on a good hard-working team capable of producing its own brand of excitement and flair.

Apparently a month is a long time in football and what seems to be in store is a desperate struggle not to lose.

We’ll see.

KOD: Heart 1 Brisbane 1.

38 reasons why Australians shouldn't play (or support) soccer

Here's a bit of fun! This is a work-in-progress so I'd be interested in feedback, especially if you think there are any reasons I've missed. I'd be happy to supply archival proof for any of the dot points if required.

I’ve spent the past four years examining the digital newspaper archive in the NLA’s Trove collection. I have been interested in the newspaper reporting of soccer through the years, particularly in Melbourne and the other states colonised by Victorian rules in the late 1800s. I am working towards a history of spin (positive, negative or neutral) used to describe the game over the past 150 years.

The material presented here is derived from a limited archive in terms of dates (up until mid-1950s) and variety. Only the Argus (and a few suburban papers) in Melbourne have been digitised.

The newspapers regularly articulate a cultural rejection of Soccer as an appropriate game for Australians. This is conveyed via notions that echo down through the years, many of which go back to the first flowerings of soccer in Australia – something that might be reflected on by contemporary utterers of such criticism. They belong to a long tradition, one which has continually figured soccer as a new and foreign game for the past 130 years.

The rhetoric of refusal comes in 4 phases:

 

1.     Initial response (1883-1914)

1.             Foreign

2.             New

3.             Soft

4.             Degenerate and enfeebling

5.             Unmanly

6.             Sneakily violent

7.             Absurd

8.             Mysterious

9.             Boring

10.           Meritless

11.            Unpopular

These are limited technical criticisms and observations of the game. They are also judgements about the kind of people who play it. There is a sense in much of this criticism that this feeble game is not worthy of expending too much journalistic energy on. Let them play their game. They’re not troubling anyone.

 

2.     Cultural-political (1905-1939)

12.        English

13.        Culturally inappropriate or unnatural

14.        Run by foreigners, notably British headmasters and/or civil servants

15.        Brainwashing of children

16.        Creation of artificial taste

17.        Occupation of our land

18.        Cultural invader

19.        Threat to our way of life

20.        Limiter to our “manifest destiny”

21.        Unpatriotic

22.        Betrayal of our armed forces

The second phase of reception tends to be much tougher in its criticism. Layered onto the attitudes of phase 1 are cultural-political tropes. Generally, soccer is seen as a “wicked foreign game” as Roy Hay has noted. Crucially, the rise of these criticisms also co-incides with the rise of ground allocation stress, initially in Perth and then spreading to the rest of the Australian rules states after ww1.

 

3.     Post ww2 xenophobia (1950-1970)

23.        European

24.        Anti-integrationist

25.        Facilitator of unAustralian crowd violence

26.        An invader with massive external financial support

27.        Stealer of our land

This is a period of massive influx of European migrants during which an at times xenophobic community is confronted by significant cultural and sporting difference. These tensions come to a head in the 1950s in Melbourne with a serious moral panic created around soccer’s presumed intensions to smash footy and steal its ovals. No longer is it “let them play their game”, it’s “let them play in the gutter.” For many people it is a kind of war.

 

4.     Post 70s

28.        A sport to keep mums happy

29.        Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters

30.        Storehouse of ethnic hatreds

31.        Misuser of public funds

32.        Communist

33.        Anti-competitive

34.        Vehicle of globalisation

35.        Corrupt game

In this phase soccer is no longer a dirty ‘secret’. The broader community is aware of the game as never before

• Participation figures are rising
• First World Cup Qualification
• Broad consumption of English football via television
• NSL is the very first national league in any football code.

Overall

36.        Unestablished

37.        UnAustralian

38.        Not Australian rules football/Rugby League

The final three points are ones that can be distilled from the 35 previous ones. Soccer is unestablished (even when it is established) and unAustralian (even when played by Australians). Ultimately soccer's greatest sin is that it is simply not Australian rules football or Rugby League.

Waiting for Vinnie

Western Sydney Wanderers FC v Melbourne Heart FC, Parramatta Stadium, 2/11/12.

It may well be a slightly despondent Melbourne Heart that travels to Parramatta Stadium for the first time ever this Friday night to meet a no doubt buoyant Western Sydney Wanderers fresh from its first goal and first win, against defending champions Brisbane Roar. The Cardiac Boys will be looking to arrest their descent into flatlining, scoreless performances while the home team will be keen to build on the fact that they have at last converted a good performance into a victory.

