Soccer World, Week & News Plus A Spot Of Tennis

A few years ago I got a USB from leading historian Roy Hay which contained files of scans of old Soccer newspapers. The file was labelled the John Punshon-Tom Wall Collection. John is another of the great football historians, largely responsible for the Victorian state league section of OzFootball. I don't know who Tom Wall is.

The scans were a mixture of jpeg and pdf files, but each file was just a single page from the paper. They must have been able to scan full size A3 pages and are great quality. Having discovered sites that allow you to make pdf files of jpeg images, and merge single page pdfs into multi page documents, I can now add these papers to the various archives on the blog.

Soccer World

The Green Paper (not hard to figure out where this nickname came from) was Sydney's soccer newspaper from the 1960's to the early 1980's with Andrew Dettre and Lou Gautier chief contributors. Jim Cook was the longtime Melbourne correspondent.

If you scroll down the History Documents page, you will find the Soccer World archive.

The new editions added to my previous scans of 1970's issues are:

1961 September 8

1962 Septmber 21, 28 October 5

1963 August 9 November 8

1964 June 12

1966 October 7, 14

1967 June 9

1968 May 3 July 26 September 13 October 4, 11

1969 January 24 May 9 August 22 September 5, 12 October 3

Soccer Week

I've blogged about this mid-1970's Melbourne paper before. Now I can share the following editions, also found on the History Documents page:

1975 April 23 June 9, 18 July 9, 16 August 6

Soccer News

The old faithful Soccer News underwent several changes in the 1960's. Having begun as a small A5 booklet in the 1940's, it grew slightly larger in the late 1950's. In the 1960's it would go full newspaper size, also becoming Soccer Weekly in 1962 in an attempt to go national. Reverting back to Soccer News the following year, it became Soccer News & Soccer Life in 1966 and then Soccer Tennis News in 1968 with the legendary Harry Hopman involved in the tennis section, again reverting back to Soccer News for 1969.

Some of the news scans are missing pages, but I've added them to the archive as there may be information someone is after and something is better than nothing. The Soccer News Archive now has had the following added to it:

1962 August 30

1963 April 11 October 3

1964 February 27 March 26 April 2, 16, 23 May 21 June 25 July 30 August 27 September 17
         October 15 November 5

1965 March 12 May 27 September 9

1966 June 2 August 11

1967 April 6 June 8 and better versions of June 15, 22 & 29

1968 April 25 May 16 June 27 August 1

1969 May 22

Vic Soccer '88

I've always maintained that Vic Soccer '88 is one of the greatest things ever published. When Soccer Action died, the great Les Shorrock started up Soccer Star, and Vic Soccer '88 can be considered the Soccer Star Annual of 1988.

Following the Great Computer Death of 2015, I gave a box of items to Paul Mavroudis of South of the Border to have a look at while I began to put my collection back into order. Thanks to his efforts in scanning and hosting, we can now share Vic Soccer '88 with a wider audience.

Personally nothing can hit the nostalgia sweet spot for me better than this publication. It's hard to turn a page without finding someone I know. On the cover is the great Josip Biskic hoisting the Dockerty Cup. Biskic was a proper footballer, and a gentleman as well. There are team photos of all the Victorian NSL clubs, all the clubs in the Victorian State League, all the Victorian boys junior state teams, the NYL-winning Sunshine George Cross youth team and touring Dinamo Zagreb side featuring the legendary Zvonimir Boban. Even the Industrial League champions and Cup winners get their pictures included.

Phil Stubbins, Andy O'Dell, Dean Hennessey, Roy Maclaren, Carl Gilder, Stan Webster, Steve Blair, Ange Goutzioulis, Jimmy McBride, Stuart Cannell, Nick Gourlias and Willie Raynes are all pictured, men who I served under as team manager in their senior, senior assistant or reserves coaching roles. It's a sign of my old age that some players pictured that I handed shirts to now have children who are NPL stars.

As a pictorial record, it is without peer. Carl Recchia even makes it into a picture as a club mascot. All the tables are there, which is a basic feature that the VSF came up short in with their late 1960's Yearbooks often lacking the final reserves tables. A slight fault could be lacking full details of Cup Finals (full line-ups, but that's probably being too picky). It was also clearly published before Croatia was stripped of that Dockerty Cup Final win for bringing on a substitute who had been suspended in a NYL game.

The only possible thing that could surpass it would be Vic Soccer '89, which I'm told by George Cotsanis of My World Is Round did come out. But for now, behold the beauty that is

Vic Soccer '88