Compiling Compilations

Now it is looking that through the work of Greg Stock and Greg Werner we may one day have the full set of Australian Soccer Weekly (later Australian & British Soccer Weekly) available in the archives one day, I've commenced work on making compilation files of various segments of the paper. Here's a little tutorial for anyone else that may be interested in doing the same.

Obviously a large collection like a full run of a newspaper contains a massive amount of data. The reason I'm making compilations is that some of this data related to specific competitions is not available elsewhere on the internet. The compilations may be later used to assist in addressing that. 

The compilations I'm working on are National Youth League pages, National Indoor Soccer League pages and pages on local Victorian soccer post the demise of Soccer Action. There are many other topics though, that some may want to make compilations of. Perhaps a fan of a particular NSL or state league club may want to compile a file with just the match reports of that club's matches. Or like I want to do, maybe people in other states would like a single document with the weekly page for their state or area on it. You may want to have all the women's football pages in one place etc etc.

The main website I use is https://www.ilovepdf.com/

To start, what you do is click on Split PDF then upload a issue of the paper you want to take pages from.

 

Once it is uploaded, you can select which pages you want to remove.

You can split multiple pages, so if the stuff you want is on pages 3, 4 and 5 you set that as your range and you will end up with a single file with those three pages on it. You can select multiple ranges from the one upload.

Once you have your pages split, you need to rejoin them. Simply select the Merge PDF option and upload all your split pages, line them up in the order you want them by dragging around the pages, then click on the big red Merge PDF button.

Once you have your new compilation, you may want to compress it a little and I Love PDF lets you do that as well. There is another website I do that with is well, and it's one that may be required prior to splitting some newspapers and magazines.

I Love PDF is free, but to a limit of files of a size of 100mb or less. https://tools.pdf24.org/ lets you compress files that are larger than that, which may be required for some of the newspapers in our archives. 

Select a file to upload, then wait for that to happen. It may take a while. Once the loading bar indicator is fully black, it will show you the file and it's existing size. Then you can click on the compress button.

The site compresses them a lot quicker than it takes to upload, but unlike I Love PDF does not download it's work automatically, so once the file has been compressed you will need to click on the download button.

Once that is done, you will have a compilation of pages in a manageable file size. 

As I've said, the options for making compilations are enormous. You may want to make one of player profiles only, one of a particular columnists' work (Johnny Warren, Tommy Anderson, Knut Werner), or one of national team match reports. If anyone makes a compilation which they'd like to share with others, get in touch and you can do that by having it added to the archives on this site.  

As always, click on images to enlarge.

Recent Additions to the Archives (August 2021)

To make it easier for people to see what's been added to the various archives on the blog, I'll be posting Recent Additions to the Archives posts like this every once in a while. For this one, which I've included to include (August 2021) in the title, I'll edit the post to include anything else that gets added during the month. These have come from scans by Greg Stock, so thanks again Greg.

Australian Soccer Weekly Archive

1980

April 1

October 7

October 14

October 21 (added 11/08/21)

October 28 (added 11/08/21)

November 4 (added 12/08/21)

1982

October 19 (cover added to the previously incomplete version)

1984

February 14 (added 26/08/21)

July 17 (added 29/08/21)

July 24 (added 29/08/21)

July 31 (added 24/08/21)

August 28 (added 28/08/21)

September 4 (added 29/08/21)

September 25 (added 27/08/21)

October 9 (added 27/08/21)

1985

February 19 (missing pages added, file compressed 17/08/21)

February 26 (added 16/08/21)

1986

April 1 (added 23/08/21)

April 22 (added 12/08/21)

April 29 (added 13/08/21)

May 6 (added 15/08/21)

May 13 (added 15/08/21)

July 29

August 5 (added 17/08/21)

August 12 (added 18/08/21)

August 19 (added 19/08/21)

August 26 (added 19/08/21)

1987

August 12 (added 21/08/21)

1988

January 27 (added 21/08/21)

February 3 (added 23/08/21)

June 2

November 2 (added 21/08/21)

1989

February 2 (added 29/08/21)

September 20 (added 24/08/21)

1990

April 11

April 18

May 2

1993

March 1 (added 26/08/21)

March 8 (added 31/08/21)

March 11 (added 30/08/21)

June 10 (added 25/08/21)

Australian & British Soccer Weekly Compilations

National Youth League pages - 1984 (added 29/08/21)

National Youth League pages - 1989 (added 29/08/21)

Victorian Soccer Pages - 1989 (added 29/08/21)

Victorian Soccer Pages - 1990

National Indoor Soccer League - 1989 (added 25/08/21)

Soccer Action Compilations

National Youth League pages - 1984 (added 29/08/21)

National League Programmes

Northern Spirit v Adelaide City 1998-99 (added 31/08/21)

I'm a couple of missing issues away from being able to complete ASW compilations for the 1989 National Indoor Soccer League season, as well as the 1989-90 National Youth League season. The compilations I would like to finish cover the three categories - Victorian (State/Premier League) Pages, National Youth League Pages and (James Hardie) National Indoor Soccer League Pages.

