Soccer Action Archive: COMPLETE

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. 

  

 

Expansion!

Expansion is on the agenda, of the blog not the A-League, that is.

Thanks to the ongoing contributions of George Cotsanis, Ian Syson, Damian Smith (in conjunction with the late Kevin Christopher) and Greg Stock, and the faithful reliability of the old HP Officejet Pro 8610 the library within the blog continues to grow.

The main areas of growth are within the Australian Soccer Weekly Archive. At the moment at least half a dozen new issues are added weekly, but there is still a long way to go before everything I have is scanned.

Everything below the blue page on the pile on the left has been scanned. On the pile on the right those below the blue page at the bottom and above the upper blue page have been scanned, So still a long way to go.

Thanks to Greg Stock we now have a Soccer Weekly News Archive. Soccer Weekly News was the NSWSFA magazine, and it predates any publications emanating from Victoria. Greg is also contributing NSWSFA and NSWSF Yearbooks and Handbooks, which can be found in the  Yearbooks and Annuals Archive within the History Documents page. To complement the 17 volume History of Soccer in New South Wales series of Sid Grant and Harry Hetherington, Greg has also provided Sid Grant's book The History of Coalfields Soccer, which can be found in the Books section of the History Documents Archive.

Also in the Book section is Laurie Schwab's The Socceroos and Their Opponents, scanned by Todd Giles ( @nfhistory on Twitter ). It's a book that probably surpassed Jack Pollard's Soccer Records as the great Australian football history tome of it's day.

Ian Syson recently provided me with some photocopies for scanning, which saw several more VASFA and VSF Yearbooks and Handbooks added to the Yearbooks and Annuals Archive. There were some also some early 1960's issues of Soccer News and the renamed (for one year only, Soccer Weekly) that are now in the Soccer News Archive.

There are also programmes coming through from Greg, so keep an eye on on the Programmes Archive for updates.

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.