Sunday 25 June 2017

State of the Blog 2017

I'm doing a bit of housekeeping on the blog as I prepare for a bit of a revamp in the coming weeks.

I will be keeping the existing major pages, but by adding pages within pages in the History Documents section I hope top make it less unwieldy. The same method will be used to clean up the Video Archive as well.

End of Financial Year Stocktake

Soccer News Archive - 76 items

Soccer Action Archive - 387 items

History Documents - 201 items

Posts Record Statistics



Page Statistics


                                        (Click on images to enlarge)


Wednesday 14 June 2017

Not So Random Pictures

Yes, it's the return of one of the Blog's franchise series, a Random Pictures post. Only not that random as they are all from a collection of photos loaned to me by Heidelberg United, so there's a strong Alexandros theme.

Speak of the devil....



No doubt there are some in football that will cringe at this image of our ethnic football past. Even less doubt that many of those aren't as tolerant of other cultures as they like to make out. Screw the hypocrites, all hail Alexander!


Ollie Norris interviewing then Sydney Olympic coach Tommy Docherty.


Manny Poulakakis and Ollie Norris present legendary VFL coach Tom Hafey with a commemorative Phillips Soccer League plate.


Ange Koutos presents Collingwood FC icon Lou Richards with a ball in the short-lived Collingwood Warriors era.


The multi-media mega star takes on Koutos.


A youthful John Anastasiadis.


Peter Tsolakis heads the ball under pressure from George Petrov.


Heidelberg's Phil Stubbins is tackled by Melbourne Croatia's George Hannah with Stuart Stevenson watching.


Jimmy Rooney tries to get away from Croatia's Ned Batinovic.


The third of the trilogy, Jamie Paton battles with Croatia's Steve Kokoska.


Celebrations for Gary Cole, Jimmy Tansey, Derek Hunter and Jimmy Campbell.


Heidelberg United from the Victorian Premier League in 2000.

Back (LtoR): Andrew Charalambous, Bill Makris, George Angelos, Peter Di Iorio, Alfonso Opazo.
Middle: Cameron Brown, Manny Pappas, Arthur Tsonis, Leigh Tsoumerkas, Sean Cunningham, Robbie Grakovski, Gerry McAleer.
Front: Jeff Stefanidis, David De Propertis, George Katsakis, Jeff Olver, Phil Peladarinos, Mile Medjedovic.

                                           (Click on images to enlarge)

Thursday 1 June 2017

Soccer Action Is Well And Truly Here!

Last August I started putting my Soccer Action collection online, and in under a year the task is now complete. Which is a bit ahead of schedule as I initially anticipated uploading just one or two a week and thought it would be something that would be completed in five or six years. The device of posting links to the new uploads on Twitter every Friday brought about the hastened completion of digitising the collection, making sure I did a few week then pushing me to do a few more than the week before.

It went from being happy with four uploads a week to trying to hit ten every Friday. I'd like to thank John Morris for giving me my original collection, and Damian Smith for the inspiration in putting them online. Thanks to Pave Jusup for allowing me to add to that collection by letting me copy from his own. Thanks also to Shahan Petrossian of Soccer Nostalgia, Miles McClagan and his amazing flickr scans, Paul Mavroudis of South of the Border and George Cotsanis of My World Is Round for further inspiration in making sure the collection was shared for all to enjoy.

Thanks also the the great statistician and historian Andrew Howe for providing me with a few missing pages and moral support. Thanks also to everyone who provided encouragement via the comments section of the blog or on Twitter, knowing people wanted to share the memories contained in the papers is what it was all about. The great Gary Cole falls into this lot, as well as the final group I need to thank, those that provided us with Soccer Action in the first place - Laurie Schwab, Les Shorrock and Craig MacKenzie.

Of course the the job is not quite finished, as my collection is not complete and after a break I will look towards finding and scanning the missing issues. The starting point to that, of course, is listing them here.

There are a few editions I have that are incomplete. They are:

1980

March 19 (pages 13 and 14 missing)

1981

March 25 (pages 13 and 14 missing)

July 1 (pages 5, 6, 7. 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 missing)

July 22 (pages 3, 4, 13 and 14 missing)

1986

July 16 (pages 1, 2, 15 and 16 missing)

And the editions I am missing completely are:

1976

February 4

March 31

1979

March 14

July 25

August 29

1980

May 28

June 4

June 25

September 10

October 15

October 22

November 5

November 19

1981

April 1

1982

January 27

February 10

March 3

March 10

March 17

March 24

April 14

May 19

June 30

July 14

August 11

September 22

October 20

1983

February 16

March 16

March 23

April 6

June 8

July 20

August 10

August 17

October 19

October 26

1984

April 4

September 12

1985

September 4

1986

April 9

May 14

October 8


So it's 387 down, 71 to go. Currently the file full of scans comes in at 5.96GB, so it may be that one day you can carry a complete set of Soccer Action's with you on an 8GB USB. The wonders of modern technology.