Google Drive doesn't have any stats so I have no idea what content has been viewed or downloaded, which would have been nice to know. If there are people out there downloading libraries I thought this may help alert them to new content.

Blog (Activity) Suspended

A couple of months ago I decided to retire from spending around 20 hours a week on adding to the archives contained on this blog, for a variety of reasons. 

I'd decided not to bother going to the State Library to compile newspaper compilations and do research when they reopened after yet another lockdown. I was a little dirty on them being so slow to reopen that section of the library. I had a finishing line in mind for what I noted I would be seeking in my last blog post, and it was constantly moving away from me. After the best part of a couple of years under lockdown and restrictions, sitting in libraries and on computers all the time does not seem like a liberating freedom. Neither did finding boxes of stuff to scan.

I had spent a lot of time on the computer, either scanning or creating pdfs from jpgs, joining emailed pdfs, searching for items via the Wayback Machine, most of it with a football game from somewhere being streamed and cast onto the television alongside it. What I'd noticed was that the games had become mere background noise. If I missed a goal because I was working on something, sometimes I would not even bother to catch it on the replay, so little was I invested it the match.

This was brought into sharper focus when I watched the premiere of the Optus Sport Football Belongs documentary. With many using it to argue for or against the regular political issues in the game, or the sport's place in the Australian landscape in general, I was more drawn to the glimpses of club life that I missed. The moments that reminded me of when I really felt the passion, and every kick did matter. With my two clubs now gone, and not having another one in me, those moments are gone forever.  

I'm happy enough to keep adding the contributions emailed to me by the network established over the years - great people like Paul Mavroudis, Greg Stock, George Cotsanis, Greg Werner, Peter Rowney, Graeme McGinty, Travis Faulks, Laurence Hall, Tony Persoglia, Doug Butcher, Warrick Ford and Ian Syson.

Every once in a while I may put up a list of what they have sent me and what's been added to the archives, because that will still be ticking along for a while yet. I won't be tweeting out a link to every item added as I add them, so that may be needed to keep some up to date with where to find new items.

The blog was down for a few hours yesterday after I received this email from Blogger/Google.

                                                  Click on image to enlarge

                                                       

I found the link to appeal, and the site was restored. I think the issue may have come from the advertising spam posted in the comments sections of posts and pages, so I have disabled commenting for now and spent a few hours catching up on removing comments relating to football tips, sports streams, call girls, drugs and supplements and a lot of stuff in Turkish and some Asian alphabets I didn't understand.  

This scare has made me even more wary of spending too much more time actively working towards expanding it further, given so many hours of work could one day very easily disappear with nothing to show for it.

The Sporting Globe and Other Compilations

Another housekeeping post, about new additions to the archives that some people may have missed if the don't follow me, or use, Twitter.

I have added yearly compilations of the soccer pages in The Sporting Globe from 1955-1969. This covers the period from when the paper's coverage on Trove ends (1954) to when the amount of Sunday games, and the paper shedding more and more sports to focus mainly on racing and Aussie Rules football, sees the game's coverage decline (1970's). This archive now has it's own dedicated page here.

Another archive with it's own dedicated page now is the Neue Welt compilations archive. Again, this is a yearly compilation of local soccer pages. Neue Welt was a German-Australian publication, and the content is in German, mostly written by Fritz Schwab, father of future The Age and Soccer Action journalist Laurie Schwab. The Neue Welt archive can be found here.

Also new is an archive of Junior Roo, Il Globo's junior soccer supplement. It can be found here.

At this stage yearly Il Globo compilations are housed in the History Documents page, but they will get their own page when a few more are added. This content is in Italian, unlike the Junior Roo supplements which are in English.

Also new to the History Documents page, but with a view to getting it's own page once more compilations are, err, compiled is the Sunday Observer compilation for 1977.

I will probably end up doing Neue Welt compilations for it's entire run on the SLV microfilms. With Junior Roo the microfilms end at 1994, then I will start working back until it commences, adding the Il Globo local soccer pages along the way. Not sure how far I'll get with the Sunday Observer, a lot of distractions going through that newspaper.

