We all know the rules to the senior game but do you remember the rules of Primary School playground fitba? (In other parts of the English-speaking world the game is known as football, in Australia it used to be called soccer).

Straiton Primary School. The football playing area is across the foreground. There used to be a shed at the right, with two supporting columns which acted as goalposts. Jerseys or dustbins were used at the extreme left wall.

Duration

Matches shall be played over three unequal periods: two playtimes and at lunchtime. Each of these periods shall begin shortly after the ringing of a bell, and although a bell is also rung towards the end of these periods, play may continue for up to ten minutes afterwards, depending on the nihilism or ‘bottle’ of the participants with regard to corporal punishment meted out to latecomers back to the classroom. In practice there is a sliding scale of nihilism, from those who hasten to stand in line as soon as the bell rings, known as ‘poofs’, through those who will hang on until the time they estimate it takes the teachers to down the last of their gins and journey from the staff room, known as ‘chancers’, and finally to those who will hang on until a teacher actually has to physically retrieve them, known as ‘bampots’. This sliding scale is intended to radically alter the logistics of a match in progress, often having dramatic effects on the scoreline as the number of remaining participants drops. It is important, therefore, in picking the sides, to achieve a fair balance of poofs, chancers and bampots in order that the scoreline achieved over a sustained period of play – lunchtime, for instance – is not totally nullified by a five-minute post-bell onslaught of five bampots against one. The scoreline to be carried over from the previous period of the match is in the trust of the last bampots to leave the field of play, and may be the matter of some debate. This must be resolved in one of the approved manners (see Adjudication).

Parameters

The object is to force the ball between two large, unkempt piles of jackets, in lieu of goalposts. These piles may grow or shrink throughout the match, depending on the number of participants and the prevailing weather. As the number of players increases, so shall the piles. Each jacket added to the pile by a new addition to a side should be placed on the inside, nearest the goalkeeper, thus reducing the target area. It is also important that the sleeve of one of the jackets should jut out across the goalmouth, as it will often be claimed that the ball went ‘over the post’ and it can henceforth be asserted that the outstretched sleeve denotes the innermost part of the pile and thus the inside of the post. The on-going reduction of the size of the goal is the responsibility of any respectable defence and should be undertaken conscientiously with resourcefulness and imagination. In the absence of a crossbar, the upper limit of the target area is observed as being slightly above head height, although when the height at which a ball passed between the jackets is in dispute, judgement shall lie with an arbitrary adjudicator from one of the sides. He is known as the ‘best fighter’; his decision is final and maybe enforced with physical violence if anyone wants to stretch a point.

There are no pitch markings. Instead, physical objects denote the boundaries, ranging from the most common — walls and buildings — to roads and burns. Corners and throw-ins are redundant where by-lines or touchlines are denoted by a two-storey building or a six-foot granite wall. Instead, a scrum should be instigated to decide possession. This should begin with the ball trapped between the brickwork and two opposing players, and should escalate to include as many team members as can get there before the now egg-shaped ball finally merges, drunkenly and often with a dismembered foot and shin attached. At this point, goalkeepers should look out for the player who takes possession of the escaped ball and begins bearing down on goal, as most of those involved in the scrum will be unaware that the ball is no longer amidst their feet. The goalkeeper should also try not to be distracted by the inevitable fighting that has by this point broken out. In games on large open spaces, the length of the pitch is obviously denoted by the jacket piles, but the width is a variable. In the absence of roads, water hazards or ‘a big dug’, the width is determined by how far out the attacking winger has to meander before the pursuing defender gets fed up and lets him head back towards where the rest of the players are waiting, often as far as quarter of a mile away. It is often observed that the playing area is ‘no’ a full-size pitch’. This can be invoked verbally to justify placing a wall of players eighteen inches from the ball at direct free kicks It is the formal response to ‘yards’, which the kick-taker will incant meaninglessly as he places the ball.

The Ball

There are a variety of types of ball approved for Primary School Football. I shall describe three notable examples.

1. The plastic balloon. An extremely lightweight model, used primarily in the early part of the season and seldom after that due to having burst. Identifiable by blue pentagonal panelling and the names of that year’s Premier League sides printed all over it. Advantages: low sting factor, low burst-nose probability, cheap, discourages a long-ball game. Disadvantages: over-susceptible to influence of the wind, difficult to control, almost magnetically drawn to flat school roofs whence never to return.

2. The rough-finish Mitre. Half football, half Portuguese Man o’ War. On the verge of a ban in the European Court of Human Rights, this model is not for sale to children. Used exclusively by teachers during gym classes as a kind of aversion therapy. Made from highly durable fibreglass, stuffed with neutron star and coated with dead jellyfish. Advantages: looks quite grown up, makes for high-scoring matches (keepers won’t even attempt to catch it). Disadvantages: scars or maims anything it touches.

3. The ‘Tube’. Genuine leather ball, identifiable by brown all-over colouring. Was once black and white, before ravages of games on concrete, but owners can never remember when. Adored by everybody, especially keepers. Advantages: feels good, easily controlled, makes a satisfying ‘whump’ noise when you kick it. Disadvantages: turns into medicine ball when wet, smells like a dead dog.

Offside

There is no offside, for two reasons: one, ‘it’s no’ a full-size pitch’, and two, none of the players actually know what offside is. The lack of an offside rule gives rise to a unique sub-division of strikers. These players hang around the opposing goalmouth while play carries on at the other end, awaiting a long pass forward out of defence which they can help past the keeper before running the entire length of the pitch with their arms in the air to greet utterly imaginary adulation. These are known variously as ‘moochers’, ‘glory hunters’ and ‘fly wee bastarts’. These players display a remarkable degree of self-security, seemingly happy in their own appraisals of their achievements, and caring little for their team-mates’ failure to appreciate the contribution they have made. They know that it can be for nothing other than their enviable goal tallies that they are so bitterly despised.

Adjudication

The absence of a referee means that disputes must be resolved between the opposing teams rather than decided by an arbiter. There are two accepted ways of doing this.

1. Compromise. An arrangement is devised that is found acceptable by both sides. Sway is usually given to an action that is in accordance with the spirit of competition, ensuring that the game does not turn into ‘a pure skoosh’. For example, in the event of a dispute as to whether the ball in fact crossed the line, or whether the ball has gone inside or ‘over’ the post, the attacking side may offer the ultimatum: ‘Penalty or goal.’ It is not recorded whether any side has ever opted for the latter. It is on occasions that such arrangements do not prove acceptable to both sides that the second adjudicatory method comes into play.

2. Fighting. Those up on their ancient Hellenic politics will understand that the concept we know as ‘justice’ rests in these circumstances with the hand of the strong. What the winner says, goes, and what the winner says is just, for who shall dispute him? It is by such noble philosophical principles that the supreme adjudicator, or Best Fighter, is effectively elected.

Team Selection

To ensure a fair and balanced contest, teams are selected democratically in a turns-about picking process, with either side beginning as a one-man election committee and growing from there. The initial selectors are usually the recognised two Best Players of the assembled group.

Their first selections will be the two recognised Best Fighters, to ensure a fair balance in the adjudication process, and to ensure that they don’t have their own performances impaired throughout the match by profusely bleeding noses. They will then proceed to pick team-mates in a roughly meritocratic order, selecting on grounds of skill and tactical awareness, but not forgetting that while there is a sliding scale of players’ ability, there is also a sliding scale of players’ brutality and propensities towards motiveless violence. A selecting captain might baffle a talented striker by picking the less nimble Big Jazza ahead of him and may explain, perhaps in the words of Lyndon B Johnson upon his retention of J Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, that he’d ‘rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in’.

Special consideration is also given during the selection process to the owner of the ball. It is tacitly acknowledged to be ‘his gemme’, and he must be shown a degree of politeness for fear that he takes the huff at being picked late and withdraws his favours. Another aspect of team selection that may confuse those only familiar with the game at senior level will be the choice of goalkeepers, who will inevitably be the last players to be picked. Unlike in the senior game, where the goalkeeper is often the tallest member of his team, in the playground, the goalkeeper is usually the smallest. Senior aficionados must appreciate that playground selectors have a different agenda and are looking for altogether different properties in a goalkeeper. These can be listed briefly as: compliance, poor fighting ability, meekness, fear and anything else that makes it easier for their team-mates to banish the wee bugger between the sticks while they go off in search of personal glory up the other end.

Tactics

Playground football tactics are best explained in terms of team formation. Whereas senior sides tend to choose – according to circumstance – from among a number of standard options (e.g. 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 5-3-2), the playground side is usually more rigid in sticking to the all-purpose 1-1-17 formation. This formation is a sturdy basis for the unique style of play, ball-flow and territorial give-and-take that makes the playground game such a renowned and. strategically engrossing spectacle. Just as the 5-3-2 formation is sometimes referred to in practice as ‘Cattenaccio’, the 1-1-17 formation gives rise to a style of play that is best described as ‘Nomadic’. All but perhaps four of the participants (see also Offside) migrate en masse from one area of the pitch to another, following the ball, and it is tactically vital that every last one of them remains within a ten-yard radius of it at all times.

Stoppages

Much stoppage time in the senior game is down to injured players requiring treatment on the field of play. The playground game flows freer having adopted the refereeing philosophy of ‘no Post-Mortem, no free-kick’, and play will continue around and even on top of a participant who has fallen in the course of his endeavours. However, the playground game is nonetheless subject to other interruptions, and some examples are listed below.

Ball on school roof or over school wall

The retrieval time itself is negligible in these cases. The stoppage is most prolonged by the argument to decide which player must risk life, limb or four of the belt to scale the drainpipe or negotiate the barbed wire in order to return the ball to play. Disputes usually arise between the player who actually struck the ball and any others he claims it may have struck before disappearing into forbidden territory. In the case of the Best Fighter having been adjudged responsible for such an incident, a volunteer is often required to go in his stead or the game may be abandoned, as the Best Fighter is entitled to observe that

A: ‘Ye canny make me’; or B: ‘It’s no’ ma baw anyway’.

Stray dog on pitch

An interruption of unpredictable duration. The dog does not have to make off with the ball; it merely has to run around barking loudly, snarling and occasionally drooling or foaming at the mouth. This will ensure a dramatic reduction in the number of playing staff as 27 of them simultaneously volunteer to go indoors and inform the teacher of the threat. The length of the interruption can sometimes be gauged by the breed of dog. A deranged Irish Setter could take ten minutes to tire itself of running in circles, for instance, while a Jack Russell may take up to fifteen minutes to corner and force out through the gates. An Alsatian means instant abandonment.

Bigger boys steal ball

A highly irritating interruption, the length of which is determined by the players’ experience in dealing with this sort of thing. The Intruders will seldom actually steal the ball, but will improvise their own kick-about amongst themselves, occasionally inviting the younger players to attempt to tackle them. Standing around looking bored and unimpressed usually results in a quick restart. Shows of frustration and engaging in attempts to win back the ball can prolong the stoppage indefinitely. Informing the intruders that one of the players’ older brothers is ‘Mad Chic Murphy’ or some other noted local pugilist can also ensure minimum delay.

Menopausal old bag confiscates ball

More of a threat in the street or local green kick-about than within the school walls. Sad, blue-rinsed, ill-tempered, Tory-voting cat-owner transfers her anger about the array of failures that has been her life to nine-year-olds who have committed the heinous crime of letting their ball cross her privet

Line of Death

Interruption (loss of ball) is predicted to last ‘until you learn how to play with it properly’, but instruction on how to achieve this without actually having the bloody thing is not usually forwarded. Tact is required in these circumstances, even when the return of the ball seems highly unlikely, as further irritation of woman may result in the more serious stoppage: Menopausal old bag calls police.

Celebration

Goal-scorers are entitled to a maximum run of thirty yards with their hands in the air, making crowd noises and saluting imaginary packed terraces. Congratulation by team-mates is in the measure appropriate to the importance of the goal in view of the current scoreline (for instance, making it 34-12 does not entitle the. player to drop to his knees and make the sign of the cross), and the extent of the scorer’s contribution. A fabulous solo dismantling of the defence or 25-yard* rocket shot will elicit applause and back-pats from the entire team and the more magnanimous of the opponents. However, a tap-in in the midst of a chaotic scramble will be heralded with the epithet ‘moochin wee bastart’ from the opposing defence amidst mild acknowledgment from team-mates. Applying an unnecessary final touch when a ball is already rolling into the goal will elicit a burst nose from the original striker. Kneeling down to head the ball over the line when defence and keeper are already beaten will elicit a thoroughly deserved kicking. As a footnote, however, it should be stressed that any goal scored by the Best Fighter will be met with universal acclaim, even if it falls into any of the latter three categories.

*Actually eight yards, but calculated as relative distance because ‘it’s no’ a full-size pitch’.

Penalties

At senior level, each side often has one appointed penalty-taker, who will defer to a team-mate in special circumstances, such as his requiring one more for a hat trick. The playground side has two appointed penalty-takers: the Best Player and the Best Fighter. The arrangement is simple: the Best Player takes the penalties when his side is a retrievable margin behind, and the Best Fighter at all other times. If the side is comfortably in front, the ball-owner may be invited to take a penalty. Goalkeepers are often the subject of temporary substitutions at penalties, forced to give up their position to the Best Player or Best Fighter, who recognise the kudos attached to the heroic act of saving one of these kicks, and are buggered if Wee Titch is going to steal any of it.

Close Season

This is known also as the Summer Holidays, which the players usually spend dabbling briefly in other sports: tennis for a fortnight while Wimbledon is on the telly; pitch-and-putt for four days during the Open; and cricket for about an hour and a half until they discover that it really is as boring to play as it is to watch.

Roy Hay

Waltzing Matilda is still Australia’s unofficial national anthem in many people’s minds. The late Dennis O’Keeffe thought that at heart it was a love song and researched the background to its creation by A B ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Christina Macpherson. Now Felix Meagher and company has turned the story into a musical for a new generation. A mixture of song and history set in the Queensland outback it had its world premiere at Mount Rothwell in the You Yangs on Friday night as ‘The Man they called the Banjo’.

Crafting a dramatic story out of the sketchy evidence is a difficult task but the production almost makes a virtue out of it as the various phases of the creation the song are uncovered. The signature song emerges in stages as the relationships between Patterson and the two women with whom he was involved are played out against the background of the conflict between the squatters and shearers.

All the performers have strong voices and personalities and Cora Browne as the jilted Sarah Riley had the biggest impact on the audience with her tantrums as she realised her ‘catch’ was slipping away. Fleur Murphy carries off the difficult balance between muse and respectability as the inspiration for the townie writer of the lyrics and a contributor in her own right. Colin Driscoll’s Swagman makes a strong plea for a factual history of the rural conflict but in the end settles for immortality in song, while Meagher has just enough menace as the squatter brother of Christina and the possibility that he was the man who shot the swaggie.

Chris Saxton as Patterson has to present a young man struggling for recognition and escape from the drudgery of his urban employment not the literary icon of popular memory. He brings it off effectively. Direction by Wolf Heidecker is crisp and focused though there are things which no doubt will be tightened in future performances. Music by Ewen Baker and Lou Hesterman warmed up the audience and kept the show lively. Audience participation, particularly in a chorus of the song hit just the right note.

Purists might wish that there had been an opportunity to hear the whole of Dennis O’Keeffe’s moving rendition of the original Patterson/Macpherson version of Waltzing Matilda. You can find that on Youtube.

