Roy Hay
Uruguayan national team and Liverpool striker Luis Suarez is in the news because he has been banned for ten matches for biting Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic. The sanction has provoked an outpouring of rage and defence by Liverpool manager Brendon Rogers and the CEO Ian Ayre. The former says the Football Association has ‘punished the man rather than the incident’. He is right of course and that is exactly what should be done in such cases. Why? Because the man has previous and while a one-off incident might be dealt with entirely on its merits a serial offender needs to have his overall behaviour considered as in a court of law by the sentencing judge. The jury may only be presented with the facts of the specific case and be adjured to ignore any other information, but the decision on the penalty for those found guilty, by admission of the alleged offender or after trial, rests with the presiding magistrate.
In fact, according to the written reasons of the FA Regulatory Commission which determined the sentence in this case, there is no mention of Suarez’s previous misdemeanours and they say it was the truly exceptional circumstances of this case which led to the additional seven match ban on top of the automatic three match penalty for violent conduct.[1] The committee, which was made up of a lawyer, Thura KT Win, FA Council member, Roger Pawley, and former player, Brian Talbot, did not take into account Suarez’s past record—which included a seven-game ban for biting while he was a player at Ajax— and judged the altercation with Ivanovic in isolation.[2] So if this is true then the Rogers’ objection falls, but the issues of whether the sentence fits the crime and who should determine it and on what grounds remains.
In 1994, Glasgow Rangers’ striker Duncan Ferguson was sent to jail for three months for head-butting an opponent, John McStay of Raith Rovers, on the field. There were complaints about the severity of that sentence, but the man was on probation for two previous off-field offences at the time. Willie Woodburn was suspended sine die by the Scottish Football Association in 1954 following a string of on-field incidents. It is possible that this sanction was ultra vires and it was not challenged in court because of the player’s loyalty to the club he played for. Woodburn said subsequently that he should have appealed the ban in court and indicated that would do so in the different circumstances of 1968 when interviewed by leading journalist Hugh McIlvanney for a book by John Arlott.[3]
Suarez grew up in Uruguay before moving to Groningen in Holland and then via Ajax Amsterdam to Liverpool. While in Holland he was banned for biting an opponent and last year he was sanctioned by the Football Association for racially abusing Patrice Evra of Manchester United. On the latter occasion his manager Kenny Dalglish flew to his defence so rapidly and vehemently that he was told to pull his head in because of the effect it was having on the club’s brand.[4] Playing for Uruguay in the world Cup in South Africa, Suarez saved a certain goal for Ghana by handling the ball on the goal-line. Ghana missed the penalty and Uruguay, minus Suarez who was correctly sent off, won the subsequent shoot-out to clinch the game. Suarez quickly went from being pilloried for the offence to a national hero for saving his side.
You could easily believe that this man has no respect for the laws of the game or the society of which he is a member. He wants to win at all costs and will do anything to achieve the result. His manager puts a somewhat different gloss on the behaviour of his star player.
This is a guy who I see on a daily basis trying very hard. His two passions in life are his family and Liverpool Football Club. He throws his life into that. It is part of his make-up – you can't change that – but I genuinely think he is trying to adapt those traits he has grown up with as a kid to life and the culture here. Each time he makes a step forward we find ways to beat him with a stick and beat him down. I can understand if he felt like that [wanting to quit England] in a moment of reflection.[5]
The ‘traits he has grown up with as a kid’ or ‘his impulse takes over,’ reflect the widely-held belief in England that Uruguayans and Argentinians like Diego Maradona will cheat in any way they can to achieve a result. There are enough examples to sustain this view for consideration but such stereotyping is not very helpful. Uruguay has won the World Cup twice playing excellent football within the laws and spirit of the game and reached the semifinal in South Africa in 2010. On the other side of the ledger there was an infamous episode in Mexico in 1986 when Uruguay kicked Scotland off the park to secure a scoreless draw and an earlier battle with Glasgow Celtic in 1967 involving the leading Uruguayan club Racing.