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. 

  

 

Working On Records

So with the the A3 scanner having packed it in, and the A4 scanner not being much use scanning A3 newspapers and being temperamental itself as well, my focus has turned to tidying up a very messy hard drive.

Over the years I've started records for both Moorabbin City and Richmond Alemannia, but it was very piecemeal. Seasons here and there, some detailed, some with next to nothing.The formats of the records varied from season to season, and between the clubs. Most team line-up files included just a surname, some had a first initial. So getting these records in order is long overdue.

When it comes to match records, the starting point is obviously the date of the game, score and goalscorers, with a venue, referee name and team line-ups all preferable.

Sadly, over the years, goalscorer information for anything below the top tier in Victorian football has been abysmal. Official top goalscorer awards for leagues only regularly commenced in the early 1980's. Even the Soccer News, the "Official Organ of the V.A.S.AF.A." did not publish goalscorers alongside it's results from the 1940's through the 1970's. 

Venues can be sourced from VASFA/VSF Yearbooks, in most cases. There will be the odd club that was still searching for a home at the time of publication. Sometimes these can be picked up in a news item in Soccer News, sometimes they can't.

Referee's names were often published in the mainstream media alongside fixtures for that week's games at times from the 1920's to the 1930's. Soccer News only did this with much frequency in the late 1960's.

Team-line ups were a feature of early newspaper match reports, at least for the top levels, that began to wane after World War II. With the advent of Soccer News, you could get predicted line-ups for that weeks games, but match reports of the previous weeks games would not have any. Sadly most clubs did not take up the offer to have their teams listed in Soccer News by sending them through, despite constant appeals and threats of fines and leading to this part of the magazine eventually being dropped.

Moorabbin City

Richmond Alemannia

The files above are what I've gathered for both clubs up to the end of 1964 so far. It gives an indication of how much of this information is missing. Later seasons will be easier and be more comprehensive when I work up to them, my greatest task there being adding first names to the existing line-ups I have.

In the era covered above, we find that grounds were still being referred to as the street or road they were on before a park had been given a formal name (see Patterson Road, Bentleigh being the latter Victory Park and Olive Street, Hampton being Sillitoe Reserve). Richmond have gone from the Migrant Hostel in Maribyrnong to Survey Park and Burnley Oval to Olympic Village and Schintler Reserve for their Victorian State League home games (with Olympic Park appearances as well).

We can also see how much use the parks of Middle, Yarra, Princes and Royal got. 

When they are both finished, maybe the State Library will be open and accessible once again to see if any more information can be added.

 

  

What Remains of Soccer News July 1924

Unlike our counterparts in New South Wales, very little remains of any local football publications prior to World War II. Though titles changed frequently, there seems to have constantly been a magazine or programme in Sydney since the early 1920's. Thanks to the work of Greg Stock, a fair bit of it is now available to be read in the archives on this blog.

It is a different story in Victoria. The State Library holds just the single issue of a pre-WWII soccer publication, the Soccer News from July 5, 1924.

It is not in great condition, and comes along with a photocopied version when requested from off-site storage. I didn't even open all the pages on the original, as the tape trying to hold parts together seems to have stuck some pages to each other and I didn't want to chance it.

It's is numbered 8, with no volume number. So that would be the eighth issue that season, in probably it's first, and more than likely, only year. It's the official organ of the V.A.B.F.A. (Victorian Amateur British Football Association) and the Metropolitan A.S.F.L. (Metropolitan Amateur Soccer Football League).

The Editorial Talks page is taken up with the editor wanting to teach and explain rules, which is a bit boring. Then there is a letter from Geelong, relating to the difficulties in getting teams to travel down there in those days.

The next page is a bit more interesting, with info on three "Soccer Men As I Know Them" and the Canadian tour. Page 3 has more detail on the Canadians. We then get some tables, and the expected line-ups for Australia v Canada, some Club Gossip, the Dockerty Cup draw.

The highlight is a barney between the Press Representative of the Newport club and the Soccer News editor. You see why the paper may not have lasted that long.

It is rounded out by a page of Items of Interest, which reveal a few player's names (rather than just a surname), tribunal verdicts. It's not very expansive, sadly.

Anyway I've made a PDF from the photos I took of it on my phone, and it's available here.

It's in such a state it really should have been scanned and retired, only to be shared via USB.

It's not just the lack of surviving issues that make me question it's longevity. There are no references to official publications anywhere, in fact you often see it mentioned to check newspapers for fixture details. I'm not sure the local game was big enough to sustain it's own paper/magazine at the time.

So this may have to do for now.