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.



3 comments:

  1. Well I for one certainly appreciate your efforts in getting these all up. I call in to the site occasionally and never fail to have a wander through the Soccer Action archive and it always stirs great memories of a totally different era.

    When I began to follow soccer - back in the 70's - coverage of the beautiful game in the Australian media was basically non-existent and Soccer Action was the one reliable source of news and results.

    I even find the advertisements carried in the paper fascinating. They are a great illustration of commercial life in the pre-internet days.


    Thanks - once again - for establishing this great archive Mark.

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  2. Edited to take the 9 issues added to the archive today off the list

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  3. Edited to remove the recent additions to the archive.

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