IT'S A SMALL WORLD: POSTECOGLOU, PUSKAS, PICKEN

I spent a fruitful day with a local soccer fanatic, David Picken, who has spent a lot of his life loving the game and writing about it. David referred to the summertime football pools coupons that we might remember from way back.

There were exotic club names emerging from the southern hemisphere; Juventus (of Adelaide!!), Hellas (South Melbourne), Budapest (Sydney) - the latter for whom Johnny Warren played. Some of you out there may remember Kevin Muscat? He was a challenging individual on the football field, of Maltese background and before going to play in England and Scotland he played for George Cross in Melbourne.

At times some of these league games provoked ethnic rivalry, for example a team based in the Croatian community playing one from the Serbian side of the city. Greeks vs Turks, think Cyprus!!! Sometimes it was quite disturbing, not just for the "locals" but also for those neutrals who just loved the game. This, along with interstate clashes on the administrative side, was not a calming influence at all. The latter still blights the game.

Around 2003/2004, it got to a point where people of influence in the game, including by then the retired, Johnny Warren, prevailed upon the Federal Government to do something about it.  The national competition, the National Soccer League (NSL) was cancelled!! A committee of enquiry was set up (the Independent Soccer Review Committee) that resulted in the Crawford Report (actually there were four reports). You can look this up on Wikipedia.

Melbourne Victory was one the foundation members of the ‘A’ League that came out of the Crawford Report. Ethnic names were not allowed and all the teams were new franchises and all the “old school“ were not allowed to put in bids.  

Much to the chagrin of clubs like South Melbourne, who felt they were the “big cheese” of Australian football!  Ange Postecoglou (remember him?) played there under the tutelage of Ferenc Puskas (remember him!!)  which sort of explains his attack, attack mentality, I guess. This was also Ange’s first coaching job. He took them to championships (nb: “He wins trophies wherever he goes”!! we’ll see!!!). 

As the Oceania representative, he coached SM at the World Club Championships in Brazil, in 2000. 

One result at the group stage, for example, was Manchester United 2 South Melbourne 0 - some bloke named Ferguson coached United and ex-Forest Independent School (based at Snaresbrook, in Essex) Quinton Fortune scored two. 

Quinton, was educated at the school while he ventured into English football, under Spurs' badge, as a trialist teenager and he played football for the Independent Schools' FA U18s and was looked after at the school by football coaching friends of mine, Pat Francis and Brian Hardcastle. David Elleray was the Chairman of the ISFA organisation at the time.