Shadow of a Game: Locating Soccer in Australian Cultural Life

This is an argument about legitimacy. Soccer—my preferred term—is at least 125 years old in Victoria, older in New South Wales. Yet it seems that proponents of the game have constantly to justify themselves in watching, playing, preferring this supposedly ‘new Australian’ sport. Since 1880, soccer has sought welcome in Australian society only to be rebuffed and rejected as a foreign game, a threat, sometimes even a menace to Australian masculinity and life in general. The game has endured sustained media myopia offset by frequent outbursts of intense and spiteful attention. Johnny Warren encapsulated this anti-soccer mentality in the title of his 2002 memoir Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters. Added to this, soccer has regularly collapsed under the massive weight of war and depression and often resurged on migrant tides.

While the game has risen and fallen subject to external pressures, it has, in perhaps equal measure, been sabotaged by its internecine feuds and unfathomable incompetence. Debates within the soccer community often oscillate around the notion of whether our miserable condition is our fault or ‘theirs’.

One long-standing frustration for soccer in Australia is that many of its tens of thousands of juniors end up playing (and supporting) other codes of football at the senior level—this drift may well be the game’s fundamental problem as it tries to establish itself on an equal footing in Australian sporting life. At the elite level, AFL players such as Adam Goodes and Brad Green were standout junior soccer players. Rugby League’s Andrew Johns starred with the round ball as a junior in Newcastle. Aboriginal player Preston Campbell loved playing soccer as a boy. Each of them left the game in their teens. It’s a trend that leaves many supporters wondering if we might have had more success had those players and others stayed in the game. I know the words, ‘He would have been a great soccer player!’ have often passed my lips.

Teenage boys find it easy to shift codes because of these ideas that soccer is ‘new’ or ‘foreign’ or not for ‘real’ men.[1] Our national cultural memory has few soccer stories that shine above the tales of the Bradmans, the Barassis, the Churchills. John Aloisi, running like a madman, twirling his shirt above his head after scoring the winning penalty against Uruguay is a recent and rare exception. As a result, for many boys soccer is the entrée and not the main course in their sporting careers.

A June 2009 instalment of Radio National’s Australia Talks provided an opportunity to think further on these matters. [2] Host Paul Barclay interviewed soccer identities Andy Harper, John Kallinikios, Bonita Mersiades and Geoff Miles, delivering a thoughtful discussion on the current state of the game. Then the lines were opened for talk-back discussion and some of the negative calls were predictable: soccer is too boring, too ethnic, soccer gets too much government funding and so on. But the one that really stood out was a ripper from ‘Nicholas in Geelong’.

Nicholas had obviously been thinking along the same lines I had in relation to the soccer potential of footballers from other codes—though from a very different perspective. He felt the Socceroo (national team) selectors were remiss in not selecting Melbourne AFL footballer Aaron Davey. ‘Week in, week out Davey did things with the oblong ball that would make Ronaldinho’s jaw drop.’ I don’t know whether Davey played soccer as a kid but I suspect that he would have been very handy. Yet Nicholas might also need to see a bit more of the Brazilian star’s magic in order to make his comparison stick. He might start on Youtube by looking first at ‘Aaron Davey soccer’ and then comparing it with ‘Ronaldinho crossbar’.

Nicholas then delivered the astonishing conclusion: ‘If you take the world’s best soccer players and play them against the world’s best AFL footballers, the soccer players would probably win 3–1; playing Australian Rules the soccer players wouldn’t physically last the first quarter.’ The reason for the latter assessment was that ‘footy is a game of character’—we can only conclude that soccer is therefore a game for those without character. This is simply a pub argument: one that can only be initiated and then had out with the aid of alcoholic encouragement—or at least that’s what I thought until coming across this story from the 1960s.

*

John Kallinikios describes in Soccer Boom how the game was undergoing a massive expansion in Melbourne in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Extraordinary crowds were flocking to Olympic Park to watch local soccer. More than 23,000 saw a clash between George Cross and South Melbourne Hellas in 1962. In 1966 over 35,000 crammed into the same venue to see Victoria take on AS Roma. Simultaneously VFL football was undergoing something of a mild decline in attendance—albeit from a great height. The fear of a soccer takeover was growing in some VFL circles. [3]

