Melbourne Soccer
Home of the Australian Football Library and the occasional thoughts about local soccer
Wednesday, 14 February 2024
Shepparton City Soccer Club Reunion
Saturday, 30 December 2023
Doug Butcher Updates
Thursday, 14 December 2023
Soccer Week Archive Updated
The Soccer Week Archive has been updated to now almost be fully complete.
Soccer Week was an independent paper which ran from mid-season in 1974 to just short of the end of the 1975 season. It filled the void after the demise of Soccer News, and was soon replaced with the superior Soccer Action.
Previously the Archive included only editions which had been scanned in full from the available newspapers sourced. George Cotsanis (of My World Is Round) had taken a vast amount of photos of the State Library Victoria's (SLV) bound volume which he has shared around over the years. Tony Persoglia made some PDF's from these images, but I was reluctant to add them to this archive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the tight binding on the SLV volume meant some columns were hard to make out. Then there was the matter of not all pages being photographed, as I assume George skipped full page ads and possibly some of the Soccerpools full pages (which sometimes may have had interstate or overseas snippets). Thirdly, the fact that the paper regularly changed the number of pages it contained made it harder to figure out if/how many pages may be missing. Generally the off-season/pre-season issues contained 8, going up to 12 when the Metropolitan League kicked off, and extending to 16 on the odd occasion. Also in some cases the date of publication was also lost to the tight binding. There was also a period of time where the paper cutting alignment must have been off, leading to text at the bottom of pages disappearing.
For these reasons I limited what I placed in the archive in the hope of finding access to unbound issues to scan properly. With this failing to eventuate, I decided to re-visit the SLV bound volume. I took additional photos, and made PDF's from them, whilst also adding the PDF's created by Tony from George's photos to the files. This gives a few pictures of each page, hopefully between them providing a decent enough image to work out what was going on. The correct publication dates of some issues were established. Which gives us now an almost complete record, with only July 23 of 1975 missing from the SLV collection.
Tuesday, 31 October 2023
New Additions - October 2023
The items added to the archive recently are as follow:
Camberwell Free Press Compilations: 1932 1933
Lilydale Express Compilations: 1959
Moorabbin News/Standard Compilations: 1972 1973 1974
Moorabbin Southern Cross Compilations: 1927 1928
Neue Welt Compilations: 1977 1978 1979 1980
St Kilda & Caulfield Southern Cross Compilations: 1927
Next month the Neue Welt archive will be complete, as it's run ended in 1981. Will probably step up the number of Moorabbin Standard bound volumes that I go through each week, and start looking at other ethnic papers from the 1960's and 1970's.
Saturday, 30 September 2023
New Additions - September 2023
The items added to the archive recently are as follow:
Neue Welt Compilations - 1972 1973 1974
Yarra Valley News - 1966
Moorabbin News - 1964
Shepparton News - 1954 1955
Sunshine Advocate - 1955
Franz Stampfl - Sports Illustrated - November 26, 1956
Jackson Irvine - Celtic v Cliftonville programme - July 23, 2013
Mark Viduka - Celtic v Rangers programme - May 2, 1999
Scott McDonald - Celtic v Dundee United programme - May 12, 2009
Will Hastie - Celtic v St Mirren programme - November 12, 1990
Paul Reid - Brighton v Sunderland programme - February 19, 2005
Nick Ward - Brighton v Rotherham United programme - February 3, 2007
Lucas Neill - Celtic v Blackburn Rovers programme - October 31, 2003
Joel Porter - Brighton v Hartlepool programme - November 8, 2008
Scott McDonald - Celtic v Dinamo Moscow programme - July 29, 2009
Luke Wilkshire - Celtic v Dinamo Moscow programme - July 29, 2009
Craig Johnston - Middlesbrough v Everton programme - March 6, 1979
James Hay - Celtic v St Johnstone programme - October 6, 1990
Adelaide Croatia Raiders 70th Anniversary - Hrvastki Vjesnik - August 3, 2022
Helensburgh Thistle 1895-1977
Fairy Meadow Italia 1987
Shooting Ahead (Woonona-Bulli) - March 24, 1972