So it is not clear that Uruguayans are uniquely culpable of bending or breaking the rules to achieve results, but the belief persists. Whether it was part of the unconscious mind-set of the members of the tribunal which imposed the penalty on Suarez is imponderable but the penalty itself was not excessive and in line with those meted out in recent seasons to among others the England captain Rio Ferdinand for missing a drug test and Suarez himself for racially abusing Evra.
[1] The Football Association and Mr Luis Suarez, Liverpool FC, The Decisions and Reasons of the FA Regulatory Commission, 25 April 2013, http://www.thefa.com/News/governance/2013/apr/~/media/164A568A93784FE391CC1FDAB4D7313F.ashx
[2] Dominic King, ‘Sorry Suarez will not appeal ten match ban,’ Daily Mail, 26 April 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2315120/Luis-Suarez-latest-Liverpool-NOT-appeal-match-ban-bite.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
[3] John Arlott, ed., Soccer: The Great Ones: Studies of Eight Great Football Players, Pelham, London, 1968, pp. 89–106.
[4] Now writing for the Daily Mirror, Dalglish has attacked the independence of the FA Regulatory Commission. Daily Mirror, 27 April 2013, http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/kenny-dalglish-luis-suarez-ban-1855378#ixzz2ReezCLP4
[5] Rogers later added, ‘He is a genuine good-hearted man, who from time-to-time his impulse will take over. We’ll see it again, in top sports people.’ King, ‘Sorry Suarez’.
Anzac Day Footy
An edited version of this article Anzac sport celebrates a unity that didn't exist was published in the Age on Anzac Day 2013.To write about sport and war is to risk censure: Why bring sport into it? Why bring war into it? Why combine the two? Moreover, in trying to balance personal attitudes towards war and military institutions with feelings of sympathy for the individuals and families killed and maimed by war, writers invite contradiction and ambiguity into their argument. The writer’s taste for one can turn sour because of the lack of appetite for the other. So why bother to struggle with this dilemma?
Like it or not, in contemporary Australia, in late April, it becomes necessary, if not mandatory, to contemplate sport and war. Our leading football codes put the connection front and centre. The AFL and the NRL both conduct highly publicised and highly popular Anzac Day matches. It’s a new tradition to which supporters of both codes have been drawn in large numbers. Since 1995 Collingwood and Essendon have battled for Anzac supremacy at the MCG. St George and the Roosters commemorate the day in the NRL. In recent years a cross-Tasman NRL game between Melbourne Storm and New Zealand Warriors has also been added to the Anzac Day mix. This year sees the first instance of Anzac footy in New Zealand, where the Sydney Swans will take on St Kilda.
And there’s something to be said for it. Both codes provided a number of troops who served at Gallipoli and across Europe, many of whom were never to return. Collingwood lost six players, Essendon seven. So these clubs’ own histories add to the solemnity of Anzac commemorations.
Yet something is missing in these memorialisations. Many things in fact. Whole segments of a bloody and divided story are left out of the tale we are usually told.
We were not a nation united in support of Britain’s prosecution of the First World War. Many Australians were set against it. The voting patterns in the conscription referenda, first in 1916 (the ‘Yes’ vote lost narrowly) and again in 1917 (‘Yes’ lost by a wider margin) make it clear that most Australians were against conscription. Many of them would have also been against the war.
Opponents to conscription came from many quarters. Catholics, republicans, the Irish, socialists, unionists and pacifists all had reason to be anti-war and anti-conscription. And they came together as a united force. The ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee of Queensland web site claims:
One reason why so many opposed conscription was that it provided a focus for a lot of different points of view about the war. Some people opposed the war; others were opposed to conscription as a principle; others were saying that they were hurt by the economic situation of the war, and were protesting against that; still others were voting to protect unionism; others were protesting at the British treatment of the rebels in Ireland. Normally these people might not have agreed with each other on many things, but they all agreed on the conscription question, and the issue gave them all a chance to express their opposition.As Melbourne’s dominant sporting code, Australian Rules football reflected that diversity and opposition. One of the leading figures in the anti-conscription movement, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, happened to be a cultural and spiritual powerbroker within the Irish-Catholic community of Collingwood and his opinions and instructions carried great weight for many supporters of the Collingwood Football Club. He came increasingly to speak out against the war and conscription, especially after the Easter Rising on 1916. While Mannix’s influence was counterbalanced by Collingwood Football Club patron, John Wren’s support for conscription (even while Wren's own newspaper was against it), this tension underlines the point that there was little collective sense of unity of purpose in relation to the war.