Roy Hay, Phil Moseley and others have documented the way in which this fear sometimes turned into the active suppression of soccer through such practices as exclusion from schools, restrictive ground allocations and concerted media attacks on the game and its participants. Moseley reports that in 1952:

the VFL directed its operatives to secure all available public sporting space in Melbourne in order to stifle the burgeoning threat posed by soccer’s migrant-inspired growth. Similar moves had been made in 1927 and 1928 when British migrants so rattled the VFL that it wrote ‘with alarm’ of this ‘foreign code’. The 1950s boom in migration promised to be far more of a problem than that of the 1920s. In 1958 a Melbourne soccer club sought to lease a council ground usually used by an Australian Rules club. In response to the application one Rules-supporting sneer, ‘let them play … in the gutter’. Melbourne’s reputation for paranoia was crowned in 1965 when youths daubed anti-soccer slogans over Middle Park, chopped down the goalposts and tried to set fire to the grandstand.[4]

Soccer’s rise to prominence produced various responses, but perhaps none as fascinating as the idea of a soccer versus VFL match played under soccer rules. ‘Captain Blood’ Jack Dyer challenged Slavia-Port Melbourne to a match to raise money for the Victorian Society for Crippled Children and Adults.

The idea for the game came about after Dyer had been a guest of the Victorian Soccer Federation at the final of the 1964 Dockerty Cup, won by Slavia 1–0 over Footscray JUST. Dyer repaid his hosts’ generosity by writing in his subsequent Truth column on 10 October, ‘I went, I saw and I was sickened. Soccer … It really is a girls’ game—but only for big girls.’ He felt that if he were allowed to train the best of the VFL players in the rudiments of the game they would easily beat a team of soccer players. This rankled with a number of the Slavia team, and Dave Meechan, invited onto Channel 7’s Wide World of Sport by Alex Barr, suggested that Dyer should put his money where his mouth was.

Manolis Papadopoulos, who attended the game, also remembers Dyer generating interest in the challenge by ‘attacking the soccer players’ abilities as athletes and the game itself as easy and simplistic for anyone to play. Dyer believed that VFL footballers were so physically advanced and technically skilful that playing soccer would be easy for them.’[5] Slavia accepted the challenge and the game was set for 15 November 1964. The Sporting Globe excitedly previewed the game: ‘We’ve been waiting for years for this and it’s here at last … soccer v. footy.’ The Globe was glowing with the prospect of a tough game: ‘ “Captain Blood” has already warned Slavia that it’s going to be “on”, and this means one thing—it’s going to be the toughest, roughest soccer match Victoria has ever seen.’[6]

Indeed, Slavia would be facing some hardened VFL footballers. Dyer’s team included Ron Barassi, Ted Whitten, Kevin Murray, Des Tuddenham and Gordon Collis. The Slavia team included goalkeeper Ray Barotajs, Peter Aldis, John Auchie and Hammy McMeechan—well known in soccer circles but hardly household names in the wider Victorian community.

Papadopoulos remembers the footy players making their intentions clear immediately. Barassi led the charge, literally, taking every opportunity to rough-up Slavia players. This backfired when Barassi went into a tackle and was let down by his woeful technique. John Auchie simply put his foot behind the ball and when Barassi came charging through for a massive toe-bash he found himself flying through the air and landing in a crumpled, injured heap. Such was the injury that he needed to leave the field.

Ray Barotajs alludes to Barassi’s injury in his own Truth column on 21 November: ‘I think the VFL boys would be the first to admit now that it isn’t a girl’s game—just ask Ron Barassi.’[7]

Thebigvee, a poster on the Melbourne Victory message board, recalled the incident:

I was at that game and still remember the mighty Barassi being carried off on a stretcher. I remember running towards the players race and seeing his face in agony … All the aussie rules people at the game were so embarrassed. How could the GOD of the VFL get hurt playing socka? Jack Dyer use to have a go at our game every bloody week, it became boring. He wrote under the name ‘Dyer’ere’. I guess little has changed.[8]

Thebigvee may or may not be exaggerating this report, but there is no escaping the pleasure he expresses in the VFL getting what he sees as its come-uppance alongside his continued resentment about the way soccer has been treated by the media and the broader culture in the past and to this day.

Many years later Slavia right-winger Hammy McMeechan met Barassi in a King Street newsagency, where they happily recalled the match and the incident. McMeechan claims Barassi confided, ‘That was the injury that eventually made me give footy away.’[9] But McMeechan refutes the notion that the VFL players were ‘putting it about’ or trying to bully the Slavia team. He claims that a terrific spirit of goodwill had developed between them, most of whom displayed the mutual respect that sports people usually have for each other’s abilities. After all, the Slavia players were the ones who had trained the VFL team in the rudiments of the game.