Musicians Ewen Baker and Lou Hesterman warming up. Photo: Ailsa Rayner.

For urban dwellers getting to Mount Rothwell on a late autumn evening in the gloaming was an adventure in itself but if you can make it tonight, Saturday 18 April at 6.30 pm for a 7.30 pm start, it is well worth the effort. Further performances are coming at Warrawong Woolshed, Eynesbury on 24 April, The Potato Shed in Drysdale on 2 May and Yarrawonga Uniting church on 23 May.

Roy Hay

Nelson Mandela, the recently deceased former president of the Republic of South Africa, was always conscious of the power of sport to symbolise, if not cause, social and political change. Hence his appearance in a Springbok jersey to present the rugby union World Cup to Francois Peinaar, the captain of the victorious team in 1995. What had been a symbol of the virtually whites-only sport embraced by the apartheid regime was now reconfigured as a contribution to the reconciliation Mandela sought between the majority of the population and their former oppressors.

In Australia in 1855 there was a sporting moment which has been almost completely forgotten but which also marked the coming together of opposing groups who had been killing each other only a few months before. What brought it back into focus was Peter FitzSimons mammoth 700-page blockbuster Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution, which also has no mention of the event or its participants.[2]

In December 1854 the combination of oppressive licence fees for the right to dig for gold, the miners’ lack of representation in the new Victorian parliament and what appeared to be corrupt use of the law provoked an uprising against the authorities on the Ballarat goldfield. The Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, fearing loss of control of civil society, put down the ‘rebellion’ by force after sending a hastily assembled army of troops and police to the goldfield.[3] The miners’ defensive stockade was overrun in 20 minutes with around 22 miners and five soldiers killed and several more seriously injured on both sides. After a brief period of martial law and a more protracted and unsuccessful attempt to convict some of the participants of treason, the government ended the licence fees, introduced a limited form of manhood suffrage and removed some of the corrupt officials.[4] Some of the victims of collateral damage in Ballarat in 1854 were subsequently compensated.[5]

On 22 September 1855, only nine months after Eureka, some of the surviving miners and troops played a football match at the Commissioner’s Camp on the nearby Castlemaine goldfield.[6] The Mount Alexander Mail reported[7]:

Report on football match in Mount Alexander Mail

Lieutenant William Henry Paul led a detachment of the 12^th (East Suffolk) Regiment of Foot into the stockade at Eureka but received a severe wound to his hip in the action. A pupil at Eton, the English public school, he joined the army and was gazetted as an Ensign in 1852 and promoted to Lieutenant in 1854.[8] He had arrived in Victoria with his comrades and was sent to Ballarat with a contingent of the 12^th which was intercepted and upset by a group of miners on the way to the diggings. One of the wagons accompanying the troops was overturned and Paul was sent on ahead with the others to reinforce the camp.[9] After the battle Paul recovered from his injuries and almost certainly was one of the prime movers in the football match.[10]

His coadjutor was probably Thomas Beagley Naylor, the Receiver of Gold at the camp at the neighbouring goldfield of Castlemaine. Castlemaine is just under 80 kilometres from Ballarat and some of the Castlemaine diggers had been present at Eureka. Naylor was also secretary of the Castlemaine Hospital and it is possible that Paul spent some of his recuperation there. Naylor was also secretary of the Castlemaine Race Committee, so like many of his contemporaries had a finger in more than one sporting activity. A few weeks after the football match he organised a subscription to fund a scratch race meeting at Muckleford, near Castlemaine.[11]

The Commissoner’s Camp at Castlemaine in 1852.[12]

Castlemaine Court House in 2014, now the home of the Castlemaine Historical Society Inc. Compare with the building to the left of the 1852 picture.

The Camp Reserve today. Home ground of the Castlemaine Football and Netball Club.

Unfortunately we don’t know the names of any of the other participants or whether the second match mentioned in the newspaper report took place. Nor do we know in detail what kind of football was being played. Darren Lewis, the historian of the Castlemaine Football and Netball Club, and Sean Fagan who has written about the first tour by an English rugby union team to Australia in the 1880s, both see the game as a precursor of their respective codes.[13] One of the earliest clubs to play football on a regular basis was begun in Castlemaine in 1859.[14] But it is equally, if not more likely, that the game bore more similarity to Association football as it was codified in England in 1863 than either Australian football or rugby union.

It was not the first football match played in Castlemaine in 1855. The local correspondent for The Argus bemoaned the absence of public celebration of the Queen’s birthday that year but reported that a football match had taken place:

‘The Queen’s birthday has been kept here in a fashion, the public offices have generally been closed. Some of the officials and of the townsmen have kept up a game of football in the Camp. There have been no parade, no salutes, no grand dinner nor ball and supper – no money for ammunition to fire a salute’.[15]

When we say these games were more like football as it was codified in 1863 in England it does not mean that they looked like an English Premier League match today or Barcelona toying with its opposition with its tika taka. They were different from the mass melees in the villages, but they were not for the faint hearted. They were strongly physical contests in which weight and probably height counted for more than neat skills of ball control.[16] But the emphasis is on kicking not handling or running with the ball. When detailed descriptions of matches appear there are many references to charging, rushing and heavy collisions with bodies being upset and falls frequent. Injuries are mentioned regularly. So it was not a decorous business and there would have been quite enough physical contact to satisfy fit young players and spectators looking for some vicarious violence.

However, the historians of both Australian rules and rugby union tend to be both imperialistic and anachronistic in claiming that this match fits their image of a precursor of their varieties of football. The Castlemaine match was only one of a large number of small-sided predominantly kicking games played in Australia, often for monetary prizes, and hence certainly to agreed rules, long before the Melbourne club drew up its first set or union diverged from soccer over the issue of hacking. In an article in The International Journal of the History of Sport the evidence for the widespread existence of a football culture in Australia before codification is presented and this Mandela moment is at last put in its context.[17]

Notes

[2] Peter FitzSimons, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution, Random House, Sydney, 2013.

[3] For the role of British troops in Australia prior to 1870, see Peter Stanley, The Remote Garrison: the British Army in Australia 1788-1870. Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1986.

[4] There was a mass meeting in Ballarat on 9 December 1854 which sought the end of the licence fee and the abolition of the Gold Commission. There was a similar meeting at Castlemaine which demanded the abolition of military rule. Justin Corfield, Dorothy Wickham & Clare Gervasoni, The Eureka Encyclopaedia, Ballarat, Ballarat Heritage Services, 2004, Timeline, p. xiv.

[5] A correspondent with the Herald, Frank Arthur Hasleham was shot in the shoulder when he came out of his tent to observe what was happening. He was paid £400 ‘for his wrong’. Mount Alexander Mail, Friday 14 September 1855, p.  3.

[6] The Castlemaine Camp had been the site of a protest meeting against the proposed doubling of the miners’ licence fee in 1852 led by Captain John Harrison, the father of Henry Colden Harrison, one of the early figures in the story of Melbourne and Geelong football. Gillian Hibbins, Sport and Racing in Colonial Melbourne, Lynedoch, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 36–7.

[7] ‘Foot Ball’, Mount Alexander Mail, Friday 28 September 1855, p.  3. Hard copy consulted at the Castlemaine Historical Society on 21 January 2014.

[8] Paul was posted to Launceston in 1856 and then took leave and returned to England. He later became Captain and Adjutant of the 36^th Regiment in Belfast in the 1860s. H.E.C. Stapylton, Eton School Lists from 1791 to 1877, Simpkin Marshall, London, 1884, p. 208.  He reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and retired in 1877. He may have died in Liverpool in 1903. Ian McFarlane, Eureka from Official Records, Melbourne, Public Record Office Victoria, 1995, and Corfield et al, Eureka Encylopaedia, p. 421.

[9] Evidence of Assistant Surgeon George Arden, Dorothy Wickham, Deaths at Eureka, privately published, Ballarat, 1996.

[10] The Eton field game was a predominantly kicking and dribbling style of football. Ian Syson reminded me of this by email, 22 January 2014.

[11] ‘Racing’, Mount Alexander Mail, 19 October 1855, p. 3. Naylor had a chequered subsequent career. In 1860 it was reported in some newspapers that he had been imprisoned for defalcation but it turned out that a clerk in Gold Office named Graybourne was responsible and convicted. However, two years later Naylor was charged with systematically purloining small quantities of gold and sentenced to four years hard labour on the roads. Hobart Town Daily Mercury, Wednesday 25 April 1860, p. 2; The South Australian Advertiser, Monday 30 April 1860, p. 3; Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 23 May 1862, p. 5; The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, Thursday 31 July 1862, p. 2.

[12] Cuthbert Charles Clarke, The Commissioner’s Camp, Castlemaine in 1852, Alan McCulloch, Artists of the Australian Gold Rush, Lansdowne editions, Melbourne, 1977, p. 140.

[13] Darren Lewis, A Day at the Camp: 150 Years of the Castlemaine Football Netball Club. Castlemaine Football Netball Club, Castlemaine, Victoria, pp. 8–10; Sean Fagan, The First Lions of Rugby: The First British Lions and Their Dramatic 1888 Tour of Australia and New Zealand, Slattery Media Group, Richmond, Vic.: 2013, pp. 196–200.

[14] Lewis, A Day at the Camp, pp. 11–13.

[15] The Argus, 28 May 1855, p. 2.

[16] Gavin Kitching, ‘”The Origins of Football”: Ideology and the Making of “The People’s Game”’, Football 150 Conference, Manchester: National Football Museum, September 2–4, 2013.

[17] Roy Hay, ‘Football in Australia before codification’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 31, No. 9, 2014, pp. 1047–1061 (Online version published 3 March 2014, hard copy 30 May 2014).

Australia’s membership of FIFA

Roy Hay

Australia is a full member of the governing body of world football, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), to give the title in French so that the acronym corresponds to the initial letters of the words. The first proposal that Australia join FIFA was put forward at the second annual conference of the Commonwealth Football Association in Brisbane in April 1914, but independent membership was not gained until fifty years later.

The world body was set up in 1904 in Paris, at the initiative of a Dutch administrator, Carl Hirschman, and a French journalist, Robert Guérin. The Football Association (FA) in England had been invited to join, indeed to take the leadership, but the four home countries, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales dithered and the Europeans decided to press ahead. International matches had already been played and in May 1904 France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, plus the Madrid Football Club (There was no national Spanish body at this time) set up the new organisation. A telegram from Germany announced that it would also join. The FA stood out till 1905 but then came in, giving the new body greater credibility, though the attitude of the home countries remained ambivalent. Scotland, Wales and Ireland were admitted to FIFA in 1910, though this was at variance with FIFA’s statutes, which only allowed for one organisation to represent a national entity.[i] England provided the second president of FIFA, Daniel Woolfall, and that helped as he led the move to have uniform laws for the game wherever it was played.

At this time Australia had no national body overseeing the game and the state associations of Western Australia, New South Wales (and New Zealand) became affiliated to FIFA through the Football Association in England. The Commonwealth Football Association (CFA) was set up in December 1911, but the news must not have filtered through to FIFA where the German Association pointed out that Australia was now a separate country and should have its own direct membership of FIFA. The German motion encouraged the Australians to set up their own organisation. The German intervention needs to be seen in the context of the strategic and political rivalry between Germany and Britain in the lead-up to the First World War. South Africa joined FIFA in 1909-10 and Argentina, which had also been affiliated through the FA became an independent member in 1912. Queensland became a member of the FA in 1912. Tasmania was also a member.

The fledgling Australian national body hoped to achieve two international objectives. The first was to attract a tour by a team from the United Kingdom or to send an Australian representative team on a tour of the home countries.[ii] The second was to take part in the soccer tournament at the Olympic games planned for Berlin in 1916.[iii] At the Stockholm Congress of FIFA on 30 June and 1 July 1912, FIFA made two decisions which had implications for Australia. The first was that affiliation to FIFA was required to take part in the Olympic Games, but the second was that separate affiliation to FIFA was not required for the colonies of mother countries. This inconsistency was to remain untested as far as Australia was concerned. When Tasmania proposed direct affiliation with FIFA at the second CFA conference in Brisbane in April 1914, the motion was defeated and it was reported that ‘Tasmania wished an affiliation made to the FIFA, but it was unanimously decided to affiliate to the FA only, as the Stockholm Congress of the FIFA declared that affiliations from colonies of mother countries were unnecessary.’[iv] As it happened the outbreak of the First World War meant that the Berlin Olympic games did not take place.

When the Commonwealth Football Association was reconstituted and activated in 1921, Australia remained a member of the FA in London thanks to Arthur Gibbs who paid the membership fee out of his own pocket.  Gibbs was the representative of Australia and New Zealand from 1910 to 1928. L H Pike was Australia’s representative from 1937. The four British associations withdrew from FIFA in April 1920 as they did not want to play official matches against their former enemies in the First World War and that decision also affected Australia. When the home associations returned in 1924, Australia was also included. In 1928 the home associations withdrew again this time over the definition of amateurism and payment for ‘broken time’. The CFA did not accept professionalism in soccer in Australia but it did not ban competition with professionals (otherwise the England tour of 1925 could not have taken place) or playing professionals from other sports. It was not till 1946 that the home unions rejoined FIFA once again.

In 1949 (?) Melbourne was selected as the host city for the Olympic games in 1956 and once again this was to be a catalyst for the reconsideration of Australia’s relationship with FIFA. By now it was firmly established that affiliation to FIFA was required for participation in the Olympic football tournament and FIFA had effectively taken over the football at the games. It took the Australian national body, now the Australian Soccer Football Association Ltd (ASFA) some time to get its planning for the tournament under way.[v] In 1954 ASFA applied for separate membership but was probably too late to have that considered at FIFA’s 29^th Congress in Berne in June. Four national associations were admitted to membership—Cambodia, Hong Kong, Malaya (later part of Malaysia) and Taiwan, the last over the vehement objection of the delegate from the Peoples Republic of China.[vi] The four Asian associations were voted for separately and there is no mention in the article cited or the FIFA minutes of any other associations being admitted at this meeting.[vii]

In November 1954 the Executive Committee of FIFA met in Stockholm to consider inter alia the preparations for the Olympic games in Melbourne.

The President stated that the difficulties to participate in the Football Tournament were greater than for the 1952 Helsinki Games. He said that not more than 16 teams would be admitted. Should more than 16 teams enter for the tournament, qualifying matches would have to be played outside of Australia . This question as well as that of the general organisation and that of refereeing would have to be studied.[viii]

The final paragraph of this minute recorded: ‘The Executive Committee provisionally admitted the Australian Soccer Football Association. This decision will have to be ratified by the 1956 Congress.’ According to FIFA Statutes Congress is the body which grants membership, though the Executive Committee has the power to grant provisional membership pending approval by Congress. This decision was significant for Australia since it now gave ASFA the formal authority to carry out preparations for hosting the Olympic football tournament.[ix]

FIFA’s 30^th Congress met in Lisbon on 9-10 June 1956 and under the heading ‘Definite admission of the following National Associations.’ On the recommendation of the Executive Committtee, 1. Australian Soccer Football Association, Wallsend. 2. Jordan Sport Federation, Amman. 3 Sports and Scouting Administration of Saoudi-Arabia, Mecca were unanimously admitted to membership. South Africa’s application to reactivate its membership was postponed until 1958 and another attempt by China to exclude Taiwan was rejected.[x] Australia was now a full member of FIFA in its own right.[xi]

Some confusion has arisen because of a report in Soccer News which read as follows:

FIFA Membership Approved: Olympic Requirement met

Provisional admission to membership in the International Federation of Football Associations (FIA) for the Australian Soccer Football Association was confirmed at the recent Congress of the Federation in Lisbon, Portugal. Actual membership rather than affiliation was a prerequisite to participation in the Soccer Tournament of the Olympic Games.[xii]

This can be read as indicating that provisional approval was granted at this meeting, but in fact it shows that provisional membership, granted prior to the meeting, was now confirmed as full membership. The reference to affiliation was to the previous situation in which Australia was affiliated to FIFA through its membership of the Football Association in England.

