What a year 2022 was in Australian football – dizzying highs and desolate lows, the new and the old colliding as they often do.

Less than a year ago we were bracing ourselves for the very real possibility of Australia missing out on the World Cup after back-to-back defeats to Japan and Saudi Arabia plunged the Socceroos and their then-beleaguered coach Graham Arnold into the intercontinental play-offs.

If you’d told me back then that our World Cup journey would end in a narrow defeat to Argentina in the Round of 16, and that Graham Arnold would be getting a contract extension, I may well have questioned your sanity.

On the domestic front, fledgling Western United dethroned mighty Melbourne City and won the A-League final, and the emergence of a new generation of stars continued, headlined by the sublime Garang Kuol.

The intrigue of football’s ongoing structural reform bubbled along, and we’re not much closer to knowing what the national second division might look like. Plus ça change.

And of course some old demons reared their ugly heads, most notably the dark iconography that marred the Australia Cup final in October and the horrifying incident perpetrated by Melbourne Victory supporters at the A-League’s Melbourne derby on 17 December.

It was also a year of anniversaries. The Socceroos became centenarians and renewed old acquaintances with New Zealand. There were also another couple of anniversaries that passed largely unremarked upon in 2022 – both silver jubilees and significant moments in Australian football history.

First, though, the Socceroos.

Drizzle in Dunedin and cigars in Newcastle

The history of Australian football is a not insignificant part of the history of 20th-century migration to Australia. The local football club was a haven and cultural touchstone for so many of the refugees and migrants who arrived after the wars. If there wasn’t a local club, they formed one.

Given the exclusionary politics of the time, the wave of migrants that followed the first Great War was smaller and more British than that which followed the second. But it still stands out, with a big population increase in 1919 followed by steady growth from 5.4 million in 1920 to 6.5 million in 1930.

Even if the population wasn’t quite booming, football was. At the grassroots level it was rivalling rugby league in New South Wales and Queensland in terms of player registrations and becoming a worry in the Australian rules states.

It was against this backdrop that football took the next step, evolving from interstate contests to the international arena in June 1922. NSW had been a pioneer, having both toured and hosted New Zealand in 1904-05, and the inaugural Australian team ran on to Carisbrook wearing sky blue.

On that historic day the Dunedin Evening Post reported that the “Test match” was played “in a drizzling rain and on a greasy field” with about 10,000 spectators in attendance. New Zealand reportedly dominated possession and forced Australia back in the early stages before taking the lead through Edward Cook after 20 minutes.

But the “spirited” Australians struck back just before half-time when Tom Thompson’s cross was bundled home by William Maunder for the very first goal by a Socceroo.

Alas, things didn’t improve much after that, either in Dunedin or in the five ensuing Tests held in New Zealand in 1922 and Australia in 1923. New Zealand won 3-1 in Dunedin and claimed the inaugural Test series 2-0, with the prolific Cook scoring in every game.

Despite William Maunder’s late goal clinching Australia’s first win at the Gabba in June 1923, New Zealand won the series 2-1, with captain George Campbell scoring hat-tricks in Sydney and Newcastle.

The pioneers did seem to have an eye on creating a legacy. At the conclusion of the 1923 series, Australian officials presented Campbell with an ‘Ashes’ trophy filled with the remains of cigars consumed by him and the Australian captain, Alex Gibb. Unfortunately, the trophy later disappeared, along with the prospect of creating an Ashes tradition in football.

While they didn’t create a physical legacy, they did start something. The history of the Socceroos and of Australian football more broadly is unlike anything you’ll find in rugby or Australian rules, because it’s much more interesting. It’s worth remembering that, especially now.

Australia hosted Olympic football in 1956 and just three years later became international pariahs due to the Australian Soccer Football Association’s refusal to abide by FIFA’s transfer policy. There’ve been epic qualifying campaigns, including an intervention by a witch doctor in Maputo, Mozambique, which allegedly set football back decades.

There’ve been crushing blows (more on that later), joyous triumphs and a grey wiggle. Australian football has essentially torn itself down and rebuilt in the last 20 years, and that process still isn’t finished. On that theme, let’s jump forward to 1997.

‘The greatest day in the history of Australian soccer‘

This anniversary was understandably unremarked upon. The club involved hasn’t competed at the elite level for nearly two decades. The competition they were part of in their heyday is long gone and little lamented. The achievement will always possess some significance, but it seemed a lot more significant at the time.

It is now just over 25 years since the Brisbane Strikers beat Sydney United 2-0 to win the 1997 NSL championship. The Strikers are still toiling away, albeit much diminished, in Queensland’s lower leagues, and walking around Perry Park these days it’s amazing to think they were once national champions. But they were, and that achievement was in some ways the genesis of the A-League.

The Strikers’ victory over Sydney United was seen by some as a turning point for football. Studs Up magazine declared that “the future of Australian football has arrived – and it’s popular, successful and multi-ethnic”.

