Almanac Book Reviews: ‘The Coping Stone – The First English Soccer Tour of Australia 1925’ by Paul Nicholls

 

Paul Nicholls, The Coping Stone: The First English Soccer Tour of Australia 1925, Fairplay Publishing, Balgowlah Heights, New South Wales, 2025, ISBN 9781923236073.

 

Whereas tours by English cricket teams to Australia and Australian tours to England were well established in the nineteenth century, the football codes talked a lot about reciprocal visits but were slow to act. It was not till 1925 that an official representative team was sent to Australia by the Football Association (FA). Paul Nicholls has put together an imaginative reconstruction of the tour drawing heavily on contemporary newspaper reporting but supplemented by other sources and a good dash of intelligent gap filling. There are no footnotes to distract the non-academic reader though it is clear that there is a heavy reliance on the marvellous Trove collection of the National Library of Australia and the author credits a number of the secondary sources he has used.

 

The English touring team was not the strongest that could have been selected but it had a good mix of established and future stars of the game including a couple who became highly influential managers after their playing careers concluded, notably Stan Seymour at Newcastle United and Tom Whittaker at Arsenal.

 

As might have been expected the visitors went through the tour undefeated. The New South Wales team probably gave the tourists their closest games apart from the five Test matches against the Australian national team. Once they had assessed the quality of their opposition, the tourists adjusted their play accordingly to avoid or reduce embarrassment to their hosts.

 

There was one major controversy which affected the tour, the use or non-use of substitutes in case of injury. The Australians wanted to replace an injured player, but the FA demurred and there were some very one-sided games even though the tourists again adjusted their on-field play. The spectators were not amused.

 

In 1925 and for a long time afterwards, Association football in Australia was very much a state rather than a national game. Within the states there was also often a wide divergence between the metropolitan teams and leagues and their rural cousins. That was not true of the mining areas where Newcastle, the Illawarra and the La Trobe Valley were able to give the urban teams a run for their money.

 

One tangible legacy of the tour was the presentation to the state bodies of trophies for domestic competition. At least some of these trophies have survived and are proudly retained in the state headquarters.

 

More stories by Roy Hay can be read Here.

 

 

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