In a fascinating piece of writing in 1916, ostensibly a letter to Oriel (writer of ‘The Passing Show’ column in the Argus), a strange and ambiguous attitude to the war is taken by a Victorian ‘sport’. The correspondent answers the frequent calls for footballers and barrackers to give the game away and join up to support their brothers in the trenches.
Abandon football! Give up our glorious winter pastime, which affords us the very best opportunity of exercising our lungs, in shouting objurgations at our brave boys’ opponents over the fence! No, no; the proposal is likewise ‘over the fence.’ Can we forego the intellect-stimulating pleasure of instructing the umpire in the rules which he ought to know but doesn’t? You ask us to go to the war; but if we did who would advise Dido Denver, that bonzer ‘wing’ man, as to his play? Dido should go too, you say? Well, that’s the limit. Who’s to feed the forwards if Dido goes? Unpatriotic? Who’s unpatriotic? You should hear us sitting at the tailboard of the van singing ‘Australia Will Be There.’
No, mister; if the Germans come here they’ll soon have the sense to know that the Australian game is the best – better than all your Rugby, or Soccer, and all those. Supposing all the footballers went to the war, what would become of the old game? Supposing all the ‘barrackers’ went, the sport would go bung just the same. The crowd makes the ‘gate,’ and the ‘gate’ makes the game. What you ask is out of the question; but we’ll tell you what we’ll do. Appoint a German as umpire, and we’ll show you what loyal Australians we are. We’ll call him everything we can lay our tongue to, and deal with him after the match. There’s a fair dinkum offer. We’re sports, we are. (22 January 1916)Bristling away behind the attempts at humour and the wanting to appear good-natured might be a sarcastic anger that questions why we are fighting in this war. Perhaps it also puts the suggestion that this war would best be fought by the exponents of “Rugby, or Soccer”, the Poms. On the other hand, maybe the piece is simply an ironic ‘white feather’ attack on those who refused to enlist. One way or the other, it points to a social resentment that runs deep.
The problem of the contemporary remembering of ANZAC is that the narrative it drives is wrong, one of an already united nation forging its identity on a Turkish beach. When we see the Collingwood and Essendon players lining up before the clash we are led to see them in unity, as different factions of one overarching national brotherhood. We are encouraged to believe in a myth.
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| Pies and Bombers players run through the Anzac Day banner. (Getty Images: Mark Dadswell) |
Nowhere does the myth as it stands acknowledge that at the time of the Gallipoli landing many Collingwood supporters (and supporters from many of the Catholic inner-city football clubs in Melbourne and Sydney) would have been very strongly against what they saw as the British imperialist war. Nor does the myth reveal the fact that the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) was largely made up of protestant soldiers. The embarkation lists in 1914-15 indicate that a small percentage were Catholic. In the three nominal rolls I looked at around 12 per cent of the initial enlistments were Catholics. And while Catholic enlistments increased in the later stages of the war, there was an initial reluctance, especially in the inner city.
Another point lost in the telling of Anzac is that between 20 and 25 per cent of troops in the very first Australian troop ships were British born, many of them recently arrived migrants. (Now revisit a crucial vehicle in the re-building of the legend, Peter Weir’s Gallipoli and see if the soldiers’ accents reflect that statistic.) The first to fall at Gallipoli (from the 11th Battalion) were in about equal measure Australian and non-Australian born.