Australia did manage to host the Olympic Games football tournament successfully, though with a few problems and the home team bowed out in the second game, losing to India after overcoming Japan in the opener. However within two years it became involved in an episode which led to the suspension of the recently obtained FIFA membership.

In the late 1950s at a time of high inward migration, football participation and attendances were growing rapidly. Club teams from Europe and the United Kingdom arrived on tours during the northern hemisphere close season and played against district, state and national selections before crowds of up to 30–40,000 in Melbourne and Sydney. In 1957 it was the turn of Ferencvaros from Hungary and FK Austria from Vienna to come down under.

FK Austria brought several international players and the squad was a very powerful one. It included Julius Ondriecska, Oscar Fischer, Franz Swoboda, Walter Tamandl, Karl Kowanz, Hans Loser, Imre Mathesz, Alfred Malik, Horst Nemec, Leo Baumgartner, Rudolf Sabetzer, Karl Jaros and Tibor Szalay. FK Austria played 11 games losing two. One was to Australia in Wallsend and the other to Ferencvaros. It was reported at the time that the club had lost £5,000 on the tour. In the next two years several of Austria’s best players including Leo Baumgartner, ‘the little professor of soccer’, Karl Jaros, Walter Tamandl, Andreas Saghi (originally from Hungary) and Eric Schwarz emigrated to Australia without clearances and no transfer fees paid to their European clubs, so insult was added to injury. Three of the first to arrive Johann Neuhold, Baumgartner and Jaros were actually suspended as individuals while they were still en route to Australia.[xiii]

In Sydney, Prague and Hakoah signed up these migrants, while in Victoria, Wilhelmina, later Ringwood Wilhelmina and then Ringwood United, attracted a number of top class Dutch players including Sjel (Mike) de Bruyckere. Prague won the NSW State League in 1961 and 1963. Wilhelmina came out on top in Victoria in 1959. Baumgartner became the superstar of his day, leading Prague for a couple of seasons and representing Australia against Everton in 1964. He went on to play for APIA and Hakoah (Sydney) and later coached Yugal to a New South Wales state title in 1970.[xiv]

The arrival of these migrant players followed a major split in the organisation of the game in Australia, precipitated by the refusal of the New South Wales Soccer Football Association to promote the Sydney club, Hakoah to the first division after it had clearly won the second in 1956.[xv] A broad range of clubs and groups within the game supported the breakaway by the New South Wales Federation of Soccer Clubs, several of whose members were signing these migrant players. At that time the breakaway movement of the New South Wales Federation of Soccer Clubs was at loggerheads with the New South Wales Soccer Football Association and consequently with the Australian Soccer Football Association which held the membership of FIFA. In 1958, the NSW Soccer Football Association was the recognized body affiliated to the national ASFA, not the NSW Federation. However, in March 1959, that changed.[xvi] If, as happened, the NSW Federation allowed the players to play for Prague and the ASFA was unable to prevent this breach of FIFA Rules then Australia’s membership of the world body was jeopardised from that point.

Australia was not the only country that defied FIFA in the 1950 and 1960s. Colombia was suspended from membership from 1950 to 1956 after the formation of a breakaway league led by the Bogota club Millonarios, with the great Alfredo di Stefano as its star player. Several players were attracted from Argentina and the United Kingdom, including the England and Stoke City centre-half Neil Franklin. Another split in Colombia in 1965 led to FIFA becoming directly involved and it took over direct administration of the game in that country. It was not until 1971 that a new domestic governing body was established in that country and membership of FIFA was regularised.

The Hungarian revolution and its subsequent suppression by the Soviet Union resulted in another outflow of players to other countries and questions of compensation to clubs and associations for their ‘transfer’. The players of the Honved club even organised a tournament in South America both as a fund-raiser and to express their opposition to the new regime in Hungary. Several leading players, including Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor, were recruited by Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain. FIFA imposed a two-year ban on the Honved stars, but others from the top leagues were ruled out for only one year for failing to provide transfer certificates. Players from the lower leagues were exempted. FIFA was highly involved in questions of control of the game and not disposed to allow breaches of its rules.

So FIFA was determined to enforce its control of the world game and though the president, Sir Stanley Rous, was very keen to ensure that all countries stayed within their orbit, when the Australian authorities refused to abide by the rules and pay the transfer fees even he was forced to agree to the suspension of ASFA’s membership on 5 April 1960.

On 4–5^th April 1960 the Executive Committee of FIFA met in Zurich and addressed the issue of the ‘Transfer to Australian clubs of Austrian players not being in possession of the Transfer Certificate,’ and considered the Report and Propositions of the Players’ Status Committee. In the light of failure to by the Australian Soccer Football Association Ltd to apply article 12 of the FIFA regulations the Executive Committee decided unanimously to suspend the ASFA’s membership.[xvii] The suspension of Australia’s membership continued until mid-1963.

Incidentally the Asian Football Confederation was founded on 5 May 1954.[xviii] Apparently in 1960 the Asian Soccer Association (sic) was going to consider an application by ASFA to join the Asian Cup competition and that Lee Wai Tong of Hong Kong was expected to recommend acceptance.[xix]

Meanwhile, Australia was drawn to play against Indonesia in the qualifying matches for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Syd Storey, president of the ASFA, said Australia would not try to enter the Olympic Games in 1960 because it would cost nearly £20 000 to send a team to Rome and it would have to qualify by beating Indonesia home and away. This was an early indicator of the financial demands that taking part in international competition would place on Australian soccer. The tyranny of distance and the associated costs would not be easily overcome. FIFA’s suspension of Australia’s membership would probably have prevented it taking part in any case.[xx] That would also have stymied an Australian attempt to join the Asian Cup competition as a qualifying route to the World Cup in Chile in 1962.[xxi]

On 7 May 1963 the Emergency Committee of FIFA met in London and considered Australian membership as item 9. The Committee were provided with reports of a recent visit by Michael Weinstein on behalf of the Australian Federation but since nothing had been provided in writing of the required conditional changes or the statutes of the newly formed Federation, it was decided to appoint a small sub-committee under the president, Sir Stanley Rous to examine the documents, if available, at the IOC meetings in Lausanne in June and take appropriate action. If the debts were liquidated then the steps to get an Australian association back in membership with FIFA were approved.[xxii]

On 12 June 1963, Dr Helmut Käser, General Secretary of FIFA issued a press statement indicating, ‘The suspension imposed on the Australian Soccer Football Association in 1958 (sic) will be lifted as from July 1^st, 1963.’[xxiii]

FIFA regards July 1963 as the official affiliation date of the Australian governing body to the organisation.[xxiv] It also says the Australian body was founded in 1961. So in a curious way, FIFA has written the previous membership of ASFA from 1954 out of its consciousness and treated the membership of the Australian Soccer Federation Ltd from 1963 as a new beginning. This is not how the history of the relationship unfolded.

References

[ii] The dream of a tour to the UK or a visit from an FA team goes back to the 1880s and was reiterated by F W Barlow of the New South Wales Soccer Football Association on a visit to the FA. Minutes of the International Selection Committee, 1 September 1913, Football Association, London, 1913. See also Bill Murray & Roy Hay, Australia, Greece and Olympic Soccer, in Bill Murray & Roy Hay (eds), The World Game Downunder, ASSH Studies in Sports History, no. 19, Australian Society for Sports History, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 113–151.

[iii] It wasn’t actually a clarion call by the CFA, which was dependent on the support of the state bodies. ‘Regarding the Olympic Games at Berlin in 1916, the congress strongly recommended each State to co-operate with the various local Olympic Committees, with a view to representation at Berlin. The hon. secretary (Mr. S. Lynch) was directed to forward fraternal greetings to the Australian Olympic Committee, and to assure it of the hearty co-operation of the Commonwealth Football Association, also stating that the association desired that the necessary steps should be taken for the representation of soccer football at Berlin.’ Brisbane Courier, Thursday 16 April 1914, p. 3

[iv] Sydney Morning Herald, 22 April 1914, p. 4.

[v] It was not only ASFA which was dilatory. There were even threats to take the games away from Australia if it did not accelerate its preparation of venues and general organisation.

[vi] Heidrun Homberg, ‘FIFA and the “Chinese Question”, 1954–1980: an exercise of Statutes,’ Historical Social Research, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, p. 75.

[vii] Minutes of the 29th Congress of FIFA, Berne, 21 June 1954, pp. 11–12. We are indebted to Dominik Petermann of FIFA for copies of the minutes of this and other congresses and committee meetings.

[viii] Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee of the FIFA held at the KAK, Stockholm on 18th November, 1954, p. 7.

[ix] ‘Australia, which has previously had affiliation only with the F.A. of England, is now a fully affiliated member with the Federation de Internationale Associations (sic), the organisation which controls the soccer universe. Without this affiliation, Australia could not have controlled the soccer section of the games, but now, of course, that is all in order, and the Australian Soccer F.A., in conjunction with all States, is already hard at work to ensure success of its portion of the Olympiad.’ Bill Orr, ‘International Soccer Galore,’ NSWSFA Ltd, Soccer Year Book 1955, p. 69.

[x] Minutes of the 30th Congress of FIFA, Lisbon, 9 &10 June 1956, p. 5.

[xi] FIFA, Official Bulletin, no. 15, Zurich, September, 1956, p. 3. We are indebted to David Hearder for a copy of the relevant pages of this Bulletin, and the documents cited in several of the following references. Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 11 June 1956, p. 9.

[xii] Soccer News, 14 July 1956, p. 5.

[xiii] ‘FIFA suspends three,’ Sun-Herald, 2 February 1958, p. 38.

[xiv] In 2012 he was still coaching football. Roy Hay, ‘The Little Professor of Soccer,’ Goal Weekly, 2 May 2011, p. 9; and his autobiography. Leo Baumgartner, The Little Professor of Soccer, Marketing Productions Ltd, Sydney, 1968. Leo Baumgartner died in December 2013.

[xv] For an excellent, detailed account of the split, see Philip Mosely, Ethnic Involvement in Australian Soccer: A History 1950–1990, Australian Sports Commission, Canberra, ACT, 1995, especially pp. 25–44.

[xvi] ‘Soccer ban on five Prague stars’, Sydney Morning Herald 11 May 1959 p.18; Trevor Thompson, One Fantastic goal – a complete history of football in Australia, ABC Books, Sydney, 2006, p.79; ‘World ban guilt’, Soccer World 16 April 1960 p. 2.

[xvii] FIFA Executive Committee Minutes, Meeting of 4–5 April 1960, Zurich, pp. 3–4.

[xviii] Homberg, ‘FIFA’, p.76.

[xix] ‘If Australia joins Asia FA, (if FIFA ban is lifted) it will compete to play against Yugoslavia and Poland for the honour of going to Chile in 1962’, Soccer News, 25 June 1960, p. 4.

[xx] The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF) website notes that Australia withdrew but does not give the reason.

[xxi] Soccer News, 27 August 1960, pp. 5 & 11.

[xxii] FIFA Emergency Committee Minutes, Meeting of 7 May 1963, London, p. 3.

[xxiii] FIFA, Press statement, Zurich, 12 June 1963. In 1958 it was the players who were suspended, the suspension of the ASFA did not occur until 1960. The effect was similar.

[xxiv] Christiane Eisenberg et al., 100 Years of Football, pp. 93–94, FIFA website, http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/organisation/associations.html, accessed 9 April 2012, email by Dominik Petermann to Roy Hay, 3 April 2012 and Minutes of the 33^rd Congress of FIFA, Santiago, 26 May 1962, p. 5 & 34^th Congress of FIFA, Tokyo, 8 October 1964, p. 3.

Roy Hay and David Hearder

(This story first appeared in Goal Weekly, 24 February 2012, pp. 1–3, and we are grateful to Costa Koutropoulos for giving it his support and exposure. It also appears on the Goal Weekly <

http://www.goalweekly.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2780:from-emus-to-socceroos-the-real-origins-of-national-team’s-name-at-last&Itemid=126>

and FFA websites <

http://www.footballaustralia.com.au/news-display/origins-of-the-socceroos/45734>

.)

On Wednesday the Socceroos take on Saudi Arabia in the final group match of the first Asian round of qualification for the FIFA World Cup in Brazil in 2014. Where did the name Socceroos come from and when? Two simple questions, you might think, but if you Google the term you will get umpteen versions of the same story, nearly all of which go back to Michael Cockerill’s Australian Soccer’s Long Road to the Top, published in 1998. ‘It was Sydney journalist Tony Horsted (sic) who coined the term “Socceroos” for the national team thirty years before. In 1967 the team, under coach Joe Vlasits, took the nickname away with it on a tour to Vietnam—a tour arranged at the height of the Vietnam war.’ [1]

There are three other published claims about the origins that sometimes crop up in discussion. In his autobiography Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters Johnny Warren says it was in 1971 prior to another tour to Vietnam in 1972 that Tony Horstead first used the term.[2] Sid Grant, whose collection of information was published in 1974, says the word was adopted in 1972–73: ‘The name and accompanying badge were the work of a leading Sydney sporting journalist and his colleague, a news photographer.’[3] Laurie Schwab asserts that the national team was dubbed the Socceroos during the successful 1973–74 World Cup mission.[4] By 1974 the word Socceroos is being used without explanation in Australian Women’s Weekly, so it was obviously in common usage by then.[5]

Tony Horstead did not accompany the team to Vietnam in November 1967. He wrote a soccer column in the Sydney Daily Mirror, under the byline of ‘Hotspur’. After the team came home on 1 December he asked his readers to send in suggestions for a name for the national team and offered a prize of a free pass to all matches the following season. A week later he reported that ‘Emus’ was the overwhelming favourite by almost four to one, next came Wattles, then Jackaroos, Wombats, Bandicoots, Boomerangs, Birubieds, Baddawalers, Walleroos, Merinos, Koalas, Woomeras, Sharks, but no Socceroos.[6]

In April 1970 the Australian team went back to Vietnam and played two matches and later in the year the Australian Soccer Federation (ASF) sent Rale Rasic and his team on a world tour with the long-term goal being qualification for the World Cup in West Germany in 1974. Hotspur’s columns just refer to the Australian soccer team or the national team and there is no mention of Socceroos or Emus.

Two years later the ASF launched its formal World Cup qualification bid on 3 May 1972. Backed by $100,000 in sponsorship from Pepsi Cola (Australia), Travelodge Australia, Philips Industries and News Limited, Sir Arthur George, President of the ASF, unveiled the Australian national team icon for the campaign.[7] The logo consisted of a kangaroo wearing football boots surrounded by the legend ‘World Cup 1974 Socceroo’.

Tony Horstead had probably never forgotten his attempt to get a punchy nickname for the national team and the next morning he had turned the logo into that name. A key sentence in his column reads: ‘The Socceroos will be the best prepared sporting team ever to represent Australia in a major event’.[8] The logo got its next public outing when Dundee from Scotland played an Australia XI in Adelaide on 17 May 1972. Matches against club sides were not regarded as full internationals and Horstead was keen to tie the name of the Socceroos to the national team. So later that year, when Australia returned to Vietnam in October 1972, he could focus on that connection.

