It is a given that the
broader Australian culture cares little for the positive memorialisation of soccer. Yet
the game itself is not much better at asserting its own legitimacy or remembering
its own belonging. Forgetting the game’s history seems, at times, to be an
imperative for soccer authorities. The transitions between significant stages
of the game’s history in Australia are moments in which deliberate erasure and voluntary
amnesia have seemed to be vital strategies.
The rebadging of
the game as soccer in the 1920s threw off the ‘British’ name in an attempt to
both domesticate and internationalise Association football in Australia. Even
though still heavily reliant on migration from Britain, an amateur and
domestically Australian-Anglo-Celtic culture emerged from the English and
Scottish roots.
After the Second
World War the rise to dominance of the continental European migrant clubs (and
a concomitant emergence of professionalism) enabled the forgetting of that
pre-war culture. For many today, soccer in Australia only really started in the 1950s. And many of the ‘ethnic’ clubs are
guilty of ‘failing’ to remember their own history of supplanting a previous
culture. South Melbourne Hellas is a case in point. A complex history of
mergers between Australian-Anglo, Jewish and Greek clubs is lost in the club’s
contemporary Greek-Australian identity.
The most recent act
of substantial and brutal forgetting came in 2004 with the establishment of the
FFA and the A-League, led by Frank Lowy and underpinned by the Crawford Report
which advocated substantial and important changes to the constitution and
management of the game. A policy of not just forgetting but also rejecting the
game’s past was adopted largely because the new soccer authorities believed in
the unassailability of the dominant myths, ones that are still in need of dismantling.
In the perceived absence of a sustained and convincing
counter-narrative of soccer’s centrality to Australian culture, history became a
no-go zone. Indeed the rejection of history was manifested in a 2006 World Cup advertising
campaign expressing the Socceroos’ intentions to play well above the level of
the national team’s historic mediocrity. Even if not intended, local history
was a victim of the campaign and the powerfully significant contribution of the
ethnic European clubs was forgotten in the blaze of negative memories of all
that was ‘wrong’ with ‘wogball’.
When the Socceroos
beat Uruguay on penalties in November 2005 they did more than fulfil a
long-cherished dream of almost all Australian soccer supporters to participate again
in the World Cup. The result also seemed effectively to justify, first, the decisions
made about the changing of the game’s ethnic identity and, second, the obliteration
of the many positive things that had come from the wogball period and the
eighty years before that.
Yet a review of the
names of the scorers in that penalty shootout enables a profoundly beautiful realisation
to emerge. Kewell, Neill, Vidmar, Viduka, Aloisi: individual players
representing and embodying a progression of waves of Australian immigration:
English, Irish, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian. Add the names of the crucial game-time
goal-scorer Bresciano and the goalkeeper Schwarzer, responsible for two heroic
shootout saves, and the multicultural diversity of Australian soccer is
revealed in all its power and glory. And that is something worth remembering.
The internal denial
of history is an ongoing and crippling problem for Australian soccer. The
game’s millions of stakeholders deserve to believe that there are reasons for
optimism that the game’s profound lack of self-belief and feelings of illegitimacy
and unbelonging can be turned around at both national and state level. Denying the contribution of wogball past and present is simply no way encourage that belief.
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