Australian football has hardly begun to learn from its past

 

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By Davidde Corran, 25 May 2010 Davidde Corran is a Roar Expert

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 FFA, football, Football World Cup, Socceroos

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On Sunday, during a lull in a Spanish second division match in Madrid, I was lucky enough to attend, I found myself thinking back to a game at Bob Jane Stadium I went to when I was about 13 years old. As I remember it, South Melbourne’s spiritual home was playing host to a game between an Australian Under 23 side and a European opponent.

However, for the life of me I can’t remember whom our national youth team was up against.

In fact, I’d forgotten about this game for so long I can’t even remember who any of the Australian players were.

I can vividly recall taking the train to the stadium, sitting in the main stand and wondering how uncomfortable it would be to have to sit on the cement ‘seating’ on the other side of the field, and then nearly falling off my chair when I realised a guy I rode the bus to school with was one of the ball boys. But when it comes to the details of the football match, I’m at a loss.

This memory has got me desperately wishing to be able to take a trip down memory lane and find out more about that game, whether it be by reading a match report, looking at the team sheet or a solitary picture.

Yet that will have to remain a simple, and extremely nerdy, wish of mine, for there’s no collection of football games played by Australian national teams or any other aspect of our game’s history available to the public.

This is an old gripe of mine that was stirred up by the launch last week of The Global Game exhibition in Melbourne.

While The Global Game looks like a fascinating exhibition, and I personally look forward to stopping by when I’m back in Melbourne after the World Cup, it is barely a drop in the ocean.

I truly believe that we need a National Football Museum.

Imagine the opportunity to explore an exhibition on the rich 131-year-old history of the game in Australia. To learn about one of the oldest cup competitions in the world which was played in rural Australia between Scottish and English footballers.

To see images from the Socceroos sojourn to wartime Vietnam in the late 1960s. Or even to simply trawl through a history of games played in Australia and find out about that Australian Under-23s game from Bob Jane Stadium.

While FFA is busy managing the Socceroos journey to South Africa and a World Cup hosting rights bid, not to mention denying the true history of the game, there’s little chance of this happening.

Excuse the pun, but on this issue, FFA do have history.

Yet I don’t entirely blame them, they have had other more important issues facing the game over the last five years.

Still, it’s a shame that, from Rale Rasic’s own personal collection of football memorabilia through to the archives of Football Federation Australia, there is a whole raft of football history going untold.

If you ask me it is time that we started to acknowledge our past and such a collection would be a great opportunity to do so.

The Global Game exhibition was launched on the back of the Socceroos’ time in Melbourne, and will no doubt do well thanks to the extra attention the game will receive due to next month’s World Cup.

But last week it should have been a permanent collection on the history of football in this country that Football Federation Australia was helping launch.

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