McMeechan says, ‘They were decent guys, especially Kevin Murray. They respected us for our skills and as people.’ He also recalls a moment of hilarity when prior to the game he entered the VFL rooms to say hello to the players and was amazed by Paul Wadham’s size 13 boots. He put them on and went back into the Slavia rooms saying. ‘Look at my skis!’ In the meantime Wadham returned to find his boots missing but was happy to enjoy the joke when Hammy came back in wearing them such was the camaraderie between the teams.

When it came to the game, it really was over before it started. The footy players were so technically deficient that they stood no chance of winning. The accompanying photograph of the VFL stars trying to clear a ball from their defence speaks a thousand words on this point.

In a passage of play that demonstrated just how difficult the translation was for the VFL players, McMeechan ran on to a through ball with his marker, Brownlow Medallist Gordon Collis, in tow. Hammy could feel Collis’s massive frame bearing down on him and so did a neat backheel to his captain and right-half, John Sanchez. But, instead of stopping, McMeechan kept racing towards the corner flag. And Collis kept right on following! Arriving at the flag McMeechan turned around with his arms outstretched as if to say to Collis, ‘What are you going to do now?’ Collis turned away seething, to the amusement of the massive crowd.

At half-time (after 25 minutes) the score was 3–0 to Slavia, comfortable without being comprehensive. Having by now recognised what was an obvious mismatch, some representatives of the VFL players came into the Slavia dressing room asking if they could play Australian Rules in the second half. The Slavia coach, former Manchester United player Brian Birch, said ‘Look at my players. Hammy’s the biggest forward and he’s only 5’ 6”. No way. We never said we could beat you at your game!’

The Sun’s soccer reporter, the American Morrie Buckner, suggested that the VFL team improved in the second half but unfortunately for them so did Slavia, running out 8–0 winners. As he wrote in his match report: ‘A dozen VFL stars showed little more than faith and hope when they played for charity in an exhibition soccer match at Olympic Park yesterday.’[10]

Thankfully missing from Buckner’s report is the Globe’s rhetoric of footy triumphalism. Though, if disappointed, footy fans might have derived some joy from his reporting that the footy team won the four-man relay race and Barassi won the long-distance kicking competition conducted prior to the match. To round out the pre-match contests, Slavia’s Nigel Shepherd won the kicking-accuracy competition.

McMeechan makes a valid point, however, when he says the might of the VFL was up against one semi-professional soccer team. ‘We only had the best runners in our club and we were up against men like Bluey Adams who had run in the Stawell gift. I’m not saying we would have won the race but had we been able to select from the speedsters in the other soccer clubs we would have given them a run.’

In what must have been something of a culture shock a few things were revealed to the sporting public well beyond the players who participated. First, the might of the VFL had been beaten by a team of part-timers, none of whom would rank in the top thousand players in the world.

Second, soccer was shown to have its own requirements of strength and fitness. While few would ignore the sheer toughness and durability required to play Australian Rules football, too many are prepared to downplay the physical demands of soccer. While John Auchie’s tackle had an unfortunate impact, it nonetheless demonstrated the balance of technique, strength and toughness required to play the round-ball game.

But the most important lesson is that for too long many Australians had failed to understand the technical skill and artistry of the world game and the physical qualities needed to play even at a moderate semi-professional level. McMeechan recalls with a chuckle that prior to the game, when his workmates found that he would be marked by Gordon Collis, he was told: ‘You won’t get a touch!’ The only surprise in the result is that some people were surprised.

In a different space or time this might have been the kind of event that changed the way a culture behaved. Indeed, even Jack Dyer begrudgingly accepted defeat and agreed that he was surprised by the skills of the soccer players. [11] The moment was right for an accord based on the mutual respect developed between the players and shared by the majority of the spectators on the day. The moment was also right for soccer to come into mainsteam culture as a legitimate sporting option for Australian children and adults. The game could lose its mysterious foreign shadow and cease to be mocked and ridiculed by professional media boofheads like Dyer and the gullible among their readers, viewers and listeners.