If it is important to commemorate Anzac Day then it is important that we remember it well and not just via slick commercialised performances. We should remember it in as much detail as we are able. We need to remember who was there, who wasn’t, why they were there and why many refused. Until the commemorations do this they will remain evasive moments of myth-making. We need to remember all, or nothing.
Anzac Day, by John Forbes
This is one of John's final poems, written in the year before his death in 1998. He didn't care much for soccer, being a rugby league follower. Cronulla was his team. He and I used to imagine we were the only ones interested in rugby league in Melbourne literary cicles and so we'd meet to watch grand finals at his place or mine. This poem nails Anzac Day.
I wonder what he'd make of things 15 years on.
Anzac Day
I wonder what he'd make of things 15 years on.
Anzac Day
A certain cast to their features marked
the English going into battle, & then, that
glint in the Frenchman’s eye meant ‘Folks,
clear the room!’ The Turks knew death
would take them to a paradise of sex
Islam reserves for its warrior dead
& the Scots had their music. The Germans
worshipped the State & Death, so for them
the Maximschlacht was almost a sacrament.
Recruiting posters made the Irish soldier
look like a saint on a holy card, soppy & pious,
the way the Yanks go on about their dead.
Not so the Australians, unamused, unimpressed
they went over the top like men clocking on,
in this first full-scale industrial war.
Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us,
& grow, despite attempts to make it
a media event (left to them we’d attend
‘The Foxtel Dawn Service’). But The March is
proof we got at least one thing right, informal,
straggling & more cheerful than not, it’s
like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic-
if we still had works, or unions, that is.
Soccer and Anzac
Time for the annual modification and republication of this piece. It tells the hidden story of soccer's place in the Anzac story.Each year on Anzac Day members of the Australian soccer community wonder, sometimes aloud: does this day have anything to do with our game? Where do we fit in the Anzac picture? 'No,' and 'Nowhere,' are the usual answers.
Considered by many a 'foreign game', soccer can seem so out of place and time in any story about Australian national development, growth and maturity. So surely the game played by Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters (and Poms and children, two categories missed by Johnny Warren) has no place in the tales of our warriors and heroes at Gallipoli and elsewhere? It just doesn't quite sit with the received legend. Perhaps these attitudes are breaking down today but there is long history of excluding soccer from the 'legend'.
In 1931 a most extreme example of this exclusion was published in Hobart where soccer authorities sought access to the North Hobart football ground, normally reserved for Australian rules. They requested its use for representative games on the two days of the season when it was not needed by the STFA for first grade matches. Typically there were expressions of resistance to this desire, one of which was a letter to the Mercury penned by ‘Derwentside’. He argued that
“Soccer” players and followers in Hobart are in a minority only a self-centred, and, which is worse, a selfish, player or supporter, would deny. Whatever merits “Soccer” has as a winter game, it has not here the following, status, or genuine sportsman-like appeal to the average Australian as the game which some fifty odd years has evolved under the name of Australian football. The proper development of a nation’s national pastimes, particularly the winter ones, does more to build up a virile nation than attempts to foster - or is it foist? - an exotic pastime upon them. Among the many thousands of Australians who manned so doggedly the trenches and trudged the fields of France and Flanders - to say nothing of the Gallipoli campaign - not a small percentage got the qualities which made the A.I.F. world renowned from the fields in at least four States devoted in winter to football played under Australian rules.This is one more letter published in relation to one more moment in the interminable squabble for playing space in Australian sport. And it articulated many of the sentiments that had come to take hold in the Australian sporting imaginary: soccer is low, unpopular, unestablished, minor, foreign (“exotic” in fact) and is being imposed/foisted on Australians by selfish and self-centred agents of foreign influence. More significantly here, it excludes soccer and its culture from the realm of Australian miltary history, particularly Gallipoli.
Yet soccer does have its place in the story. Indeed, soccer was at Gallipoli, and not merely in spirit. It was played there. The stunning image below of a soccer match being played at Gallipoli is the kind of picture that leaves nothing to be said. An organised game of soccer was played between Allied troops and they were being cheered on by hundreds of others. At Gallipoli.