On 29 September 1972 Horstead casually mentioned that he was accompanying the team as ‘Australia’s Socceroos set forth next Thursday on their Asian tour’.[9] It is clear from the context that this is a term that would already be familiar to his readers. Horstead used the term regularly thereafter.[10] Lou Gautier of Soccer World also accompanied the Australian team and while they were in Vietnam he wrote about the children who crowded around the players as they trained at Cong Hoa: ‘They were rewarded for their interest with Socceroo badges. The kangaroo emblem is a sensation and I think that Australia’s national team has now won its spurs to be known world-wide as the Socceroos, like the “Wallabies” in Rugby Union and the “Kangaroos” in League.’[11]

So in 1972 the Socceroos team name was coined by Horstead who continued to use it in the Daily Mirror and other News Limited papers. The dedicated soccer press began to use the name early in 1973, but it was towards the end of that year before the other metropolitan dailies adopted the usage and not without protest. The Sydney Morning Herald argued on its front page on 15 November 1973:

‘Now that the Australian Soccer team is basking in honour and glory after its World Cup victory over South Korea it can surely do without the name “Socceroos”which is increasingly being applied to it. Of course, the names ‘Wallabies’ and ‘Kangaroos’ have already been taken by national teams of other codes, but if the soccer team is to have a collective nickname what’s wrong with being known as the “Emus”. After all, that strong speedy—although not too bright—bird is so authentically Australian that it has a proud place on the Coat of Arms’.[12]

The mixture of poor humour and condescension was typical of the non-soccer press and in this case the Fairfax paper may have had its nose put out of joint by the Murdoch-owned Mirror. The tide of popular support for the Socceroos on and off the field following successful qualification for the World Cup assured that the name would stick. At the final tournament in West Germany in 1974 the name was ubiquitous.

When Football Federation Australia replaced Soccer Australia in 2005, the new CEO John O’Neill thought that the Socceroos name would disappear in time.[13] That did not happen. In 2012 it is so firmly engrained in people’s consciousness that it is just about the only survivor from old soccer into the brave new world of football under the FFA.

David Hearder has been researching this topic for several years and we are indebted to Louise Moran, who spent several hours ploughing through microfilm and hard copy newspapers on our behalf.

References

[1] Michael Cockerill, Australian Soccer’s Long Road to the Top, Lothian Books, Port Melbourne, 1998, p. 12.

[2] Johnny Warren with Andy Harper and Josh Whittington, Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters: An incomplete biography of Johnny Warren and Soccer in Australia, Random House, Sydney, 2002, p. 133.

[3] Sid Grant, Jack Pollard’s Soccer Records, Jack Pollard, North Sydney, 1974, p. 258.

[4] Laurie Schwab, The Socceroos and their Opponents, Newspress, Melbourne, n.d., [1979] p. 4.

[5] ‘Wonder how the Socceroos would take to girls getting in on their act?’, Australian Women’s Weekly, Wednesday 9 July 1975, p. 40; ‘They even sold the Australian Socceroos’ colors with a kangaroo-style tail sewed on. That one kept the fans on the hop.’ Australian Women’s Weekly, Wednesday 28 August 1974, p. 113.

[6] Tony Horstead, ‘Emus it is—they can run and kick,’ On the ball with Hotspur, Daily Mirror, 8 December 1967, p. 90; see also Tony Horstead, ‘Thanks to Tour Team’, On the ball with Hotspur, Daily Mirror, 1 December 1967, p. 73.

[7] Soccer World, 12 May 1972, p. 7; Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1972, p. 53; Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1972, pp. 15 & 16; Sun (Sydney), 4 May 1972, p. 69; Australian, 4 May 1972, p. 24; Daily Mirror, 4 May 1972, p. 65; Australian Soccer Federation, 11^th Annual Report for the period ending 31 August 1972, ASF, 1972, p. 4.

[8] Tony Horstead, ‘We’re after Soccer’s World Cup – Mirror Backing $100,000 Effort’, Daily Mirror, Thursday 4 May 1972, p. 65.

[9] Tony Horstead, ‘Short shrift for slackers on Asian tour’, On the ball with Hotspur, Daily Mirror, 29 September 1972, p. 79.

[10] For example, Tony Horstead, ‘Soccer stars face big cut,’ Daily Mirror, 3 October 1972, p. 58; ‘Socceroos eager for bright opener,’ Daily Mirror, 7 October 1972, p. 9. There are many subsequent examples that month.

[11] Lou Gautier, Soccer World, 27 October 1972, p. 3.

[12] Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 1973, p. 1.

[13] Michael Cockerill, ‘O’Neill wants to lose Roos in the name of progress’, Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 14 January 2005, p. 36.

Unanswered questions

Finding out where the name Socceroos comes from has been an interesting quest for David Hearder over several years. As always in history, puzzles remain and new questions arise. Who was the cameraman who worked with Tony Horstead? Who actually designed the logo for the ASF? Did anyone else use the name in 1972 apart from Horstead and Gautier? Goal Weekly would be delighted to hear from readers and others who can add to or correct the story we have told here.

Sources which are now out of date

History never stands still and our research will not be the last word on the subject. We welcome corrections and additional information. Meantime, the following sources might be updated in the light of our research.

Wikipedia

Origin of “Socceroos”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_national_association_football_team#Origin_of_.22’Socceroos.22

The team’s nickname was coined by Sydney journalist, Tony Horstead, in 1967 in his coverage of a “goodwill” tour by the national team to South Vietnam.[44]

[44] Michael Cockerill, Australian Soccer’s Long Road to the Top, Lothian Books, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 1998, p. 12. ISBN 978-0850918928.

The Roar

Socceroos

http://www.theroar.com.au/football/socceroos/

The Socceroos’ history stems from the first Australian national football team which was convened in 1922. The nickname ‘Socceroos’ was coined by journalist Tony Horstead in 1967. But it wasn’t until reaching the 1974 World Cup finals that the Socceroos came to prominence. After switching to the Asian Football Confederation in 2005, the Socceroos confirmed their second World Cup finals appearance the same year.

One Fantastic Goal

Australia went on to play and win the Vietnam National Day tournament in Saigon in 1967… It was at that tournament that the nickname ‘Socceroos’ was coined by the News Limited journalist Tony Horstead. Although there was never any official baptism under that name for the national team, the term Socceroos was taken on by players and fans, became a standard piece of media shorthand and was ultimately adopted by the soccer hierarchy.

Trevor Thompson, One Fantastic Goal: A complete history of football in Australia, ABC Books, Sydney, 2006, p. 99.

Our Socceroos

…the next major tour organised by the ASF in 1967 – a trip to Asia during the heat of the Vietnam War. …It was on that tour that a journalist named Tony Hoystead [sic] first referred to the Australian national team as ‘The Socceroos’

[Ray Baartz:] “… (journalist) Tony Hoystead [sic] travelled with the team…It was Tony who coined the name “Socceroo” and began to write his articles referring to us by that name”

Neil Montagnana Wallace, Our Socceroos, Random House Australia, Milsons Point, NSW, 2004, pp. 2 & 56.

History of the Socceroos

Talking of FIFA World Cups, the Socceroos—as Daily Mirror football reporter Tony Horstead had dubbed them back in 1967—made their inaugural appearance at the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

Sue Behrent, History of the Socceroos, Penguin Books, Camberwell, Victoria, 2011, p. 4. This book uses the name Socceroos for its brief match reports from 1967 onwards.

FFA website

Australia’s campaign for the 1970 World Cup saw the Qantas Socceroos knock out Japan, South Korea and Rhodesia.

Australia in the FIFA World Cup: Official Socceroos History

FFA website, http://www.footballaustralia.com.au/socceroos/history

Accessed 18 February 2012.

This short history does not mention the origins of the name specifically, but it introduces a double anachronism by referring to the 1970 Australian team as Qantas Socceroos. The team did fly with Qantas, however, but naming rights were a thing of the future.

Roy Hay

(This article appeared in Goal Weekly on 23 December 2011, p. 19.)

Charles Perkins was a pioneering figure in the recognition of the Aboriginal people of Australia. In the 1960s he led the freedom rides which brought discrimination against Aborigines into Australian politics. He was the first male Aboriginal graduate of the University of Sydney. He became chair of the Aboriginal Development Commission and head of the Federal Government’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs. For four decades he was one of the most recognised figures across a range of issues affecting the indigenous peoples of Australia. Yet it was football where he first made his name and football which set him on the way to his later achievements. As he said ‘Football serves a three-fold purpose. The first was to provide me with finance for my study. Second, it enabled me to keep fit because I needed to study for such long hours., Third, it was the means whereby I could mix socially and enjoy myself comfortably.’

Born in 1936 near Alice Springs. His mother was of the Arunta people, a very inclusive group, and his father whom he only saw once, was of the Kalkadoon people from Mount Isa. Charles was taken to Adelaide at the age of ten along with several other children by a Church of England pastor. Among the Aboriginal children in the school at Marryatville was John Moriarty, another who made his way through football to an important career in Australian life. Life was very tough for the youngsters who had to cope with discrimination and abuse. In 1951 the state Under-18 was practising near the school. The boys from St Francis’s took them on and gave them the runaround. Perkins and Moriarty and some of the others joined the squad soon after. That started the love affair with football.

Charles Perkins rose through a number of junior clubs in Adelaide including  Port Thistle juniors, International United (Redskins), and Budapest which he joined in 1956. His speed, power and ferocious shooting skills were recognised and in 1957 when he was at Fiorentina a scout from Everton offered to pay half his fare for a trial with the club in England. Like other young Australians, including Craig Johnston and Tony Dorigo, Perkins found the gulf between the football he had been used to in Australia and that in United Kingdom was huge. Though he tried hard he could not break into the Everton team and though he was offered a part-time contract in the end, he decided instead to try his luck elsewhere. He had a spell with local team in Wigan and then joined Bishop Auckland. On the face of it this was a curious move, going from a top professional team to an amateur one, but as he pointed out the amateur players were getting just as much money at the professionals in those days of the maximum wage in England. A game against Oxford University opened his mind to the possibility of going to university himself one day. In the short run he turned down offers in England, including one from Manchester United, and returned to Australia.

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

Adelaide Croatia, presided over by the leading housebuilder, Branko Fillipi, agreed to pay his fare home as they wanted his drive and direction for their push for promotion. Within months of coming home, he was helping the club to win promotion and cups as player-coach and becoming vice-captain of the South Australian state team. His experience in England had sharpened his skills including his tactical awareness and organisational capacity. John Moriarty and Gordon Briscoe were two other Aboriginal members of the Croatia team in these years. Meeting the future premier of South Australia Don Dunstan helped to develop his interest in the politics of Aboriginal advancement and in 1961 he moved to Sydney. After a false start at Bankstown he was offered a contract at Pan Hellenic, where he was an immediate hit. Once he settled among the Greek community he combined success on the football field with study for matriculation and then at Sydney University. Under his leadership Pan Hellenic finished fourth in Division One in New South Wales in 1961 and 1963. He finished his career as a player at Bankstown in 1965, but he remained involved in the game off the field.

Perkins, Soltos Patrinos, Jan Bout, Brian Smith, Nilo Rasulin, Joe Vlasits (coach). Front row: Chris Ambros, Angelo Mavropoulos, Doug Logan, Jimmy Pearson, Can Gameras. Missing: Jim Hatzis. Source: Laurie Schwab collection, Deakin University Library.

When the National Soccer League started he was president of Canberra City and became a member of the Australian Soccer Federation and its vice-president in 1987. He also helped promote the indoor game in Canberra along with his long time friend Johnny Warren and was president of the Australian Indoor Soccer Federation for a decade. He never forgot what he owed to the game and his autobiography A Bastard like Me tells the story, warts and all. His influence persisted long after he died in 2000, because he paved the way by his example for the next generation of talent to come through. Harry Williams worked closely with Perkins in Aboriginal support services in Rockdale in Sydney and went on to play for Australia in the World Cup in Germany in 1974. The modern generation of Aboriginal players, men and women, owe a great deal to the pioneering career of Charles Perkins.

Charles Perkins, activist and administrator. The Assistant Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs protests along with Bob McLeod and Allan Sharpley. Two of Perkins’ children on his right. Source: Laurie Schwab collection, Deakin University Library

Roy Hay

(This appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, on 5 December 2011, p. 20 as ‘Book it now, Winnie. Diversions, plagiarism and whodunnits’).

It is time once again for the annual reading list which might assist some of you looking for something to delve into over the holidays or for a present for a friend or family member whom you know still enjoys the pleasure of a book they can handle and smell as well as read.

If John Harms did nothing but produce the Football Almanac each year with Paul Daffey he would justify his status as a living national treasure, but he also writes some first class journalism. Geelong fans will turn quickly to the grand final replays led off by Cathy Sullivan, whose first published journalism was on the doings of the juniors and seniors of the Western Victoria Soccer Association in the Geelong Advertiser. Now she produces stories for Lateline on ABC, and she can evoke the spirit of Geelong families and their football team in a few deft words. John Harms also presides over a loose combination of amateur and professional contributors on sport to a website called the The Footy Almanac (www. footyalmanac.com.au). The quality is variable, the content sometimes very moving. The site is free of the kind of vituperative abuse which disfigures so many vox pop offerings on the net.

Simon Townley’s Good to Great, the story of the Cats’ 12 year journey from near death to 3 premierships in five years and their plans to stay at the top arrived only this morning and so too late to be included in the Advertiser article. Full of pictures and great insight into the football revolution, on and off the field, it is something not just for the died in the woolly jumpers Catters but anyone interested in the transformation of an also-ran into a success. It is a story  with resonance outside sport as well.

Also hot off the press in the United Kingdom and launched in Geelong and Melbourne in December is Jennifer Kloester’s biography of Georgette Heyer. I have to declare an interest, because Jennifer has been a student and colleague for several years. Her companion to Heyer’s regency novels is already a best-seller and the biography will enhance her reputation as it reveals the most private of authors, whose popularity continues today and whose books are still in print. Jennifer also has turned her skills to writing a novel for young adults, which has been accepted for publication by Penguin.

Steve Craddock put me on to James Robertson, And the land lay still. This is probably the Scottish novel of recent times and certainly a brilliant recreation of the mid and late 20^th century. It takes several individuals and families and weaves them into a sympathetic but critical portrait of a country coming to terms with its altered place in the world.

David Crystal, The story of English in 100 words, is also available as an e-book. It starts with ‘roe’ which he thinks may be the first English word written down and proceeds to recent importations into the language from the twittersphere. Crystal has several books on the language but this is probably the most accessible and something you can dip into or read consecutively as the words are arranged more or less chronologically as they came into use.

Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage has been justly praised in the United States and round the world. The complex relationships between the four-term American President and the woman who supported him throughout his political career and carved out a pioneering role for herself are sensitively explored. Hazel, who was a colleague for some time at Deakin University, died tragically young from cancer, but not before writing acclaimed biographies of Christina Stead and Richard Wright and a brilliant account of the partnership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A fund has been established in her name to assist a writer with funding for travel and research so her influence will continue.

