Chinese helped kick off our passion for beautiful game
While Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea will be feted in luxury on their Australian visit, five star hotels are a far cry from the demands placed on the first soccer teams to play here
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Tottenham Hotspur FC and Chelsea FC will be feted in five-star luxury for their one-off games against Sydney FC tonight and Tuesday night. Five star hotels and state-of-the-art stadiums are a far cry from the demands placed on the first northern hemisphere team to play in Australia 92 years ago.
The exhausting schedule for Australian Football’s foreign guests pitched up 24 games over 12 weeks in 1923, with players trekking from Sydney to compete in four states.
Far from a team of traditional European masters, the visitors were students from China, where the sport had begun 12 years earlier.
The first report of soccer in Australia dates to July, 1832, when a letter writer complained to a Sydney newspaper that “on Sunday, during Divine Service, a large batch of youngsters were eagerly engaged in playing at football on Hyde Park”.
It was almost 50 years before the colony recorded its first official soccer match, played at Parramatta Common on Saturday, August 14, 1880. London-born schoolteacher and Paddington Cricket Club secretary John Fletcher elected to form an Association Rules football club, organised a match pitting his Wanderers team against students from The Kings School First XV rugby club.
The NSW English Football Association was established in 1882 and affiliated with British FA in 1883, when NSW and Victoria played the first interstate match, while the Rangers ran on as Queensland’s first soccer club.
The 1884 arrival of British insurance official Arthur Gibbs, who would co-found soccer in New Zealand in 1890, gave the game a boost in Victoria and in 1886 Australian officials requested a visit by an English team.
The game expanded to South and Western Australia before the outbreak of WWI, which set back hopes of a tour by British teams.
The game went national in 1921 with the formation of the Australian Soccer association, which organised a tour to New Zealand in June-July, 1922.
The Australian team of eight NSW players and eight Queenslanders played 14 matches for nine wins over four weeks. The New Zealanders arrived for Australia’s first foreign soccer tour in 1923, playing their first game in Brisbane on June 9, followed by games in Sydney and Newcastle.
The New Zealand connection paved the way for Australia’s second visiting soccer team when sports commentator Harry Millard, assuming rugby was China’s main code, was commissioned to visit China to organise a team to tour Australia and New Zealand.
Finding soccer, not rugby, played in China, Millard advised New Zealand Rugby Union to abandon their project, and contacted the Australian Soccer Association. After resolving funding disputes in Australia, Millard negotiated with the Far Eastern Games committee, which selected a team based on Hong Kong’s South China Athletic Association players, who won the Far Eastern Games in May 1923.
Three Shanghai-based players were added to the South China squad for the Australian tour, to make it more representative of all China. The 16-member team left Hong Kong with Millard and South China AA president Mok Hing on July 18 aboard the Yoshino Maru, reaching Sydney on August 6. Sydney’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce hosted a first-night welcome. The next day, team members wore Chinese costumes for a reception with the soccer community, politicians and Australian Chinese residents.
More than 40,000 people packed Sydney Showground on August 11 for the visitors’ first Australian match, playing against a NSW team for a 3-3 draw. China’s star was Lee Wai-Tong, then 17, who scored almost half the team’s 63 goals on tour and later became China’s most famous footballer.
The Chinese team’s gruelling schedule began with four Sydney games in 11 days, followed by four games in Newcastle, Wollongong and Maitland before a 20-hour train ride to Brisbane, where visiting US comedienne Ruby Norton kicked off for Queensland.
The three-match Queensland tour included a game at Ipswich, another mining town with “a rich tradition in soccer”. By September 15 it was noted the Chinese “were beginning to tire from all the travelling”. Playing before 10,000 spectators, China lost 5-0, with four goals scored in the second half. In 11 matches, the Chinese had logged five draws and six losses.
After 12 hours on the Brisbane Mail train to Tamworth, 3500 spectators saw China win 9-0 against New England. After 10-hours on the Glen Innes Mail back to Sydney for another win came the long train ride to Melbourne, broken by a stop-over match in Harden.
From Melbourne the Chinese team travelled by train to Adelaide and caught a ferry to Tasmania. The tour finished with a 0-0 draw against South Coast at Wonoona on November 11.
The next foreign football tourists arrived from Canada to play six matches in 1924, before an English tour team arrived in May 1925.
Originally published as Chinese helped kick off our passion for beautiful game
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