Australian Game Vastly Superior
This is a doosie. The Grand Final Footy Record in 1934 felt impelled to publish this communique from England, dismissing soccer and praising the "Aussie code". (Imagine reading your A-League Grand Final program and coming across a piece bagging footy or Rugby League.)
The piece claims that soccer is an inferior game for a number of reasons. It is less exciting and exhilarating. The crowd numbers are low and those who are there don't even like the game. The players are afraid to be adventurous and they are incompetent at what they do. Like Jack Dyer after him, the writer assumes that with a little bit of training footy players would take soccer by storm. This is what they used to call arrant nonsense.
This is silly enough as it is but when we realise that the author is making stuff up as well as leaving out fairly crucial information then the piece shifts from the realms of stupidity to propaganda.
We can forgive the author for calling the goalkeepers full-backs, but he can't be forgiven for calling them cowardly for refusing to handle the ball illegally outside of the penalty area.
Yet the more serious errors are ones of detail. The author claims to have gone to the opening game of the season in the Newcastle area. The trouble is Newcastle United were playing away on this day, hammered 5-1 by Nottingham Forest. The professional teams in the area who played at home on that day were Gateshead and Darlington (3rd Div) and 1st division Sunderland who beat Huddersfield Town 4-1 at Roker Park - a game at which there would have been a few more than 14,000 given that Sunderland were in the elite of English football in the mid 1930s.
If the author is referencing a game he saw Newcastle United play (possibly their first home game on 1 September. beaten 5-2 by Brentford), he really needed to point out their 2nd div status. He might also have added that the club was in a shambles, having been relegated the previous season and only just avoiding relegation in 1934-35 on goal average. As he rightly pointed out, they weren't very good!
I suspect that accuracy in reporting wasn't at the forefront of the writer's mind. The important work to be done on Grand Final day 1934 was simply to remind footy spectators that soccer was such a feeble game compared with the fare they were about to receive.
The Footy Record could get away with this kind of propaganda then because there was no other source of information on English football for its readers. Imagine the flurry of refutations that would happen today.
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