The blog's Soccer Action Archive is now complete with every issue of the iconic Australian football publication of 1976 to 1987 included. 460 editions, from it's debut on February 4, 1976 until the sad demise and disappearance on April 9, 1987.
I was too young to have ever bought an issue of Soccer Action, perhaps only having bought a few issues of Shoot! before the end of the 1980's. The first Australian soccer newspaper I bought would have been Les Shorrock's successor to Soccer Action, Soccer Star, in 1989. It was in the early 1980's that I acquired my collection of Soccer Actions, given to me by the then Richmond physio John Morris (also a former Moorabbin City, Oakleigh Cannons and Victorian state team physio).
The Soccer Action Archive was created in August 2016. Originally I planned uploading one scan a week from my own collection, which was probably only 50-60% complete at the time. I soon started uploading more issues per week than that, and as my own collection was nearly all scanned began looking at sourcing the issues I didn't have. The final few issues took a couple of years to sort out, but here we are today, every issue ever available to everyone as a free download.
Soccer Action was held in affection by a great many people, which brought about willing contributions towards completing this project. Damian Smith was the first to lend me some missing editions, and over time I can thank him, Steve Delmenico, Pave Jusup (and the Melbourne Knights/Frank Burin Collection), George Cotsanis (My World Is Round), Sam Barres, Paul Mavroudis (South of the Border), Andrew Howe, Tony Persoglia and Nick Hatzoglu for supplying the papers and scans to archive every issue published. Thanks to the latter pair, the final four issues (March 5, May 14, July 16 & October 8, 1986) have been added today to make the archive complete.
So now the works of Laurie Schwab, Les Shorrock, Craig MacKenzie, Knut Werner, Billy Vojtek, Rale Rasic, Johnnie Warren, Les Murray, Andrew Dettre, Peter Katholos, Brian Mossop, Ron Smith, Leif Jensen, John Cerubbi, Zika Nikolic, Peter Georgiou, Tommy Anderson, Bruce Waddell, Meno Toutsidis, Stephen Kalus, Alex Vesic, Kyle Patterson, John Taylor, Peter Scott, Frank Pangallo, Jim Cook, Manos Milios, Paul Moon, Oscar Perea, Walter Pless, Joe Lenzoni, Ted Smithies, Philip Micallef, Peter Desira, Ricky Rosso, Mike Lynn, Rocky Di Zio, Tim White, Peter Windsor, Allan Crisp, Stephen Dettre, Ken Kontra, Mike Mikolajczyk, Mick Mitten and John Mangan amongst numerous others will remain available to all, online.
All right here, or in the tab at the top of the page.
To download a folder with every issue in it all at once, try here.