A request to do a review took me to Ideologies in the Age of Extremes: Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, Fascism 1914–91. It was an excellent idea of Willie Thompson’s to re-examine the dominant ideologies of that most ideological of ages, Eric Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century, from the outbreak of the First World War to the collapse of Soviet communism. A generation of students has grown up since then who live in a very different world where the forces which contend are very different both in content and in relation to each other. This is a worthwhile introduction to the period covered.

Patrick Mangan’s, Offsider is a Nick Hornbyesque account of growing up inspired by soccer in an Aussie Rules world. He and his brother John, both later excellent journalists, started their first soccer paper at primary school in rural Victoria. How could I not love a precocious pair of youths who had the presence and wit to adopt Ayr United as their team? Ayr was my home town team in Scotland and one for which my grandfather played and managed.

Another book with a soccer theme is by Les Murray on The World Game. I got an early copy which contained a story about the relationship between Lucas Neil and the then Australian coach, Pim Verbeek, which led to a threat to sue the author. It was reissued without the offending material and the rest is Murray’s view of soccer and its star performers rather than a history of the code.

The most impressive history I read this year is David Reynolds, In Command of History: Fighting and Writing the Second World War. This is a tour de force which compares Churchill’s six volumes of personal history of the war with what he did, said and wrote at the time before and after he became Prime Minister. Reynolds brings out the many ways in which the later account needs to be understood in terms of the political and other circumstances during which it was compiled. It is excellent critical history which does not diminish Churchill, but does not let him get away with many omissions and revisions of his stance on issues. Also it delineates very clearly the extent to which Churchill relied on his team of writers and researchers some of whose work appears in the books virtually verbatim but under the author’s name.

A much longer book, covering a shorter period, and less innovative in its approach is James Holland’s The Battle of Britain. You will have read about 500 pages before you get to the main phases of the war in the air, which people correctly believe to be the nub of the affair. Holland’s account has several good stories of individuals, bringing out elements in the behavior and character of some of the leading figures which are often underplayed in previous accounts, but little new information on the overall course of events.

My crime fiction includes the annual offerings of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter Robinson, and I have now worked my way through all of Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle novels and her autobiography as head of MI5. She is not in Le Carré’s league, but can produce page-turners, which become more illuminating once you have read her own story.

Finally Eileen Shorrock gave me a couple of copies of the Staffordshire Sentinel for February and March 2000 which almost make a short book in themselves. They included the tributes and the stories about Sir Stanley Matthews who died that year. A superstar in his generation ‘The Wizard of the Dribble’ was the David Beckham of his era. He came to Australia with Blackpool in 1958 and returned several times thereafter to coach but not to play competitively. Jon Henderson is writing a new biography and would like anyone with stories about Matthews in Australia to get in touch. He can be contacted at jon5@talktalk.net.

Annie Wakeford (extreme left) and Norma May Mawson (second left) welcome the Victorian Minister for Housing, Wendy Lovell (cemtre) to the new Miller homes in Highton, 13 July 2011.

Alexander Miller: The unknown philanthropist and his legacy

Alexander Miller

Dr Jennifer Kloester, Dr Al McLean and Roy Hay

Alexander Miller (1842–1914) was an extraordinary man whose legacy lives on to this day. Arriving from Scotland as a child in the 1850s, he settled in Geelong and made a very successful career as a businessman, with interests throughout Victoria. Late in life he began to construct a number of houses for people, particularly women, who had fallen on hard times. At his death in 1914 he left a very substantial sum to set up a trust to continue the work he had begun. Today, in partnership with the Office of Housing of the Victorian Government and Wintringham Housing Limited, the trustees of the Alexander Miller Memorial Homes provide homes for disadvantaged people throughout the state, honouring Miller’s vision.

Our account reveals more about an intensely private man than has been known before and should contribute to his being recognised for his role in transforming the lives of many of his fellow citizens. The discretion within broad guidelines he allowed to his executors and trustees enabled them to adapt his vision to changing circumstances through depression, wars and rising community expectations. This account also demonstrates the value of the relationships between the personal action of private individuals and those of concerned organisations and government in achieving effective socially beneficial outcomes today. This century-old initiative has evolved into a model for the continuing achievement of the goals Miller sought to realise in his lifetime.

Jennifer Kloester, G Alwin McLean and Roy Hay, Alexander Miller and His Enduring Legacy, Sports and Editorial Services Australia in association with the Trustees of the Alexander Miller Estate, Teesdale and Melbourne, 2011, was launched by the Victorian Minister for Housing Wendy Lovell at a new set of 34 Miller Homes in Highton on 13 July 2011. Copies of the document are available from the Office of Housing.

Roy Hay

Deakin University

Originally published as:

Roy Hay, ‘A new look at soccer violence’, in Denis Hemphill, All part of the game: Violence and Australian Sport, Sydney, Walla Walla Press, November 1998, pp. 41-62. This has been placed on the website as the result of a request for an introductory article on the subject.

Academic interest in violence and soccer, like academic study of the game itself, is a very recent phenomenon.   Until the late 1960s, football or soccer violence was not a matter of serious concern in academic or official circles in the English speaking world.   The popular consensus, which had not been intellectually challenged, was that soccer violence only occurred in South America, southern Europe and Scotland.   In the first two areas, a hot blooded Latin temperament and a general lack of self control was a sufficient explanation, while north of the border the religious divide between Catholics and Protestants underlay most of the violence.   In England, the demise of folk football, prior to or during the industrial revolution, had put an end to the connection between football and violence and any subsequent outbreaks had a peculiar and specific rather than a systematic and structural explanation.

1            Soccer, deviance and the breakdown of social control

Concern with violence at an official level became evident in the late 1960s following a series of pitch invasions and scuffles involving rival groups of football fans.[1] Probably the first academic study appeared in 1971, when Ian Taylor, who had spent a year in the Sociology Department at Glasgow University, wrote an article for Stanley Cohen’s Images of Deviance.[2] Taylor’s focus was originally on Scotland though by the time this version appeared he was covering England as well and his thesis, in its original and unvarnished form, was that the football clubs had grown out of the working class and had been ‘owned’ in a fundamental sense by the working class who made up the vast bulk of the support.   Since you did not commit chien lit, you did not shit in your own bed, people did not get involved in violence on their own turf.   The collective forces of social control operated effectively.   As the commercial possibilities of football became fully appreciated and football became a business, then the ownership of football clubs was gradually wrested from the punters by a new business class of owners.   Deprived of their control, the fans lost the kind of respect for the turf which had previously guided conduct, and protest, accompanied by violence, followed.   Taylor speculated that this response was an attempt to restore a traditional sense of control, in the absence of the kinds of reform which might have met the aspirations of the fans.   It was an attractive, if simple, thesis, which owed a lot to the popular sub-Marxist critique of society of the time.   Later criticism was to demolish both the empirical basis of the argument, because football clubs had always been business firms from the start of the professional game in the 1880s and there had been plenty of violence in the nineteenth century, and the theoretical underpinnings, as the sociology of deviance was challenged by other more hard-nosed paradigms.[3] But Taylor’s prophetic conclusion that ‘the soccer hooligan may begin to organise’ was to be borne out in spades.

2            Ritual aggression and tribal anthropomorphism

In England, the successes of English clubs and the national team in the World Cup in 1966 led to an upsurge of intellectual interest in the game.   This took various forms including the radical chic which led A J ‘Freddie’ Ayer, the philosopher, to the stands at White Hart Lane, and a more anthropological concern as Peter Marsh, Elizabeth Rosser, Rom Harré and colleagues left the dreaming spires for the wilds of Cowley and Headington to study the strange tribes who supported Oxford United.[4] The Oxford group were responding to what has also been seen as an offshoot of the 1960s revival of soccer and the general mood of liberation and popular protest, the appearance of violence on the terraces of England.   The word ‘appearance’ is used here in a double sense.   Marsh and his colleagues were interested in the rituals of behaviour, seeing much of the apparent violence as forms of posturing and display rather than actual, physical confrontation.   Subsequent developments were to undermine this relatively comforting conclusion.   But the question whether violence was appearing or re-appearing also needs to be addressed.[5] Was the post-Second World War period unique with its high attendances and apparently little violent behaviour?   Desmond Morris continued the anthropological strand with his glossy illustrated work The Soccer Tribe.[6]

3            Failure of the civilising process

At the University of Leicester, Eric Dunning, joint author of a celebrated study of rugby union, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players: A sociological study of the development of rugby football, published by ANU Press in 1979, turned his attention to association football and violence in the 1980s.   He attributed the rise in violence to the failure of the civilising process.   The theoretical underpinning of the explanations advanced for the form of English soccer hooliganism from 1966-7 onwards by Dunning was the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias.   Elias’s argument was there had been a long-run decline in interpersonal violence associated with what he described as ‘the civilising process’.   It is a very complex middle level theory with strong empirical content.[7] Dunning strongly resists charges that the theory is evolutionary either in content or tendency.[8] As applied to football, especially soccer, by Eric Dunning and Patrick Murphy, it was used to explain the levels of violence and the form that violence took in the periods before the First World War and after 1966-7 as primarily resulting from the norms and the social conditions faced by groups of unincorporated young lower working class males.   Where the processes of state formation produced a stable monopoly of the use of force, then citizens could operate in an environment in which overt force was neither required nor tolerated.   The lower ranks of the working class were deprived to some extent of this experience.   The ‘ordered segmentation’ of these communities produced a set of characteristic features among the young male members.[9] Their manliness depended on a willingness to fight in defence of local, parochial or tribal concerns.   The particular form that the violence took was also shaped by government policies and political tactics, the media and the police.   The level of violence was sometimes amplified and at other times played down by these authorities.[10]

Having embarked on a study of contemporary problems, Dunning and his colleagues also pursued the historical origins of football violence.   The work of Tony Mason, John Hutchinson and Wray Vamplew had alerted them to the existence of soccer-related violence in earlier periods of the modern organised game.[11] So in a mixture of sociological and historical research they claimed to have discovered the roots of football hooliganism around the turn of the twentieth century when ‘a much larger proportion of the British working class appears to have been less “civilised” than tends nowadays to be the case’.[12] Growing incorporation reduced the levels of violence in the period down to the 1950s (at least in England).   The post-1960s explosion of violence was attributed to the growing power of the working class and a shift in inter-generational power, plus the advertising of the game as a place where fights and incidents regularly take place, thus making the game more attractive to rougher working class males.[13] Dunning’s work has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds by R W Lewis, who argues that existing theories, including Dunning’s, fail to place football adequately in its historical and social context.   Moreover the statistical evidence compiled by Dunning and his associates involves double counting of incidents, inadequate categorisation, and misinterpretation of examples and leads to some inadequate speculation, thus exaggerating the extent of violence before 1914.   Lewis also provides some Lancashire evidence which he asserts indicate that incidents of hooliganism were ‘few and untypical’.[14] Dunning and his colleagues have responded with an extended critique of Lewis’s article as ‘bad history and bad sociology’, characterising Lewis as empiricist and arguing that many of the latter’s examples were open to more than one reading.[15]

4            Participant observation and the violent masculine style

The Leicester group was, however, the amalgam of two distinct styles, which have recently shown signs of bifurcating again.   John Williams, a mainstream sociologist, was the man who did the field work among the fans for his thesis, while Eric Dunning was a collaborator with Elias.[16] Williams’s participant observation of English fans at the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain, at the European championship game between Denmark and England in Copenhagen and Aston Villa supporters who went to the 1982 European Cup final against Bayern Munich in Rotterdam provided the centrepiece of the first book to appear from Leicester, Hooligans Abroad.[17] Williams was not the first participant observer of football hooliganism.   Peter Marsh spent three years on the terraces from Southampton to Middlesborough, though the bulk of his work was done at Oxford and Milwall.[18] Williams, however, was the first to study the international dimensions of the interactions between fans of different nationalities and the authorities in a range of countries.   His reporting, in conjunction with Dunning and Murphy, was based on a reading of the English and local press and some consultation with police and other agencies abroad, and the book itself concluded with a series of recommendations for policy changes to control football hooliganism, including the control of tickets for overseas matches, monitoring of travel arrangements, segregation of fans and a new role for stewards accompanying fans on away trips.   This piece of social engineering was to bear fruit in the next few years, though its outcomes were not always as the Leicester group had wished or predicted.

In his most recent work Williams has become increasingly critical of the original Leicester paradigm.   After aligning himself with those who criticise ‘the latent evolutionism’ of the Eliasian approach partly because of his reassessment of earlier episodes of football hooliganism, Williams suggests that the aura of ‘irrefutability’ surrounding the work of Dunning leads to an underplaying of important national and cultural differences in patterns and forms of hooliganism.[19]

‘The theory underplays the more general importance of culturalist approaches, perhaps particularly those which examine the nature of, and shifts in, the cultural significance of the game in this country, and those structuralist perspectives which highlight key aspects of the constantly changing relationship between the state, football and the football audience’.[20]

Needless to say, Dunning has responded vigorously, and one might think convincingly, to these charges.[21]

The Williams-Dunning-Murphy work was historically and sociologically informed and pioneering, though some of its limitations are becoming apparent.   It was followed by some more controversial participant observational work by Gary Armstrong and Rosemary Harris among the fans of Sheffield, the Blades and the Owls, United and Wednesday.   A proposed article by these two researchers provoked a response among referees (academic, rather than the football variety) which eventually led to an issue of the Sociological Review being devoted to the cultural aspects of football in August 1991.   Part of the controversy arose from the trenchant criticism by Armstrong and Harris of previous work and their failure to provide a convincing theoretical justification for their own research.   While it extended the coverage of ethnographic research, the typicality of Sheffield was much disputed and there was derision for the rather lame conclusion that the focus should be shifted to why some young men are drawn into groups which indulge in hooliganism and others are not.   That these groups might have provided a supplement or substitute for the family for people drawn from all social classes did not appear to be a world-shattering revision of existing theory.   The notion that football hooligans were a totally acephalous tribe was also criticised by Bert Moorhouse among others.[22]

5            Participant involvement

If participant observation was a key feature of the research of the 1980s another genre which emerged in the latter part of the decade can be described as ‘participant involvement’ represented by the work of Colin Ward, Jay Allen, Bill Buford and the Brimsons.[23] Ward, Allen and the Brimsons claimed to be the autobiographical works of self-described football hooligans, but Buford’s account was a deliberate piece of slumming by the American editor of the Cambridge literary magazine Granta.[24] This is a shocking book, deliberately so.  The author became involved after witnessing fans taking a train apart in Wales and then devoted eight years to an inside study of English hooliganism.   Yet it is also a quite conscious attempt by the author to come to terms with his own feelings about violence.   In describing the ways in which crowd behaviour escalates from collective solidarity into demonstrative behaviour and eventually what appears to be anarchy, Buford recounts his own dissociation from his normal values as he abandons himself into this moral void.   He portrays the nihilism of the violent actions, relating it to feelings he had not had since he was a teenager.   “Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures.   What was it like for me?   An experience of absolute completeness.”

Buford’s sources, apart from his own observation, are members of the various organised groups of fans who attached themselves to clubs, such as Manchester United’s Red Army, newspaper cuttings services and contacts in the National Front.   Aside from its description of the mentality and social experience of some soccer hooligans, the book makes some large claims.   One of these is about the disappearance of the English working class.   Nothing is left but a bankrupt style and violence for its own sake.   As a kick at some sacred cows this is one thing, but as serious sociological observation, it is ludicrous.  Pete Davies described Among the Thugs as a “meretricious, misleading, morally repellent piece of work” and it is hard to disagree.[25] The quotation comes from his book which is a much better guide to what soccer is all about.   It has a much more balanced, if less involved, assessment of hooliganism too.