It was not to be. Within months Dyer was back to his baiting best—though he never made the mistake of challenging the ‘soccer boys’ again. The lessons were forgotten and normal service was resumed. ‘Wogball’ was consigned once more to the margins of Australian life where it quietly got on with the never-ending business of tearing itself apart and rebuilding and tearing itself apart and …

*

If soccer has been too easily dismissed as a ‘wicked foreign game’, much emotional and intellectual energy has been devoted to establishing the indigeneity of Australian Rules football. Writers such as Leonie Sandercock, Ian Turner, Geoffrey Blainey and Martin Flanagan have written eloquently of the vital contribution Australian football has made to Australian life. Through their work they argue that Australian football is the indigenous Australian game. [12] More recently, influenced by the work of Jim Poulter, Martin Flanagan and others, a younger set of critics have begun to entrench an even more spectacular claim: that Australian football has Aboriginal origins. The Football History Wars (sharing some of the gravitas of the more general History Wars) peaked over Gillian Hibbins’ suggestion that the purported Aboriginal beginnings of Australian football are a ‘seductive myth’.

Hibbins stands accused of neglecting the massive contribution Aboriginal people have made to Australian Rules football when she says that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis of Aboriginal origins.[13] However, this accusation confuses the undeniable presence and influence Aboriginal people have in contemporary football with the idea that Aboriginal people have been there all along. Aside from being historically questionable, it is an inadvertent way of ignoring the racism to which Aboriginal people have been subjected in Australian football. To suggest that the game has Aboriginal origins is to assert a lineage that can comfortably charge through the packed histories of Aboriginal exclusion. It is to forget the racism that drove Doug Nicholls out of the Carlton Football Club.[14] It is to forget the colour bar imposed in the Darwin competition in the 1920s that eventuated in the Aboriginal players temporarily shifting over to soccer. It is to forget the near total absence of Aboriginal players in the history of Australian football’s premier competitions until relatively recently. Ultimately it is to forget why it ever occurred to Nicky Winmar to raise his guernsey and point proudly to his skin.

There is no question that Aboriginal people played forms of football in the 1850s and earlier. Whether as marn grook or under some other name, there are countless historical examples. A number of historians have pointed to William Blandowski’s 1857 notes on Aboriginal life as an example of Aboriginal football and its contribution to the development of Australian Rules. He describes the game he observed thus: ‘The ball is made out of Typha roots; it is not thrown or hit with a bat, but it is kicked up in the air with the foot. Aim of the game: never let the ball touch the ground.’[15] These notes were the basis of the accompanying etching.

Perhaps it’s my soccer-coloured glasses but I am convinced that the boys in the middle background are participating in an activity that more resembles soccer (keepy-uppy or hacky-sack) than Australian Rules (kick-to-kick). An (admittedly fanciful) argument could be mounted that proved through pictorial evidence and observation notes that some Aborigines first played a game more resembling soccer before they ever played Australian football. This argument would be crowned by the fact that in June 2009 a team of young Aboriginal players from Victoria played in the national Aboriginal soccer titles under the name of Marngrook Meenteel (Football Stars) thereby recovering their true soccer heritage.

This argument is of course silly and pointless—but it is of the same genre as any other attempt to write the present onto the past. Eric Hobsbawm has shown the folly in the invention of tradition in this manner.[16] My purpose is not to suggest that soccer was being played at this time, merely to point out the extent to which soccer gets excluded from historical consideration by the invention of a great Australian Rules tradition which, having acknowledged its contemporary social dominance, looks back over history and colonises the lot for itself. The logic runs: if there’s a reference to a game of football in a Melbourne newspaper in the 1850s then it must be to Australian football because all football games in colonial Victoria lead geneologically to present-day Australian Rules.[17] An example of this can be found in Phil Roberts’ history of the North Ballarat Roosters. Citing an example of an eleven-a-side game in Melbourne in 1850, Roberts suggests: ‘Whether this was an “Aussie Rules” game is open to question, but it is evidence of the start of Melbourne’s football.’

Even if it is not Australian Rules it is the beginning of the game that became Australian Rules—therefore it is the beginning of Australian Rules. Similarly, if Aborigines are found to have played football anywhere in Victoria it must—so the argument goes—be a precursor to Australian Rules.

While it would be ahistorical to look for organised soccer prior to the game’s codification in England in 1863, attentive historians nonetheless need to keep their eyes and minds open for games resembling soccer being played well back in Australian history. As Roy Hay has claimed, ‘Football probably more closely akin to the association football rather than what became Australian Rules was being played in and around Melbourne in the mid-nineteenth century.’ [18] Evidence suggests that Warrnambool Football club was established as an ‘English Football’ club in 1861. According to the club’s website:

On 4th June 1861 Warrnambool was the scene of a game of ‘English football’ in which two goals were scored. Shortly after the second of them the ball burst, bringing a premature end to the proceedings, with no victor declared. However, the sport itself appears to have been a winner, and today’s Warrnambool Football Club traces its origins all the way back to that winter of 1861, making it among the oldest football clubs in Australia.