While more evidence is needed to connect this image directly with Australian troops, they certainly played soccer on Lemnos in December 1915. Lemnos was loaned by Greece as a base "for operations on the Gallipoli Peninsula" and the following image shows members of the 6th Battalion playing there against a team from HMS Hunter. The men were likely en route to Egypt after participating in the Gallipoli campaign.
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| The team from the destroyer HMS Hunter playing a game of soccer against a 6th Battalion team at a camp on the Aegean island of Lemnos. Australian War Memorial. |
More symbolic and potent evidence of the Australian game's intimate connection with Gallipoli lies in the remarkable story of the Soccer "Ashes". They were conceived in 1923 during New Zealand's tour to Australia.
Mr. Mayer (manager of the New Zealand soccer team) took back to the dominion the ashes in a box with a history attached to it. Mr. W. A. Fisher (secretary of the Queensland association) possessed a silver safety razor case presented to him when he left for the war, and it was with him when he landed with the Anzacs. He presented it to Mr. Mayer, and it contains some of the soil of Queensland and New South Wales, whose representatives played in the test matches. Mr. Mayer intends to have it mounted in New Zealand woods so that it may be a prized memento in connection with international matches between Australia and New Zealand. (The (Adelaide) Register, 10 August, p7)
The "Ashes" tag appeared to be a typical symbolic nod to the cricketing Ashes until it was revealed by the Sydney Morning Herald 13-years later that the case literally contained ashes.
The "Ashes," incidentally, are a genuine trophy. They are a relic of the New Zealand team's visit to Australia 13 years ago, when the ashes of cigars smoked by the captains of the New Zealand and Australian team were placed In a plated safety-razor case, which, in turn, was enclosed in a casket of New Zealand and Australian timbers, honeysuckle and maple, suitably ornamented and inscribed. This trophy bears a record of the test games between the two countries since 1922, and was won three years ago by Australia, which beat the visiting New Zealand team in every test. (3 July 1936)
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| The Sydney Sun-Herald (5 Sep., p 41) reiterates the story of the Australia-NZ soccer "Ashes" during the 1954 New Zealand tour of Australia. |
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| The 'Ashes', courtesy Ozfootball |
But it is not so simple. Soccer is a game whose high points and poignancies are explained as statistical spikes or historical curios whereas its low points are seen to be the norm; its joys are accidental and its miseries systemic. The burden of proof for the soccer historian is eternal in its recurrence. So the soccer historian needs to work harder than most to have their stories even registered.
Four examples
There are many other examples of soccer being present in Australian military contexts in the First World war. The four presented below are not particularly special or significant. Indeed, they are presented precisely because of how low-key and mundane they seem.1. A wartime awards ceremony in which a team receives winners' medals in an inter-company soccer competition.
2. Another decorated wartime soccer team, runners-up in a divisional competition.
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3. Soccer balls ordered for the troops.
The Euroa Advertiser reports in July 1916 seeing. . . a cable from Cairo to headquarters, 'Send immediately six tents, 10 small pianos, 5,000,000 printed letter paper and envelopes, 50 sets of cricket material, 50 soccer footballs [my emphasis], 50 association footballs [presumably Sherrins]'.
4. HMAS Sydney's soccer team, October 1918
These four moments, along with scores of others that could be identified and presented here, speak for themselves. And for most historians such a collection of evidence could begin to suggest a pattern. Yet the soccer historian struggles against the idea that that is all they are: a collection of instances; random, special cases that defy and deny the truth of the overarching myth that soccer, even if it was there, was never really there.
Yet it was there.
