The Death & Life of Australian Soccer traces birth of modern nation

Australian soccer is in a golden age, but how did it overcome the false dawns and frustrated passions of the past?

Socceroos’ Scott Chipperfield competes with Luca Toni of Italy in the 2006 World Cup.

Australian fans of the world game have never had it so good. The Socceroos are champions of Asia and remain a chance for Russia 2018, which would be their fourth trip in succession to the World Cup finals. The Matildas are genuine contenders for World Cup glory, not merely in our lifetimes but in the immediate future. And the A-League, for all its growing pains, is a ­vibrant, viable national competition.

Old-timers reared on repeated World Cup failures and a national league that never quite sputtered into life could not have dreamt of such ­robust health. Soccer was always the runt of the footballing litter, a suspect code nurtured in the ethnic communities, played by soft (Aussie) wogs, unloved by the media and the Anglo masses. All that changed in 2005 with the birth of the A-League and qualification for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where a golden generation of Socceroos pushed Italy to the limit in the knockout phase of the competition. Italy won the World Cup that year but Australia came of age. This was the watershed.

How it came to pass is a wonderfully messy tale of false dawns and frustrated passions, told with great scope and finesse by Joe Gorman in The Death & Life of Australian Soccer. Like the best sports literature, his book places the game in a much wider context, in this case a young nation’s uneasy shift from assimilation to multiculturalism. The key on-field moments are all recorded — who could forget Charlie Yankos’s screamer against Argentina? ­— but backroom names such as Frank Lowy and Charles Perkins feature more prominently than Paul Okon and Harry Kewell, priests of the footballing arts.

“The soccer-loving European migrants had nation-building in their DNA,” Gorman writes.

Despite a narrow and parochial sporting culture based around state-based competitions and federations, the migrants had created a national soccer federation, a national soccer newspaper, the Australia Cup and the most inclusive national team in the country. They had adopted Australia’s first independent national anthem and ventured into uncharted territory in Asia to qualify for the world’s most important tournament. More than any other sport, soccer had dragged Australia out of the 1950s.

Here we have the most comprehensive life-and-times of the game in Australia. Such is Gorman’s reach and such is his achievement. His story begins in the late 1940s with the arrival in Australia of Andrew Dettre, a Hungarian refugee with a poet’s ear, a love for the round ball and a vision for its future. He was soon followed by Leopold Baumgartner, an Austrian footballer who came to play and chose to stay.

This was a time when Hungary was showing the world how the game worked and Austria was a newly fading jewel in its crown. Those who saw Baumgartner play, Dettre included, reckoned he was sublime, a real class act. Other European professionals followed in his path and Australia was briefly exiled from the Federation Internationale de Football Association when local clubs refused to pay transfer fees for players they regarded simply as immigrants.

It was also a time when the nation that ­invented the game, England, was beginning to realise how far behind the pack it had fallen. Soccer in the middle years of the 20th century belonged not to the home country but to the ­nations of continental Europe, and so it was the Magyars, the Italians, the Germans, the Yugoslavs, the Dutch and the Greeks who built the game in Australia. They built it and they branded it. Before Sydney FC and Western Sydney Wanderers came Sydney Hakoah, St George-Budapest and ­Marconi. Before Melbourne City and Melbourne Victory, the southern city’s great teams carried names such as Hellas, Croatia, Juventus and Hungaria.

The first national home-and-away competi­tion, launched as the Philips Soccer League in 1976, had ethnic blood in its veins. Canberra City and Newcastle KB United were the exceptions to the rule: purpose-built, non-ethnic franchises that captured their respective cities’ attention for a time but failed to hold it.

The A-League by contrast is a modern, homogenous, mostly harmonious affair whose ­advent has marked a kind of Year Zero. Damian Mori, the most lethal marksman in Australian soccer history, appears in A-League records as the scorer of seven modest goals. Other modern giants such as Mark Viduka don’t trouble its statisticians at all.

Meanwhile, a few of the old ethnic teams do battle in the state leagues. Some of them mix it once a year with the big names in the Football Federation Australia Cup, a national knockout competition where they threaten to write their own fairytales. Others have fallen into the lower divisions or ceased to exist, their stadiums now silent monuments to glories barely remembered. “Life in the shadow of the great soccer boom has not been kind to the game’s true ­believers,” writes Gorman.

David Brearley is a journalist and writer who knows how to kick a football.

The Death & Life of Australian Soccer

By Joe Gorman

UQP, 409pp, $32.95