Warrnambool is one of the oldest football clubs in Australia and it has been an Australian Rules club for almost all of that history. But a game resembling soccer was there at its origins. Indeed ‘a game resembling soccer’ is a way to describe the very first example of the Melbourne Rules laid down in 1859, as ‘Free Kick’ attests:

The [English] Football Association was accordingly formed, and set of rules drawn up, which by a very curious coincidence, are very nearly similar to those which were decided on at a meeting of representatives of football clubs, held at the Parade Hotel, near Melbourne, some 5 years ago … Whether a stray copy (for the rules were neatly printed and got up) ever found its way home I do not know, but if not it is a strong argument in favour of our own code, that the football parliaments assembled on opposite sides of the globe, should bring the identical same result of their labours. [19]

As far as ‘Free Kick’ is concerned, the similarities between soccer and Australian football in 1864 were far more significant than the differences. Indeed, games resembling soccer have been played in Australia for as long as any other code of football.

There we have it: soccer was in the vicinity at the beginning of organised football in Australia. It has been a part of the sporting fabric of the whole nation ever since (historically widespread in ways that the AFL would envy). And it remains a significant part of our sporting landscape. Its ongoing struggle for legitimacy then is surely an object of bafflement. Or is it simply a measure of just how far we still have to travel as a nation in relation to questions of masculinity, xenophobia and tolerance?

Notes

1. One real boon for the game is that the ideological proscriptions discussed have less impact upon girls. As a result women’s soccer in Australia is in good health. That being said, women’s soccer is subject to the prejudices that affect women’s sport in general. Back to top

2. Australia Talks, ‘The Rise of Football’, 18 June 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/australiatalks/stories/2009/2598827.htm.Back to top

3. John Kallinikios, Soccer Boom: The Transformation of Victorian Soccer Culture 1945–1963, Walla Walla Press Sports History Dissertation No. 2, Walla Walla Press, Sydney, 2007. Back to top

4. Phillip Moseley, Ethnic Involvement in Australian Soccer: A History 1950–1990, National Sports Research Centre, Belconnen, c. 1995.Back to top

5. Personal correspondence with Manolis Papadopoulos, 27 June 2009. Back to top

6. ‘Footy takes on the soccer boys’, Sporting Globe, 14 November 1964. Back to top

7. Ray Barotajs, ‘Slavia were surprised’, Truth, 21 November 1964. The typical sexist attitudes of the time are ironised by the way in which soccer and Australian Rules today are competing to attract women players as part of their development strategies. Perhaps Dyer would be turning in his grave. Back to top

8. Thebigvee on Melbourne Victory’s discussion board, 20 July 2009, http://www.melbournevictory.net/forum/showpost.php?p=2358337&postcount=17.Back to top

9. Personal interview conducted 29 June 2009. All subsequent references to McMeechan are from this interview. Back to top

10. Morrie Buckner, ‘League Stars Failed’, Sun, 16 November 1964. Back to top

11. Jack Dyer, Truth, 21 November 1964. Back to top

12. See Leonie Sandercock and Ian Turner, Up Where, Cazaly? The Great Australian Game, Sydney, 1981; Geoffrey Blainey, A Game of Our Own: The Origins of Australian Football, Information Australia, Melbourne, 1990. This theme is a constant across Flanagan’s body of work. Back to top

13. Ciannon Cazaly, ‘Off the Ball: Football’s History Wars’, Meanjin, no. 4, 2008, pp. 82–7; John Harms, ‘Bounced out of footy’s history’, Age, 24 May 2008. Back to top

14.Adam Muyt, Maroon and Blue: Recollections and Tales of the Fitzroy Football Club, Vulgar, Melbourne, 2006, p. 66. Back to top

15. See http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-news/2007/first-football/. Back to top

16. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. Back to top

17. Phil Roberts, Roosters: The History of the North Ballarat Football Club, North Ballarat Football Club, Ballarat, 2003, p. 8. Back to top

18. Roy Hay, quoted in ‘125 years (and rising) of Football’, FFV website, 26 February 2009, http://www.footballfedvic.com/storyprint.php?id=2171.Back to top

19. ‘Free Kick’, letter to Bell’s Life in Victoria, 14 May 1864, p. 2. Back to top