Almanac Books: Review – ‘football belongs: Eight Matches That Explain Australia’ – John Didulica

 

John Didulica, Football Belongs: Eight Matches That Explain Australia, Optus Sport, Melbourne, 2021, ISBN 9798497261875, 149 pp., RRP $9.99.

 

John Didulica has had a significant influence on football (soccer) in Australia on and off the field. Grandson of Croatian migrants, he grew up with the game, played for North Geelong, Melbourne Knights and Green Gully, and then became the legal representative for several players and officials. He was the CEO of the Professional Footballers Association and a key member of FIFPRO, the international players’ organisation. His latest role is Director of Football at Melbourne Victory. He knows the game inside and out. He is clear that football has been a vital, but much misunderstood and underestimated part of Australia’s cultural and sporting life since at least the Second World War.

 

Football Belongs emerged out of a series of podcasts with the same title in which Didulica and journalist David Davutovic, along with other members of the Optus Sport team, analysed a series of games that reflected pivotal moments in the story of the code in Australia. These included the game between South Australia and New South Wales in 1960 when a stellar performance by a young Indigenous player John Moriarty won him selection for the Australian national team—long before they became known as the Socceroos. But Moriarty never got the chance to take the field for his country, because the international body FIFA had suspended Australia’s membership. Some of the clubs in New South Wales in particular had been signing players from top European clubs but did not pay any compensation to them. It took three years for the Australian Soccer Federation and some of its sponsors to cough up enough money to settle the issue. This was too late for Moriarty who had succumbed to a career-ending leg injury. His contemporaries, Charles Perkins and Gordon Briscoe also missed out and it was not until Australia qualified for the FIFA World Cup in West Germany, that an Indigenous man, Harry Williams, took the field for the Socceroos.

 

The final of the Vietnam National Day tournament in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1967 also figures. Can you imagine sending a team of young men to a war zone to play football? Yet the Australian government allowed this to happen but then ignored the players when they came home with the trophy. To this day they have not received any official recognition, unlike the entertainers and others who preceded and followed them. A reunion in 2017, sponsored by the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust, brought the survivors together but that was all. The account of the event enables Didulica to reflect more broadly on the ways in which the ANZAC story has been appropriated and is now virtually monopolised in a sporting context by the AFL. As he and Ian Syson have pointed out, in proportional terms the involvement and the sacrifices of the soccer community outweigh those of the other code.

 

To win the Vietnam tournament Australia had to overcome South Korea in the final. The same was true in 2015 when this country hosted the Asian Cup of Nations for the first time. The latter tournament was a fantastic advertisement for multicultural Australia. All the teams that took part attracted large numbers of their expatriate communities in Australia to the games. Crowds, income, media coverage and general Australian involvement were extraordinary, outdoing the Commonwealth Games and the Rugby League World Cup. As an opportunity for engagement with Asia there has been nothing like it, but there was very little follow up. When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Beijing he presented Li Jin Ping with a Hawthorn football guernsey, despite the fact that his opposite number is a soccer nut, bent on holding and eventually winning a FIFA World Cup.

 

A match that never happened introduces the women’s game in which Australia has been a competitor at the highest international levels since the mid-1990s. The Matildas won the Asian Cup of Nations in 2010 and most recently reached the bronze medal match at the Tokyo Olympic Games this year. In 2015 it took a strike by the Matildas and refusal to play a lucrative series of matches against the United States of America to force the Australian authorities to make significant moves towards equal pay for women. They wanted remuneration that went some way to matching their commitment to the game.

 

The final substantive chapter covers the saga of Hakeem Al-Arabi, the young Pascoe Vale footballer, who was caught up in an international incident when Australian authorities wrongly labelled him as someone wanted for a crime in Bahrain. Craig Foster, former Socceroo captain and later president of the PFA, took up the case, while Didulica helped him mobilise the football authorities. Together they engineered a successful campaign that resulted in the return of the young man to his wife and his football club.

 

Modestly, Didulica writes that he is neither historian or sociologist, but he has managed to illuminate and analyse recent Australian history through the lens of one of its football codes. He raises a number of issues that will provoke discussion and criticism, but his enlightening approach is to be welcomed and recognised for its fresh vision of Australia as it was, is and could be.

 

 

We’ll do our best to publish two books in the lead-up to Christmas 2021. The Tigers (Covid) Almanac 2020  and the 2021 edition to celebrate the Dees’ magnificent premiership season(title is up for discussion at the moment!). These books will have all the usual features – a game by game account of the Tigers and Demons season – and will also include some of the best Almanac writing from these two Covid winters. Enquiries HERE

 

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Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

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