Allen’s account is distinct from the others since it is the first inside story from a new group who apparently emerged in the later 1980s, the so-called ‘casuals’ for whom style and the voyeurism of violence were a major part of life.   As police surveillance and crackdowns targeted the increasingly penned in working-class football fans, so street-wise kids treated the challenge to a series of finely orchestrated series of responses, which involved the emergence of the ‘firms’ and the ‘casuals’ – football-supporting and hooliganism became post-modern.

6            Reading the football hooligan, soccer becomes postmodern

Inevitably the study of football hooliganism became bound up in the development of postmodern critiques of society, though it is arguable whether there were any gains to be made as a result.   There was some highly effective criticism of the solipsist tendencies of the postmodernist project at the Sport, Philosophy and the Olympics Conference at De Montfort University in 1996.[26] It is easy to guy postmodernism when applied to soccer hooliganism, and it is hard to resist this extract taken more or less at random from Giulianotti:

‘Unlike the Scots, the Irish did not attempt to construct a symbolic “fusion of horizons” between themselves and other teams, which would have provided them with greater scope for popular cultural colonisation of those teams encountered in Genoa.   The pre-eminence of secondary sub-discourse of instrumental sociability and self-regulation amongst team members when performing to the local, media and prima facie opposing teams has been noted consistently’.[27]

My preference is for a more accessible account:

‘We walked down to the Scotland versus Holland game with a couple of young Scots supporters and they said they were getting on famously with the Dutch.   Evidence of this appeared when we got to the ground as a group of Dutch supporters in orange hair, orange faces, orange tops and kilts appeared.   “Can you not make up your mind what you are?” I asked.   In reply, one lifted his kilt and crossed his legs.   Just as well, for he had nothing on underneath.   “Dutch hermaphrodites”, I said to Tony Mason.[28]

The work of Steve Redhead, Stuart Cosgrove and Giulianotti has not been without its value.   Redhead, in particular, in teasing out connections between football, popular music and youth culture has helped in the process of demolishing simplistic connections between the sartorial style of football fans and a predilection for fascism.[29] Redhead argues that carnival rather than fighting has become fashionable at British sporting events, though this was written before the England match in Ireland last year, when there were reports of considerable neo-fascist involvement.   Also a claim that most English, Scottish and Irish fans at Italia 90 behaved more like Italian spectators can be a somewhat double-edged compliment when you remember what the Ultras and the Tifosi get up to, or the Juventus fans when they met Manchester United in 1996.[30]

7            Manipulation from above and tackled from behind

Gary Armstrong and others have revived some of the manipulative models of society which were common in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to football hooliganism.[31] They argue that the authorities, particularly the police, have used a socially sanctioned campaign against football hooliganism to introduce surveillance methods and techniques which would otherwise have been pilloried and exposed by the civil libertarians.   Most of this comment relies on Armstrong and Hobbs’ article in the Giulianotti volume, since unsuccessful efforts were made to get hold of Armstrong’s London Ph D thesis ‘Fists and Style’ which is the basis of much of his evidence on the topic.[32] When Armstrong’s arguments were put to police representatives at the Football, the Law and Civil Liberties Conference in Glasgow they were met by a response that the police were always fully accountable and a cautionary tale about what happened when a match commander who believed in treating fans like human beings was put in charge of a contentious game.[33] Subsequently the appearance of Armstrong’s Football Hooligans: Knowing the score in early 1998 has provided a much more extended and nuanced account of the Sheffield experiences, though his publishers’ claim that this is the first anthropological study of football hooliganism is ludicrous.[34] A biographical appendix of the Sheffield United “Blades” compiled on the way to an away game in April 1987 is designed to illustrate that there was no stable membership to this particular supporters group, though it is not clear how a single survey can illustrate dynamic and fluid cohorts over time.

8            Critiques and displacement, moral panics

Bert Moorhouse has always been very sceptical of much of the interpretative writing on football hooliganism in England, both because of his work on Scottish fans, particularly those who made the biennial pilgrimage to Wembley for the England versus Scotland game until that ended in 1989, and on general sociological grounds.   The Scots got drawn into a moral panic and an English labelling process even though their behaviour had not significantly altered over the years.[35] More seriously though Moorhouse argues,

‘The sober truth is that football violence is not a particularly large segment of all recorded violence and that one theoretically puzzling issue is why, given a high value on masculinity norms, heavy drinking and pre-existing social antagonisms in British society, football hooligans have not been a lot more violent’.[36]

Recent research tends to support this conclusion.   ‘It may be that even at their highest levels, arrest and ejection rates are representative of “run of the mill” behaviour at these events which requires official police intervention’.[37]

9            Cross-cultural comparisons

Moorhouse opens up the possibility of international comparisons of which there have been several of varying quality and depth in recent years.   A pioneer was Alan Roadburg who tried to account for differences in level of violence associated with sport in the Britain and the United States.   He was one of the few social scientists whose predictions were borne out in practice as he said there was no reason to expect that English football hooliganism would flourish in the United States in connection with the National Soccer League.[38] But that was true only because the league folded!   But violence has not been a strong accompaniment of the revival of Major League Soccer in the United States since the World Cup in 1994.

Bill Murray had done a piece of detailed work on the Old Firm, Rangers and Celtic, in Scotland and their fans, including a chapter on disturbances.[39] This is careful historical research with no taste of sociological concern or theorising, but it makes the point that the bulk of disturbances in Scotland seemed to have been linked to the Old Firm and religious rather than class differences.   A highly polemical response to Murray’s research by Gerry Finn adds a great deal of heat but little light to the topic.[40]

The work of Janet Lever for Brazil, Eduardo Archetti for Argentina and several Italian studies also have much to contribute, making evident the parochialism of much of the English analysis.   H H van der Brug wonders why football hooliganism has taken on in Holland, Germany and England to a greater extent than in other European countries, but again the situation is neither as clear cut nor as static as this view implies.[41] A full comparative study has not really been attempted, though Philippe Broussard’s Génération supporteur: Enquête sur les ultras du football comes closest from a journalistic perspective.[42]

10          Australian themes

i            Perceptions

The study of sports violence and soccer violence in Australia is in its infancy.   Wray Vamplew was one of the first in the field.   His informants were a non-random selection of sports coaches, participants, administrators and academics researching in the area.   He used a questionnaire which included the following questions: “In your opinion is the current level of violence in your sport 1 acceptable 2 excessive”.   Violence among players was defined by example as including foul language, racial or ethnic abuse, sexual harassment, verbal abuse of officials, physical abuse of officials, verbal abuse of other players, kicking, eye gouging, punching, biting, elbowing, head high tackles, tripping and other.   For spectators, the examples were: foul language, racial or ethnic abuse, sexual harassment, verbal abuse of officials, throwing of missiles, drunkenness, running on to pitch, vandalism (Note the absence of physical abuse of officials or players from the categories of spectator behaviour).   In each case respondents were asked to compare current experience with that of five years ago and in regard to spectators they were invited to rate spectator violence as ‘no problem, exists but acceptable, excessive’.[43]

He analysed 906 responses, 675 males and 231 female, with 54 from soccer, 143 Australian rules, 69 cricket.   34 per cent of soccer respondents thought spectator misbehaviour was excessive, compared with 19 per cent for rugby league, 18 for rules, 16 for basketball and 10 for netball.   Soccer was perceived as being particularly bad for throwing missiles, running onto the pitch, foul language, racial and ethnic abuse and abuse of officials.   These are perceptions.   Perceptions of more or less well informed people involved with the various sports, but they are not measures of the actual level of such incidents.   Since perceptions are important in forming attitudes to games these may not be ignored but while they help identify a perceived problem, they don’t necessarily give a firm statistical grasp on the issues identified.

In the media, the association of soccer violence has become a journalistic cliché producing some almost Pavlovian reactions.[44] The Roth cartoon captures a widely held perception that Australian Rules is more violent than soccer on the field.

ii            Balkan politics and displaced person syndrome

Phil Mosely has done some excellent detailed work on violence in soccer in Australia concentrating on the importation of Balkan politics in the post-war period.[45] More generally, in his original thesis and in subsequent work, he has linked violence in Australian soccer to the experience of the first generation of immigrants from war-torn Europe, with all their ethnic hatreds, and the idea of a ‘displaced person’s mentality’ arguing that the disorientated and anomic individual was more prone to violence than settled members of Australian society.[46] Soccer as a sport which attracted the first generation migrants accordingly picked up the violence as part and parcel of the migration process.   Different styles of play involving migrants from Britain and the continent also provoked conflict.   This kind of work has moved the argument a long way forward, and by concentrating on certain key groups it has focussed research in a very interesting way.   But there are problems.   The Maltese had a deserved reputation for violence in Australian soccer.   George Cross was suspended on occasion in Victoria and St Georges in New South Wales.   The former drew referees’ bans and so on.   But the majority of Maltese were not DPs, had no great reputation for violence at home at matches, and political problems only with Germans and Italians, which one might understand, but Maltese violence does not seem to have been limited to those groups.   More generally the recitation of a number of incidents and a brief examination of each based largely on newspaper reports carries certain inherent biases which need further exploration.

iii            The BBB and Croatian identity

John Hughson in his Ph D thesis has taken up the running with a close ethnographic study of the Sydney Croatian Bad Blue Boys, who model themselves on their counterparts in Zagreb, who followed Dinamo, now Croatia Zagreb renamed by President Tudjmann.[47] The original BBB are the subject of some fascinating analysis by Furio Radin, Minister for the Italian minorities in the Croatian Parliament, as they began to form a key part of the Croatian identity and independence movement, and later became a focus of the democratic opposition to Tudjmann.[48] Hughson has also produced a number of articles on the BBB and Croatian involvement in soccer violence and claims on that basis that Australian multicultural policy should be brought into question.   The evidential base for this large demand is somewhat tiny, even within the Sydney United club.[49] Similarly discussion about violent incidents involving Croatian and Greek fans needs to take account of the contemporary context of Victorian politics as is done below.[50]

11            A new look?

Having spent much of the last decade trying to quantify changes in violence associated with soccer in Victoria using all the available sources, I have come to the conclusion that there is a strict limit on what can be achieved by this approach.   There are no consistent series of records belonging to the soccer associations; the referees records are even more patchy; newspapers only report selected cases and even the specialist soccer press, when it exists, cannot be relied on to have covered each relevant incident.   Police records do not distinguish soccer related incidents and it is only by a close recalculation of data at the watch-house level and the application of some fairly arbitrary judgment that one could construct anything from this material.   For an attempt to make sense of some recent data see the work of my colleague Ian Warren.[51] There is the further set of puzzles related to the questions of variations in control and policing of incidents.

As a result I have turned back to what one might regard as traditional historical techniques for my new look at soccer violence.   I now tend to believe that it is only be very careful and more wide ranging investigation of specific incidents that one can reach a closer understanding of the dynamics involved.   To give a flavour of that, the rest of the discussion is a consideration of three sets of incidents, in 1972 and 1994 and those in England in 1996.

The first of these might easily but misleadingly be categorised as a simple case of ethnic violence with a crowd invasion and an attack on a referee at a match between Croatia and Hakoah in Melbourne.   However to understand the events of 1972, it is necessary to appreciate that changes in the structure of Victorian soccer in the 1960s had put the clubs in control.   Collectively the clubs had great difficulty in disciplining members since they relied heavily, as many still do to this day, on a support base, particularly for finance, drawn from one specific community.   Yet clubs and the Victorian Soccer Federation were prepared to act and several members were suspended for varying periods for various kinds of irregularities including on and off-field violence.   Geelong (Italian) was suspended for four or five weeks in 1955, George Cross (Maltese) in 1949, Croatia in the most significant and controversial case in 1972.

There is a considerable range of sources available for the study of the last of these incidents, which has not been seriously examined before.   There are newspaper reports, the transcript of court proceedings before Mr Justice Newton in the Supreme Court of Victoria, which cites the essence of the deliberations of the various Victorian Soccer Federation disciplinary bodies, the oral memories of participants on and off the field which have been recorded and those of Victorian Soccer Federation officials some of whom were key figures in the proceedings.

On 30 July 1972, Croatia played Hakoah in the Victorian State League, the top competition, at Olympic Park, which was Croatia’s home ground at the time, in front of 1700 spectators.   Croatia was fighting for a place in the top four, as was Hakoah.   Jimmy Brennan was the referee.[52] Fifteen minutes into the second half, he sent off a Croatian full back Hugh Gunn.   It appears that Gunn had made a series of strong tackles on the Hakoah winger, Bobby Saunders who formerly played with AFC Bournemouth.   The winger was described as a ‘jumper’ by his team manager Hedley Copeland.   He made a meal of the tackles and Brennan decided to take action against Gunn.[53]

Two minutes later Brennan gave another foul against Croatia.   According to Tony Vrzina, an eye-witness and an influential figure in the Croatian community and coach of several successful teams, Brennan then warned the Croatian player who had perpetrated the foul that a repetition would result in him being sent off too, and when he signalled this to the player by pointing towards the dressing rooms, the crowd interpreted the gesture as an indication that this player too was being dismissed.[54] The crowd invaded the pitch and the referee, the linesmen and some officials and players were punched and kicked (There was no mention of any weapons)[55].    According to Hedley Copeland, the players on both sides lined up to protect the referee, landing a few blows on spectators who were trying to get at him.   The match was abandoned.    There were five police in attendance, who were unable to prevent the assaults, but more police were summoned and matters were brought under control and the ground was cleared.

Frank Burin, an eye-witness and later team manager of Croatia, says that the young Croatian captain was in the mood to take his team off the field and waved in the direction of the Croatian youth on the terraces, perhaps inviting them to come over the fence.   The trouble-makers were known to the club.    Frank thinks it was inexperience on the part of the captain, Benec, or perhaps he was set up.[56] The first fans over the fence may well have been connected to the Croatian Youth in Carlton, which had had trouble with the police.

At the VSF Tribunal, chaired by Justice O’Connor, on Thursday 3 August 1972, Croatia was charged that it had failed to control its spectators resulting in the abandonment of the game and an assault on the referee and linesmen.   The club criticised the referee.   ‘Because of his poor umpiring the public was upset and invaded the playing area’.   Croatia had five paid police and officials who were themselves assaulted.   No club would have been able to control the spectators.   The Club deplore and ‘are very sorry about these incidents which only harm our club’s welfare and soccer in general’.   The Tribunal unanimously found, ‘Croatia Club failed in its responsibility to control the spectators and ordered that Croatia be disqualified from membership of the VSF.   To the decision, the tribunal added, ‘The tribunal feels that if strong action is not taken to compel soccer clubs to control spectators the day is not far distant when such behaviour will result in the death or serious injury of some persons.’[57]

Croatia appealed against the decision, but the Appeal Board on Tuesday, 8 August 1972 found Croatia guilty and disqualified the club from membership until the conclusion of the 1972 season.   Thereafter it was specifically allowed to apply for re-admission, with the decision on that application being determined by the VSF in accordance with its Constitution and Rules.[58] Croatia did apply on 22 August 1972 in writing, but this application was refused.[59]

After a considerable debate within the club, Croatia then appealed to the Supreme Court of Victoria that the decisions of the Tribunal and the Appeal Board were invalid, that the club was still a member of the State League and that the club had not been guilty of an ‘offence’ in respect of which the Tribunal or the Appeal Board were empowered to impose any penalty on the club.[60] Mr Justice Newton found for the VSF and awarded costs against Croatia.