Soccer into the war
Prior to the First World War soccer had undergone something of a renaissance in Australia. After fitful beginnings in the 1880s, organised soccer spluttered into life in the first decade of the new century. Recovering from the depression and energised by waves of migrants, the game bloomed around Australia. Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart had thriving competitions. The 1912 Townsville competion, for example had 8 clubs in a population of just over 10,000. In large country towns like Rockhampton and Toowoomba, the game emerged and re-emerged like migrant-fuelled spot fires. In Victoria, the Dockerty Cup commenced in 1909 and became a central plank in the game’s re-growth. Club fixtures were regular and 1913 saw the reinstatement of the NSW-Victoria clash after a 25-year break.War brought much of this expansion to a grinding halt. The Hobart Mercury recollected prior to the resumption of the interstate rivalry between Tasmania and Victoria in 1921:
The last occasion on which a Victorian team visited Tasmania was in August, 1914, and it was at Hobart when war was declared. Seven of the team volunteered for active service immediately on return to Melbourne. They beat the Tasmanian team on that occasion by two goals to nil, and earlier in the season at Melbourne had won by six goals to nil. Victoria have an exceptionally strong team, and Tasmania is also well represented, three members of the team, J. H. Honeysett, Stonor, and Beattie being in the team which was defeated by Victoria in 1914.Like their Melburnian brethren, soccer players across the country were enlisting in droves. Each state felt the slashing of player numbers to the point where competitions were starting to look unviable. The Mercury claimed that "Soccer football stood out as a fine example to all sporting organisations in Tasmania. The Elphin Club had sent every one of its playing members to the war." (31 March, 1915) In South Australia player losses were also mounting. In April 1915 the Sturt Club reported losing "the services of eight of last year's players, who have enlisted in the Expeditionary Forces, and are now in Egypt, but several new men having been secured the prospects are bright." (The Register, 1 April)
While these departures were causing the game to wane, the clubs 'happily' sent their members off to war with a sense of duty and pride, as well as a semblance of ownership. The Adelaide Tramways team placed its enlisted members in a prominent position in its 1914 team photo (below).
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The annual international match between teams representing England and Scotland, under the auspices of the Victorian Amateur British Football Association took place on Saturday on the Fitzroy Cricket ground the authorities of which on this occasion granted the free use of the ground as net proceeds from the match were to be handed over to Lady Stanley's fund for Wounded Australian Soldiers.Yet it was clear that the inescapable war was taking its toll. The Argus goes on:
Four of the players who took part in last year’s match are on active service, namely Lowe, Golding, Guthrie and Hyde, the latter of whom is at present in hospital at Plymouth, England, wounded. Of those who took part in Saturday's encounter 13 of them represented their various countries last year - seven for England and six for Scotland. Three of England’s representatives and two of Scotland's have enlisted and were relieved by their respective commandants to enable them to take part in Saturday's match.The massive commitment made by soccer players to the war effort meant that the game was being played on borrowed time. And by 1916 the Melbourne competition was suspended, not to be resumed until after the war. According to the Argus, when soccer did resume, in 1919:
At the first annual meeting of the British Association, on June 16, the report covering a period of four years commencing 1915 disclosed the interesting fact that 90 per cent. of the players had enlisted for service abroad or at home. No competitive football had been played during the war.In Toowoomba (then a town of 13,000 people) the commitment was remarkable. On the resumption of soccer in Toowoomba in 1919:
At the annual meeting of the British Football Association it was reported that 140 members of the association had gone to the Front . . . During the evening the Chairman extended a hearty welcome home to the returned men present, and Mr. S. Morgan responded on behalf of the returned men. The secretary stated that the British Football Association ("Soccer") was the only football association that had an honour roll in Toowoomba. The names of Syd. Cousens, Lit. Groom, (both pictured below) A. Dundasch, Colin Groom, W. Bury, and J. McManus were recorded in the minutes as having paid the supreme sacrifice in the late Great War. (Brisbane Courier, 4 April, p11)
Irymple and the Caledonians
Pre-war soccer had not only grown in the metropolitan and larger regional centres. It had taken root in the country as well. Small towns like Broken Hill, Charters Towers and Renmark had bustling soccer cultures.Mildura's developing two-team competition in this period rescuscitated a game that had flowered there briefly in the mid-1890s (curiously, at a time when the game virtually vanished in Melbourne). Weekly matches were played between clubs based in Mildura and the neighbouring town of Irymple. This microcosmic competition provides its own story and gestures towards the general tragedy of war. Of the 11 players pictured in the Irymple team of 1913 (below), at least seven enlisted. Of this number, five lost their lives.