The Courier Mail giddily pronounced it the “greatest day in the history of Australian soccer”. They were partly right. Change was afoot, and ironically it ended up leaving the Strikers behind. As ever with Australian football, it’s best to not get too far ahead of yourself.

Speaking of which, Queensland’s a funny old place – and I’ve earned the right to say that, having lived here for more than 20 years now. The locals claim to love an underdog, but they really don’t. If State of Origin rugby league hadn’t immediately gone Queensland’s way, they’d have lost interest immediately.

Above all, they like a winner, and credit where it’s due, when they find one they really do get behind it.

Strikers captain-coach in 1996-97 Frank Farina said as much in his autobiography, My World is Round. The Strikers rarely pulled much of a crowd, not even when the team firmed as championship contenders late in 1996-97 NSL regular season and finished second on the ladder behind the mighty Sydney United.

But when Wayne Knipe’s away goal at Parramatta Stadium put the Strikers through to the grand final – and a home grand final at that – something awakened. According to Farina, there was a crowd waiting at the airport to congratulate the team on their return to Brisbane, much to the amazement of the players.

As Farina recounted, “Strikers fever hit Brisbane – and it was a dream come true for me and the other older players who had never seen anything quite like it for our code in Australia”. I suspect a few of the Brisbane Roar players who were part of the club’s golden years between 2010 and 2014 might say something similar.

As Joe Gorman wrote, “By kick-off, Suncorp Stadium had to be locked for fears of overcrowding” with the official crowd figure of 40,446 a new national league record. And the suddenly football-mad Brisbanites roared their team home. Farina scored just after half-time and they rarely looked like losing, with veteran striker Rod Brown clinching it later in the second half.

But the game had an added symbolism. Sydney United, along with South Melbourne and Adelaide City, were powerhouses of the NSL and are of course clubs with distinct ethnic identities. The success of an upstart like the Strikers, a club with ostensibly broader popular appeal, was seen as a potential game-changer.

There’d been crowd trouble at the preliminary final between United and South Melbourne, administrators were fed up and media were jumping all over it, with the Courier Mail declaring that “Soccer [is] sinking into an ethnic quagmire”.

It’s interesting looking back at the enthusiasm of the Murdoch press for the potential of a new ‘soccer’. Did they see it as a commercial opportunity, or was it just part of the culture wars – the ‘I’m not racist, you’re racist’ narrative? John Howard was Prime Minister, Pauline Hanson was freshly elected to Parliament; multiculturalism was certainly on the agenda.

Whatever, a new football happened, just in a completely different format. Whatever optimism existed in mid-1997 about the future of the NSL had evaporated by the end of that year.

Where were you on 29 November 1997?

It was one of those moments. I was 14 years old and watching at home in northern NSW alongside my dad and with my mum and sister occasionally feigning interest.

Football had been very good to me up to this point. My team, the Brisbane Strikers, were champions of Australia. I was yet to discover that I was completely hopeless at playing the game. Harry Kewell had scored in Tehran and we were almost there. Then it all came crashing down.

I still vividly remember it. Aurelio Vidmar putt the Socceroos 2-0 up and Mum idly wondered about a holiday in France. Publicly I was appalled: “Don’t say that, Mum!”. Privately I was intrigued. “Hang on, is she serious?”.

Enter a crazed pitch invader, Australia’s dominance waning, Karim Bagheri scored, Mark Bosnich’s 80th-minute goal kick was returned with interest and Australia’s defenders were caught on their heels.

This isn’t happening, is it?

Khodadad Azizi, then Asian player of the year, was never going to miss. There was still hope, though – ten minutes left to play against opponents who were far from unimpeachable. But the fluency that’d put Australia in front was gone. They were desperate. Graham Arnold had become the focal point of the attack. It was over.

Even Iranian coach Valdeir Vieira knew it was a heist – he said as much in the aftermath. Johnny Warren couldn’t talk as he choked back tears – and he loved to talk. Nothing was ever quite the same again.

Quite literally. The failure to put away Iran cast a pall that took a long time to dissipate. It wasn’t the express reason why the then federal Minister for the Arts and Sport, Senator Rod Kemp, appointed David Crawford, then the CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, to lead an independent review of the governance and management of soccer in Australia in 2002.

But it was there in the terms of reference: the review would make recommendations “to enable the sport to maximise its potential at all levels from community participation to international performance”.

The NSL was dying. The best it’d ever done was get Australia close to the World Cup. As heartbreaking as that night in 1997 was, it was essential in creating something a little more coherent and predictable, something that might attract some private investment.

If 2022 proved anything, it’s that we’re on the right track. The Socceroos beat Tunisia and Denmark and pushed Argentina all the way with a squad largely forged in the A-League. There’s Garang Kuol and Nestory Irankunda, and as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a potential generation of young players of South American descent to follow the young African prodigies.

There are still a few problems, not least the proclivity of some folk to treat football matches as a test of the limits of public order. I mean, who brings a low-grade explosive device, primarily intended as a last-resort distress signal for those stranded in a maritime vessel, to a football match? Some people are weird.

Hang in there, football fans.