This is the game that pits the two ‘new boys’ of the A League together, the as yet secondary clash between the shadow teams of the country’s two biggest cities. A lack of clarity as to Heart’s constituency (overshadowed by the monolith that is Melbourne Victory – albeit one Heart regularly beats) and the sheer freshness and ambition of the whole Wanderers show gives this inaugural fixture a touch of the clean slate, and suggests a rich history to be written. In years to come this will be the fixture that measures the A League’s health and so neutrals might want to wish it the best of luck.

Both teams have claimed a commitment to good open football and that both have demonstrated, at times, that very thing. Defence is the least of these teams’ problems. Simon Colosimo and Patrick Gerhart are solid at the back for Heart while Wanderers have also recruited well at the back, notably Michael Beauchamp from Heart.

Both teams attack well down the flanks and have exciting players in those positions. Wanderers Aaron Mooy seems a gem in midfield and it feels inevitable that Shinji Ono will soon elbow himself some room on the marquee stage to match the deeds of Del Piero and Heskey. For Heart, Fred is still one of the best attacking midfielders in the competition and David Williams has shown glimpses of his quality but still has a way to go to achieve his potential.

The problem for both teams has been at the pointy end. They have simply been unable to stick the ball in the net. Wanderers have scored the fewest goals (1) but have taken the most shots while Heart has now gone 250 minutes without scoring after looking like netting a hatful in the Melbourne Derby and squandering a number of chances in the follow-up against Wellington.

In terms of results so far, my sense is that Wanderers have been downright unlucky not to sit in the top half of the table. And while Heart are less unfortunate to be propping up the table, but for a couple of moments that didn’t go their way they too would be sitting much higher.

The season’s story so far points to a low scoring game, perhaps even a goalless draw. However, both of these teams are capable of scoring a hatful if their strikers can find their radars. David Williams has promised that his team “will go through a run of form very soon that will get a lot of people talking about Melbourne Heart.” Let’s hope that it is sooner rather than later.

Heart to win 2-1.

Late breaking news via twitter. Vinnie Grella was seen walking into Hyundai Heidelberg at 4.30. #breathless

This preview first appeared in Goal Weekly

MHFC v CCMFC, Bubbledome, 28/10/12

Heart fails to get the blood pumping

Central Coast won a lacklustre game at AAMI Park on Sunday against a sometimes feeble and always toothless home side. The Mariners didn't deserve it. Though Heart deserved nothing either. Perhaps both teams should have points deducted for their display. And the crowd of 6357 wasn’t too flash either – although the home end impressed in never letting up their chants. However, they need to be careful with the taunt to the Mariners, “Your support is fucking shit”. It’s crass, derivative and an invitation to karma.

Heart showed some fire in patches but nowhere near enough while the Mariners scored through a glorious 51st-minute Pedj Bojic free kick wheeled straight in from the training ground. The northerners held on to that barest of leads through a structure best described as solid in keeping out an attack best described as vague.

Yet the game might have been a little different had the hard-working Richard Garcia put away a golden opportunity early on instead of blasting wide. Fred (replaced through injury at half-time) was typically creative and influential and David Williams and Aziz Behich also showed some early fire on the flanks. This creativity however was soon extinguished as mistakes started to disrupt the fluidity of the play and the match settled into what one press-box wag described as one resembling a “training game”. While Heart at least tried to build from the back, the Mariners preferred the counter-attacking (often long-ball) route from the outset and this remained a constant in their performance.

From a Heart perspective there were just a few positives. Fred, a cut above, and Garcia gestured towards the kind of midfield Heart might be constructing. Mate Dugandzic, playing as an attacking midfielder in place of Fred also showed signs that might convince coach John Aloisi to persevere with him in that role. But the forwards and those who found themselves on the front line will have to be more committed to making the right choices, whether shooting or making that killer pass.

Probably the most positive sign for Heart was something that occurred off the pitch. Heart’s new recruit, Vinnie Grella, stationed in the coaches’ room next to the media box was in great danger of putting out the window when Josip Tadic missed a sitter that would have seen the scores level with 20 minutes to go. Banging the glass in frustration, Grella expressed the kind of passion and energy that Heart will need if they are to produce the results that so much of their play deserves.

The game concluded in a brighter vein. As time ticked down, Heart attacked in waves that were competently repulsed by a defence untested by committed precision play in the attacking third. In the press conference after the game the coaches’ bearing told the whole story. Graham Arnold had the pickpocket smile of a man who had just got three points when none would have been a fairer representation of his team’s performance. John Aloisi’s face suggested a man who had reached into his pocket to find his wallet gone and in its place a three-week-old entry ticket to Etihad Stadium. Heart needs to recapture that opening round spirit and recapture it quickly. It will be found in the attacking third of Parramatta Stadium if they care to look.

This match report first published in Goal Weekly