Whatever the outcome of the expulsion, many people connected with the clubs were convinced that Croatia had been victimised.   Martin Groher of North Geelong Soccer Club believes that Croatia was set up, particularly by Tony Kovac, who was associated with the Footscray JUST club, and the fact that the match was against Hakoah, and hence seen by some as Nazi sympathisers (Ustashe) versus Jews, was significant.[61] The former Executive Director of the VSF, George Wallace, denies that Croatia was set-up and says that the matter was handled by the book by the VSF, as was proved in the subsequent court case.   Both may be right.   However, it seems that there were equivalent incidents that year which did not result in expulsion or comparable penalties, for example Sunshine George Cross versus Footscray JUST on 7 May 1972.[62] Enver Begovic was reported to have said that it was humanly impossible for club officials and police to stop a determined group of troublemakers from creating a disturbance at any sporting event.   ‘It has happened at four different State League rounds this season, yet charges have not been brought against any other club’, he said.   ‘To disbar Croatia for an incident which it could not possibly prevent is both unjust and a threat to other properly administered clubs’.[63]

In the transcript of his judgment in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Mr Justice Newton referred to eight cases from a large bundle of case records submitted by the VSF.   His references related to whether the charge against Croatia constituted an offence, and hence the selection and comment on these cases has to bear that in mind.   Of the eight cases cited however, only one, that against Victoria Park Soccer Club, for an incident on 16 July 1972, dealt with on appeal by the Federation Tribunal on 2 August 1972, resulted in the disqualification of the club.   In this instance it was from the District League for the remainder of the 1972 season.   During the incident which led to the charge against Victoria Park supporters armed with knives, iron rods, umbrellas, stones and broken bottles invaded the ground and attacked the referee and opposing players.   In the other seven cases dealt with, the penalties, for offences which all involved spectator incursions, ranged from fines of up to £100 to reprimands and requirements to supply two policemen to subsequent home games.   In the case of one club, Kingsville, it was the second offence which resulted in a $50 fine and the instruction to supply police.[64] Now these cases may well exclude others where more severe penalties were applied including expulsion.[65] Fred Hutchison, referee and secretary of the Ringwood Wilhelmina club said that other clubs had been expelled and it was the fact that Croatia was regularly in trouble which led to the severe penalty in its case.[66] However, it is at least arguable that Croatia was treated with disproportionate severity in 1972.  On the other hand Laurie Schwab and Craig Mackenzie’s claim about 1972 that ‘Everything went smoothly until there was crowd disturbance during a match at Olympic Park against Hakoah’, will not stand up.[67]

There were politically inspired incidents after the Ampol Cup final between Croatia and JUST which led to an unprecedented VSF decision to have the league matches between Croatia and JUST played behind closed doors at a venue to be announced to the players only 24 hours before the game.[68] Both clubs appealed against the decision and it was eventually rescinded, leading to the resignation of the Chairman of the VSF John Gorton.   He was reinstated a week later.[69] The two clubs were also required by the VSF to change their names to those of the districts in which they played.   JUST protested on the grounds that following the amalgamation with Footscray it was now known as Footscray JUST.[70] So Croatia was in the VSF’s bad books before the expulsion.

Tony Vrzina says that he went to the club and offered to negotiate with the VSF to ensure that Hakoah got the points from the game and that Croatia was not punished severely.   This offer was turned down because it was said that Vrzina was only out to do down the reputation of the club following his resignation.   Vrzina had recruited a star player from Croatia who had suffered a head injury and had drink problems.   He was accused of not playing the new player, whom some believed should become coach.   This was part of the reason for Vrzina’s resignation.

It has been put to me several times that if Croatia had agreed to Hakoah getting the points then the expulsion would never have come about.   But  the leadership of the Croatian club, especially Enver Begovic, believing in the rightness of their cause refused to countenance such a concession.   We shall probably never know for certain whether there was decisive political pressure to expel Croatia in 1972.   It is however hard to accept that the expulsion of Croatia from the State League, North Geelong from the Provisional League and North Geelong from the Ballarat and Geelong District League in 1972 was just a series of coincidences.   The year 1972 saw the election of the Whitlam Labour government and a sharp change in the national political climate, in which Croatians, went from being accepted or at least tolerated in government circles as fervent anti-communists, to pariahs as tainted with fascism in the eyes of Labour.   Mr Justice Murphy was to mount his celebrated raid on the ASIO offices in Melbourne, seeking information about a cover-up of relations between the previous government and Croatian nationalists.

The Croatian community was stunned by the expulsion.   Many people severed their involvement with the game at this point and some never came back.   Players, whose suspensions were lifted early in August, left for other clubs.[71] Billy Vojtek joined Sydney Croatia, Mackay went to Sydney-Hakoah, Bill McIntyre to Hellas and Kondarios, Turicar and Hadiavdic to Keilor-Austria.[72]

Others Croatians were equally determined to keep the community identity to the fore and continued to hold meetings every Tuesday even though the club no longer existed as a competitive entity.    Subsequently, however, those involved changed tack and came back into soccer through Essendon Lions which was gradually taken over by the Croatian community.[73] Tony Vrzina became President-Manager with Duze Zemunik as coach.   Eventually Essendon Lions evolved into Essendon Croatia and then Melbourne Croatia, then Melbourne CSC now the Melbourne Knights, back to back champion of the National League, the Ericsson Cup in 1994-5 and 1995-6.

Because Croatians had been using the soccer club as a focus for political campaigns, the expulsion incidentally proved effective in the sense that since that time Croatian clubs have been careful to maintain their opposition within the boundaries set by the national and state federations.[74] One interesting point has been raised to me.   There was no real ethnic conflict with Hakoah.   Hakoah actually spoke for Croatia in the VSF tribunal.   Conflict, if it existed, was with Serbians represented in VSF by Tony Kovac.   Kovac died before I could interview him and so I have nothing from his perspective on why the ban was imposed.   VSF sources deny any departure from the rules or ethnic bias.   Fred Hutchison remembers it as the culmination of a long series of incidents and said the VSF was tired of Croatia.   But what about George Cross, which was also involved in a series of incidents?   It was Maltese.   With whom did they have ethnic conflict?   Italians or Germans?

The next pair of games I want to look at took place in 1994 at the same venue, involving teams from areas involved in territorial disputes in south east Europe, which had very different receptions, though as I will try to show, it was events off the pitch which gave them that.   The first game I want to consider was a National Soccer League game on 6 March 1994 between South Melbourne (formerly South Melbourne Hellas) and Melbourne Knights (previously known as Melbourne Croatia) ended peacefully in a one-all draw.   There was a crowd of 15,000, close to capacity at Middle Park, South Melbourne’s home ground for over 30 years, though it has now been displaced to the Lake Oval (the Bob Jane Stadium) to make way for the Grand Prix.   After the game, as the crowds left the stadium, a scuffle among a small group of supporters broke out and an elderly fan was struck ‘by half a brick thrown into a crowd’.[75]

On the Monday headlines in the press included ‘Racial row spills on to soccer field’, (Geelong Advertiser), ‘Violence erupts after soccer match (Age), but the context was more clearly given in the Herald-Sun, which had ‘Kennett offer on feud’ above a colour photograph of the injured Alex Karamitros in an extensive report on page three.[76] The front page repeated the photograph in close-up under the heading ‘Fan felled, ten held in flare-up’, which put the focus back firmly on the soccer.   The match, far from being the cause of inter-ethnic violence, was rather caught up in what had erupted over the previous months in large part as a result of political decisions made by the Federal government in Canberra and the State government in Victoria.   The rumbles following the terms of the recognition of Macedonia as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on the one hand and Mr Kennett’s apparent endorsement of the Greek position on the other came in the midst of, and helped to contribute to, rising tensions in the two communities in Melbourne.   The Croatians had absolutely nothing to do with this in a political sense.

The soccer match however guaranteed a huge crowd as the two Melbourne teams vied for top spot in the NSL with an advantageous position in the play-offs at stake.   The match was very exciting and could have been decided three minutes into injury time, but Australian skipper Paul Wade, of South Melbourne, fired a penalty kick wide of the goals.   During the match, despite warnings from the soccer authorities to both teams and their fans, provocative banners were raised, very tentatively, by spectators.   The Croatian youth flew Macedonian banners, while the Greeks, the Hellas Hooligans perhaps, had a Serbian flag on display albeit briefly.   Both sets of younger supporters indulged in some fairly pointed chanting and there was a great deal of passionate support, but most of it directed at the result of the game.   There was a stronger than usual police presence at the ground and virtually no trouble while the match was in progress.

At the end of the game, both sets of fans are inevitably intermingled on the bankings opposite the main grandstand and in the car park area.   There is very little traffic control after major sports events in Melbourne, with the crowds usually left to sort themselves out.   According to the Herald-Sun report there was a huge shouting match around 5 pm, about ten minutes after the end of the match, and some youths were throwing rocks, which are plentiful around the back of Middle Park.   ‘A man was charged with recklessly causing injury, while another nine between 17 and 63 were charged with resiting arrest, obstructing police and riotous behaviour’.   The young reporter sent by the Herald-Sun had very little experience of soccer matches and according to the soccer correspondent behaved very naively.

The contrast needs to be drawn with the Victorian Soccer Federation Premier League final played on 25 September 1994, when the political atmosphere in Victoria had cooled considerably.   This match involved Preston (Macedonian) and Port Melbourne (Greek) and once again was played at Middle Park, before a much smaller crowd, perhaps a tenth of that for the National League game.   There was some shouting and chanting, some banging of the back of the stand, a couple of flares, a provocative banner, quickly confiscated, and one small disturbance during which a youth in a Macedonian top ran into a group of Greek fans in front of the social club, then sprinted away to the top of the banking where he quickly removed his top and put on another nondescript one.   I thought at the time that this was the action of an agent provocateur.   No arrests were made and the Preston, the minor premiers, won the match comfortably and were well received at the finish.

The lesson which I hope is emerging from this is that politicians have to be careful about their interventions in these areas, as do the police.   If soccer was an independent dynamic and a cause of violence in an earlier generation, and I think that is very arguable, then it no longer is and has become more the victim of, rather than the trigger for socio-political issues.   The image of the game remains, despite the best efforts of the Associations and the clubs, which have accepted the process of downplaying traditional symbols, including long time club names, even if somewhat reluctantly at first.   Commercial pressures, sponsorship, and the critical need to manage a successful transition from the generations who built up the sport in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s to younger people, born in Australia, to whom the game inevitably means somewhat less, are combining to encourage clubs to go down the path of community and locality identification, rather than ethnic exclusiveness.   Examples include Morwell Falcons, Wollongong Wolves, Brisbane Strikers and the revived Newcastle Breakers.[77] Even the big city clubs like Croatia, now the Knights in Melbourne and United in Sydney, Olympic and South Melbourne are setting off down the same road.

I suggest that we need to adopt a similar approach if we are to make sense of the Trafalgar Square riots during the European Football Championships in England in June.   After England’s defeat in the semi-final by Germany there was a major gathering in central London that night and what began as a wake ended up with police baton charges and mayhem.   In several other parts of England there were reports of riotous incidents and a young Russian student was stabbed because it is said his assailants thought he was German.   Frank Keating has recently claimed that the violence was covered up by the media and authorities, by the former in shame at the ways in which they had contributed to fomenting the xenophobia surrounding the later stages of the championship.   I can only report that I had copies of all the material relating to the violent incidents in my files within forty-eight hours of the events and did not see any signs of a cover up, more something which could be explained by timing, since the troubles occurred too late to be picked up by the morning papers and there are very few afternoon editions in England these days.

In a recent study David Waddington has developed what he calls a flashpoint theory of social disorders to explain how public gatherings sometimes turn into riots.[78] Waddington admits that football hooliganism does not fit his model.[79] He finishes with quote from Dick Holt about difficulty of disentangling old and new in social history.   Yet the kind of approach Waddington’s work represents seems to me suggestive.

I believe we do need thick description in Geertz’s sense, and close historical analysis.   Riots and hooliganism are seldom, if ever, reducible to a single historical cause.   Riots change in character as they proceed because of the interactions between the rioters, bystanders and authorities and hence the perceptions of the various groups can be very different, thus producing the greater likelihood of escalating conflict and certainly differing accounts of what transpired.   The external context for hooliganism may be vital.   This can include structural factors and direct interventions by politicians and the media which raise the temperature making trouble more likely.   Here I think there is a link to Waddington’s flashpoint theory.   Then again fashions change and people respond.   Today’s violence will not be the same as yesterday’s.   The problem with soccer of course is that it is just too popular.

Nowadays there is bound to be one incident of violence associated with soccer somewhere in the world on any given day.   It will be picked up by the news services and chances are that it will be the item which will appear on soccer in the Australian mainstream press.   Even the sending off of an Argentinian polo player for violent conduct in a match involving Kerry Packer’s team somehow turned up in the Herald-Sun under the heading ‘Soccer’ and a soccer ball logo.   Is the link between soccer and violence so deeply buried in the sub-editor’s psyche that this is the result, or is there a more prosaic explanation?

References

Roth Cartoon, Age 1 June 1985, p. 40

Soccer, Herald Sun, 17 June 1993, p. 55.

[2] Ian Taylor, ‘Soccer Consciousness and Soccer Hooliganism’, in Stanley Cohen, ed., Images of Deviance, Penguin, London, 1971, pp. 134-164.

[3] Taylor modified his original thesis in the light of subsequent research, see ‘On the sports violence question: Soccer hooliganism revisited’, in John Hargreaves, ed., Sport, Culture and Ideology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

[4] Peter E Marsh, Elizabeth Rosser and Rom Harré, The rules of disorder, London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1978

[5] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A history of respectable fears, London, Macmillan, 1983, pp. 29-31, concludes, ‘The realities of pre-war football do not find agreement with post-war nostalgia’.

[6] Desmond Morris, The soccer tribe, London, Cape, 1981.

[7] For a very brief introduction see, Eric Dunning, ‘The social roots of football hooliganism: A reply to critics of the Leicester school’, in Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth, eds, Football Violence and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 145-49; See also, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for excitement: Sport and leisure in the civilising process, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.

[8] Dunning, Reply, pp. 145-149.

[9] Drawing on the theories of Gerald Suttles, The social order of the slum: Ethnicity and territory in the inner city, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968; The social construction of communities, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972.

[10] Eric Dunning, ‘“Culture”, “Civilisation” and the sociology of sport’, Innovation in Social Sciences Research, 5, No. 4, 1992, pp. 7-18.

[11] Tony Mason, Association football and English society, 1863-1915, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1980; John Hutchinson, ‘Some aspects of football crowds before 1914’, The Working Class and Leisure, Conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Sussex, 1975; Conference report, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, 32, Spring 1976, pp. 10-12; Wray Vamplew, ‘Ungentlemanly conduct: The control of soccer crowd behaviour in England 1888-1914’, in T C Smout, ed., The Search for wealth and stability: Essays in economic and social history presented to M W Flinn, London, Macmillan, 1979, pp. 139-154.

[12] Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy and John Williams, The roots of football hooliganism : an historical and sociological study, London, Routledge, 1989, p. 230.

[13] This is a close paraphrase of ibid, pp. 232-234.   Liberal and progressive ideas and decriminalising legislation also had to bear a share of the blame.

