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
Obvious parallels with National Soccer Annual published by Fairfax in the 1980s.
ReplyDeletePretty much a successor. Shorrock, mainly a photographer with Soccer Action, published Soccer Star and Vic Soccer after Fairfax pulled the pin on Soccer Action.
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