Yet the scale of this tragedy is sadly exceeded by the example of the Caledonian team in Perth. Eight members of the club lost their lives in active service. The following image depicts, in uniform, the club's first XI and marks its six members who died. John Williamson's Soccer Anzacs (from which the image is extracted) documents the Caledonian story from origins to the club's final demise.
Commemorating Anzac Soccer?
The Toowoomba, Irymple and Caledonian tragedies (among so many others) underline a question that many in the soccer community have asked: "Why don’t we honour the Anzac legend with a commemoration similar to those arranged by other codes?"Perhaps the failure is for good reasons - like not wanting to get caught up in a perceived jingoism or not wanting to rain on someone else's parade. But perhaps it's because soccer doesn't actually know its own history.
And it's not as if the game has never seen a role for itself in the remembering of Anzac.
SOCCER FOOTBALL.It's just that soccer no longer seems not to know how to approach Anzac. In 2009, Football Federation Victoria tried to institute an Anzac match between Hume City (Turkish) and South Melbourne (Greek). It produced neither the desired symbolism nor the expected fireworks. After three years, the idea appears to have been shelved.
Charity Match at Moonee Valley. Under the auspices of the Metropolitan and District “Soccer” Association a match for the benefit of the Anzac appeal will be played on the Moonee Valley racecourse. Moonee Ponds United will play Metropolitan and District Association. (Argus, 9 April 1927, p25)
Personally, I'm not sure I would want to see a blockbuster Anzac soccer match develop - though in the unlikely event that it could be arranged, a game between Australia and Turkey might be appropriate. I think there is already too much hoop-la around what should be a solemn and sacred occasion. But the soccer community needs to work harder to make the broader community conscious of the game's role in Anzac and military history in general, whether that be seen in a positive or negative light. We need to understand why and how it came to be that a game so 'foreign' in the popular imagination participated so thoroughly in a campaign that for many is a founding moment in a vital Australian legend, or myth. We owe it to the memories of the men who formed the Returned Soldiers team in Brisbane to remind people they were there and then returned. After all, their team's very foundation was an assertion of memory.
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We must remember but we must remember well. Lest we forget, indeed.
Ian Syson
Soccer and Anzac: conference abstract
This is the abstract for the paper I will be delivering at the ASSH conference in Canberra in July:
In the contemporary memorialisation of the nexus between sport and Anzac, Australian soccer does not figure prominently, if at all. Hegemonic codes of football and other 'established' sports take centre stage. Australian soccer, however, was very much a part of Anzac and there is an argument to be made that at crucial moments it was more involved than the two present-day codes of football that commemorate the Anzac tradition most aggressively. This paper looks at the place of soccer in the early stages of of the mobilisation of the AIF, into the Gallipoli campaign and beyond. It argues that soccer was in fact over-represented in the AIF and, as a result, in the Rolls of Honour, one of the main contributing factors to the game's lowered significance in immediate post-war Australia.
In the contemporary memorialisation of the nexus between sport and Anzac, Australian soccer does not figure prominently, if at all. Hegemonic codes of football and other 'established' sports take centre stage. Australian soccer, however, was very much a part of Anzac and there is an argument to be made that at crucial moments it was more involved than the two present-day codes of football that commemorate the Anzac tradition most aggressively. This paper looks at the place of soccer in the early stages of of the mobilisation of the AIF, into the Gallipoli campaign and beyond. It argues that soccer was in fact over-represented in the AIF and, as a result, in the Rolls of Honour, one of the main contributing factors to the game's lowered significance in immediate post-war Australia.
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