[14] R W Lewis, ‘Football hooliganism in England before 1914: A critique of the Dunning thesis’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 13, 1996, pp. 310-339.

[15] Patrick Murphy, Eric Dunning and Joseph Maguire, ‘Football spectator violence and disorder before the First World War: A reply to R W Lewis’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 15, 1998, pp. 141-162.

[16] Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for excitement: Sport and leisure in the civilising process, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.

[17] John Williams, Eric Dunning and Patrick Murphy, Hooligans abroad: The behaviour and control of English fans in continental Europe, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

[18] Peter Marsh, ‘Life and careers on the soccer terraces’, in Roger Ingham et al, ‘Football Hooliganism’: The wider context, London, Inter-Action Inprint, 1978, pp. 61-81.

[19] J Horne and D Jary, ‘The figurational sociology of sport and leisure of Elias and Dunning: An exposition and critique’, in J Horne, D Jary and A Tomlinson, eds, Sport, leisure and social relations, London, Routledge, 1987, p. 100.

[20] John Williams and Steven Wagg, eds, British football and social change: Getting into Europe, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1991, p. 177.

[21] Eric Dunning, ‘The social roots of football hooliganism: A reply to critics of the Leicester school’, in Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth, eds, Football Violence and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 137-155.

[22] H F Moorhouse, ‘Football hooligans: Old bottles, new whines?’, The Sociological Review, 39, No. 3, August 1991, p. 500.

[23] Colin Ward, Steaming in: Journal of a football fan, London, Simon and Schuster, 1989; Jay Allan, Bloody Casuals: Diary of a football hooligan, Famedram, 1989; Bill Buford, Among the thugs, New York, Vintage Departures, 1993, Originally published London, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1991; Dougie and Eddy Brimson, Everywhere we go: Behind the matchday madness, London, Headline, 1996.

[24] In what follows I am plagiarising my review of Buford in Mattoid, 48, 1994, pp. 259-260.

[25] Pete Davies, Twenty-Two Foreigners in Funny Shorts, Random House, New York, 1994, p. 268.

[26] Roy Hay, Sport, Philosophy and the Olympics, Second annual conference on Philosophical Issues in Sport and Physical Education, Maryland College, Woburn, 15 to 17 March 1996, Centre for Applied Sports Philosophy and Ethics Research (CASPER) at De Montfort University’s Bedford Campus, sponsored by International Centre for Research on Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester, Victorian Bulletin of Sport and Culture, Victoria University of Technology, 7, June 1996, pp. 11-12.

[27] Richard Giulianotti, ‘Scotland’s tartan army in Italy: The case for the carnivalesque’, The Sociological Review, 39, No. 3, August 1991, p. 515.

[28] Roy Hay, ‘Euro 96 Diary Day Three’, Australian and British Soccer Weekly, 25 June 1996, p. 23.

[29] Steve Redhead, ‘Football and youth culture in Britain’, in John Williams and Steven Wagg, eds, British football and social change: Getting into Europe, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1991, pp. 145-159.

[30] ‘Manchester United fans want action from UEFA after claiming they were subjected to violent treatment during Wednesday’s European Cup match against Juventus in Turin’. Manchester, England Sep 13, 1996 – 15:17 EST, (c) 1996 Copyright Nando.net (c) 1996 Reuter Information Service.

[31] Gary Armstrong and Dick Hobbs, ‘Tackled from behind’, in Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth, eds, Football Violence and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 196-228.

[32] In April 1997, I was told by the Graduate Studies section of University College, London that the thesis was currently not available for consultation because it contained ‘sensitive material’!

[33] Roy Hay, Football, the Law and Civil Liberties, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance, Renfrew Street, Glasgow, Tuesday 26 March 1996, Scottish Council for Civil Liberties and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, sponsored by the Scotsman newspaper, Victorian Bulletin of Sport and Culture, Victoria University of Technology, 7, June 1996, pp. 12-14.

[34] Gary Armstrong, Football hooligans: Knowing the score, Oxford, Berg, 1998.

[35] H F Moorhouse, ‘Scotland against England: Football and popular culture’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 4, September 1987, pp. 189-202; H F Moorhouse, ‘Football hooligans: Old bottles, new whines?’, The Sociological Review, 39, No. 3, August 1991, pp. 489-502.

[36] ibid. p. 493.

[37] Ian Warren, Cultures of control: Law, Enforcement and public order at sporting events: A comparative approach, University of Melbourne MA, 1996, pp. 26-7.

[38] Alan Roadburg, ‘Factors precipitating fan violence: a comparison of professional soccer in Britain and North America’, British Journal of Sociology, 31, 1980, pp. 265-276.

[39] Bill Murray, The Old Firm: Sectarianism, sport and society in Scotland, Edinburgh, John Donald, 1984, Chapter 7, ‘The riots and the fans’, pp. 163-189.

[40] G P T Finn, ‘Racism, religion and social prejudice: Irish catholic clubs, soccer and Scottish society – I The historical roots of prejudice, International Journal of the History of Sport, 8, 1991, pp. 72-95; G P T Finn, ‘Racism, religion and social prejudice: Irish catholic clubs, soccer and Scottish society – II Social identities and conspiracy theories’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 8, 1991, pp. 370-397.

[41] H H van der Brug, ‘Football hooliganism in the Netherlands’, in Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth, eds, Football Violence and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 174-195.

[42] I owe this reference and much else besides to Bill Murray.   For a sane discussion of the issue of hooliganism see his The World’s Game: A history of soccer, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1996, pp. 162-171.

[43] Wray Vamplew, ‘Sports crowd disorder: An Australian survey’, in John O’Hara, ed., Crowd violence at Australian sport, ASSH Studies in Sports History, No. 7, Australian Society for Sports History, Campbelltown, 1992, pp. 79-111.

[44] See Appendix, Roth cartoon, Polo item from Herald-Sun, Geelong Advertiser and Soccer Action.

[45] Philip Mosely, ‘Balkan politics in Australian soccer’, in John O’Hara, ed., Ethnicity and soccer in Australia, ASSH Studies in Sports History, No. 10, Australian Society for Sports History, Campbelltown, February 1994, pp. 33-43; Philip Mosely, Ethnic involvement in Australian soccer, 1950-1990, Canberra, Australian Sports Commission, 1995, Chapter 6, Violence – a case study of the Balkan communities, pp. 64-72.

[46] Philip Mosely, ‘European immigrants and soccer violence in New South Wales, 1949-1959’, Journal of Australian Studies, 40 March 1994, pp. 14-26.

[47] John E Hughson, A feel for the game: An ethnographic study of soccer support and identity, Ph D, University of New South Wales, 1996.

[48] Roy Hay, Football in Europe, Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research, University of Leicester and the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, hosted the Football in Europe Conference at Leicester City Soccer Club, 30-31 May 1996 Bulletin of Sport and Culture, Victoria University of Technology, 8, September 1996, pp. 10-12.

[49] John Hughson, ‘The Bad Blue Boys and “the magical recovery” of John Clarke’, in Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti, eds, Entering the Field: Studies in World Football, Oxford, Berg, 1997, pp. 239-259; John Hughson, ‘Football, folk dancing and fascism: diversity and difference in multicultural Australia, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 33, 1977, pp. 167-186.

[50] Hughson, Football, folk-dancing and fascism, p. 183, fn. 8.

[51] Ian Warren, Cultures of control: Law, Enforcement and public order at sporting events: A comparative approach, University of Melbourne MA, 1996.

[52] According to George Wallace, Brennan was much affected by these events, though he continued to referee.    He is alleged to have committed suicide in 1984 or 1985.

[53] Hedley Copeland in conversation at meeting of Victorian chapter of ASSH, Adam Street, Burnley, 4 October 1993.   Copeland attended the subsequent meeting of the tribunal and spoke on behalf of Gunn and Croatia.   At the tribunal Gunn was acquitted when he appeared on a charge of violent conduct.   Sun, 10 August 1972, p. 62.

[54] Discussion with Tony Vrzina at Fawkner, 5 September 1993, following the Premier League semi-final.   Vrzina had resigned as coach of Croatia earlier in the year after recruiting players from overseas during a pre-season trip.   There was disagreement among the committee according to the Age, 17 April 1972, p. 22.   Vrzina had been with the club for two seasons and he won the Ampol Cup with Croatia at the start of the season, beating JUST 2-1 in a violent final.   Age, 11 March 1972, p. 28.   The replayed semi-final with George Cross also had fiery incidents.   Age, 4 March 1972, p. 27 and 9 March 1972, p. 28.

[55] According to the AUP report in the Geelong Advertiser, 500 people stormed on to the ground.   The referee was escorted from the ground by police, he was not injured.   No arrests were made.   The police locked the gates and ushered people out of the ground.   ‘The treasurer of the Croatia club Mr Husein Plecic said yesterday his club’s followers were tired of unfair refereeing’.   Geelong Advertiser, 31 July 1972.

[56] Interview with Frank Burin, 31 Jan. 1994, tape recording in possession of the author.

[57] ibid, p. 19

[58] Decision of the Appeal Board of the VSF 8 August 1972, VSF Files at Soccer House.   See also Sun, 10 August 1972, p. 62; ibid., 11 August 1972, p. 48.

[59] Enver Begovic and others v Michael Parker and others, Judgment by Mr Justice Newton of the Supreme Court of Victoria, 3 May 1973, pp. 2-3.

[60] ibid, p. 3

[61] Harry Mrksa also believes that Kovac, JUST and the Yugoslav authorities were instrumental in putting pressure on the VSF directly and through Jewish members of the Federation, interview with Harry Mrksa,  27 May 1993, tape recording in possession of the author.

[62] The Age, 8 May 1972.

[63] Sun, 10 August 1972, p. 62.

[64] Enver Begovic and others v Michael Parker and others, Judgment by Mr Justice Newton of the Supreme Court of Victoria, 3 May 1973, pp. 21-3 and 29-34.

[65] Geelong Soccer Club, playing as IAMA was suspended for four weeks in 1955, Geelong Advertiser, 25 July 1955 and Goodchild Soccer Club was expelled in June 1956 “for failure to comply with League requirements on club management and other matters”.   Soccer News, 30 June 1956, p. 4.

[66] Interview with Fred Hutchison, tape recording in possession of the author.

[67] Soccer Action, 19 October 1983, pp. 8-9.

[68] Jack Pollard, Ampol’s Australian Sporting Records, 1968, p. 250.; Age, 22 April 1972, p. 27.

[69] Pollard, op. cit., p. 250.   The meeting of the Tribunal was scheduled for Monday, 15 May 1972, Age, 3 May 1972, p. 24.

[70] Age, 26 April 1972, back page.

[71] Sun, 11 August 1972, p. 48.

[72] Soccer Action, 19 October 1983, pp. 8-9.

[73] Tony Vrzina was invited to coach Essendon Lions in July 1974.   He saved the Ukrainian team from relegation and during the next season he was instrumental in the Croatian players and officials taking over, paying their predecessors $25,000 for the clubrooms and facilities at Montgomery Park.   Notes on an interview with Tony Vrzina at Hilton Hotel prior to AC Milan press conference, 17 June 1993.

[74] Though in 1997 Sydney United pushed its disagreements with Soccer Australia through the Courts once again at enormous cost to both club and governing body, and in 1998 Melbourne Knights took Soccer Australia to court over a player transfer and lost.

[75] Age, 7 March 1994, p.

[76] Geelong Advertiser, Age, and Herald-Sun, 7 March 1994.

[77] Revived in 1996-7.

[78] David P Waddington, Contemporary issues in public disorder : a comparative and historical approach, London, Routledge, 1992.

[79] ibid, p. 138.

By Roy Hay

This year in Scotland the ‘Old Firm’, Celtic and Rangers, will meet seven times in the 2010–11 season.

Somewhere along the line the notion has arisen that this is a record and the two clubs have never played as many games in one football year.

Most recently the Sunday Age repeated this claim in its PSSST column on the back page of the sports section.

The column is well named, but inaccurate.

When my grandfather, James ‘Dun’ Hay was captain of Celtic in 1908–09, the clubs met seven times—twice in the Scottish League, twice in the Scottish Cup, including the replay in the final which preceded the Hampden Riot, of which more in a moment, twice in the Glasgow Cup and once in the Glasgow Charity Cup.

But that was not the first time or the record for the number of meetings between the clubs in a single season.

There were seven meetings in 1896-97 and 1900-01, eight in 1897-98 and 1898-99 and nine in 1899-1900.

In that year there were two Scottish League meetings, two in the Inter-City League, two in the Scottish Cup, two in the Glasgow Cup and one in the Charity Cup.

Judging by the team lists these were all full strength fixtures and that is why they were called the Old Firm, because of their sedulous pursuit of the money.

‘Maley moneybags’. Bill Murray, The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in Scotland, John Donald, Edinburgh, 1984, p. 38, taken from Scottish Sport, 24 August 1900.

In 1909, the Scottish Cup final had to be replayed after Jimmy Quinn, the star centre forward for Celtic, rescued a draw for his team by barging the Rangers’ keeper into his own net while he was holding the ball very late in the game.

The replay took place at Hampden Park a week later on 17 April.

The Scottish Football Association had decreed that if the replay was also drawn a third match would be required, but Willy Maley, Celtic’s manager, had hinted in his newspaper column that extra time would be used to settle the issue.

When the match ended one-all, with Quinn scoring again for Celtic, some of the players lingered on the pitch suggesting the possibility of extra-time.

But when officials began removing the corner flags, the fans came over the fence in disgust at what they saw as the greed of the clubs and the SFA.

For the only time in the history of the game in Scotland the fans of Rangers and Celtic rioted in unison against the authorities instead of kicking lumps out of each other.

They burned the pay boxes, a neat symbolic gesture, and when firemen arrive to put the flames out they were pelted with stones by the rioters who also cut the fire hoses according to a report.

It is also said the outnumbered police on duty had to throw the stones back at the crowd to try to restore order.

Another story is that only one rioter appeared before the court after the incident.

I cannot vouch for the truth of all these claims and there is no doubt that a lot of embroidery has gone on since the event.

What is certain, however, is that Celtic and Rangers did meet seven times in 1908–09 even if the Scottish Cup was withheld and both clubs were sanctioned.

Celtic was in the midst of a stellar period in which it won the Scottish League six times in a row, something which remained a record until Jock Stein’s magnificent teams won nine in succession from 1966 to 1974.

Rangers emulated that feat under Graham Souness and Walter Smith from 1989 to 1997.

So nine is an important number for both Rangers and Celtic, and the teams did meet nine times in 1899-1900.

I appreciate the help of David Paton with this article. The career of James ‘Dun’ Hay is covered in my biography of my grandfather. Roy Hay, James ‘Dun’ Hay, 1881-1940: The Story of a Footballer, Sports and Editorial Services Australia, Teesdale, Victoria, 2004, available from our website at www.sesasport.com.au or from Amazon UK and other good bookshops.

Source and captions for pics.

1909 Final replay. The end of the match. Dodds, Loney, Hay, Quinn, McMenemy and McNair (Celtic) and Gordon and Galt (Rangers) linger, encouraging the idea that extra-time might be played. Hugh Keevins and Kevin McCarra, One Hundred Cups: The Story of the Scottish Cup, Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1985, p. 78.

‘Maley moneybags’. Bill Murray, The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in Scotland, John Donald, Edinburgh, 1984, p. 38, taken from Scottish Sport, 24 August 1900.