5 Reviews

David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, Viking, London, 2006, ISBN 9780670914807, £30.00.

This is a mesmerising kaleidoscope and a blockbuster of a book. It has 977 pages and weighs more than a kilo. It reads like a novel and its range is stunning. It will become the standard one-volume history of the world game, as it has an argument for each rise and fall of football clubs and national sides, whether it be in Europe, Africa or Australia, in the context of change in the global economy, society, politics and crime. Industrialisation and urbanisation are seen as necessary though not sufficient conditions for the growth of the professional game. How the game became our collective metaphor for the human predicament, a self-created world of risk and uncertainty, is the thread which runs through the rest of this tantalising account. Though it is written by a sociologist there is no jargon and seldom doubt about the author’s meaning. He has a wonderful eye for a story, and nearly all of them are germane to the argument, though the odd one creeps in for effect.

Goldblatt tries to explain how the game has evolved locally, nationally and globally and why teams and countries emerged as significant elements in the game either domestically or on the international stage. At times he does this through a close presentation of what he considers to be the relevant economic, political and social changes taking place in the society concerned. Yet each example has its own unique and contingent features and occasionally the author admits that it was just lucky that an exceptional generation of players emerged at that time and not at another. This will frustrate those looking for a model which can be applied generally or those who think that success can be easily replicated.

For example, Dutch total football emerged in the late 1960s as the product of ‘Ajax’s patrons, Rinus Michel’s coaching, the ideas and talent of Cruyff and the cohort of players that emerged with him and the peculiarities of the Dutch conception of space’, an idea he derives from David Winner’s Brilliant Orange. Dutch thinking is influenced by the paucity of the land area in which they have to live. They think geometrically and process spatial decisions quickly. But to erect this as an explanation for the success of the Cruyff generation of Dutch footballers (or the more recent success of Dutch coaches) is puzzling given that this spatial thinking did not spring into existence at the time of the soccer prowess but, as Winner suggests, existed in Dutch life throughout modern history.* Perhaps Simon Kuper in Football Against the Enemy is on stronger ground with his argument that Dutch players take much greater interest in and control of their environment than their equivalents in Britain who tend to defer to the autocratic coach/manager.

The problem, however, is not just explaining the rise and fall of particular teams and collections of players or national sides but the fact that some persist in relative success over many years while others have very brief periods of efflorescence. On the one hand you have Manchester United or Liverpool, Rangers and Celtic and Brazil at national level and, on the other, the Hungarian national team in the Puskas era, Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough, or Napoli with Maradona. In the end Goldblatt concludes that there is an association between the off-field changes in society and the development of what became the world game, and vice versa, but he is too shrewd to suggest that there are conclusively determining features on either side.

For those who are interested in following in Goldblatt’s footsteps or knowing when to trust him on details or interpretation the process is frustrating. He has read much more widely than his bibliography suggests and the few notes per chapter don’t provide a secure or complete guide to his additional sources. The reviewer has to be realistic. Full referencing would probably have doubled the size of the volume and made it completely unpublishable.

Inevitably the reader turns to areas within his or her competence and, when that raises problems, confidence in the other parts of the mammoth work is shaken. For example, there is no sign that Goldblatt has read the work of Adrian Harvey or Neil Tranter on the immediate pre-history of the game in England or the central belt of Scotland. If he had, then the evidence they provide about the existence of small-sided, rule-bounded games in the culture of the people would have helped strengthen some of his arguments about the explosion of popularity of association football when it emerged in mid-nineteenth century and provided an alternative to the top-down conventional model of the spread of the game on which he has to rely.

In the case of Australia, which does not bulk large in the world game or the book, Goldblatt perpetuates comfortable myths about Aboriginal influence on the early development of what became Australian rules football. He seems unaware that early football was sometimes played on rectangular pitches using a round ball and overemphasises the availability of land as an explanation for its success. He also pretends to have read The Sporting Globe for a quotation about the behaviour of post-war migrant players but he has taken the information unacknowledged from a chapter of an ASSH Studies volume along with the ethnic attribution of clubs in Victoria and other information. Perhaps more worryingly there is no mention in the book of Bill Murray’s two pioneering studies of the World Game or his equally path-breaking work on Rangers and Celtic, or of the splendid efforts of Phil Mosely and John Hughson.

Goldblatt is no romantic so most of his stories about the game in virtually every area contain an account of the roguery and worse which went on in clubs, associations, federations and public authorities. A game as popular and all pervasive obviously attracted criminal elements at all levels, from the match fixers to the owners of teams and the administrators who were nominally there for the good of the game. The corruption goes all the way to the top in FIFA where the manifestly crooked have flourished under the regimes of Joao Havelange and Sepp Blatter. Contrast the immediate sacking of some FIFA administrators when they were alleged to have lied to a major sponsor, Mastercard, in a United States court case thus threatening the financial house of cards erected by Blatter with that of Jack Warner who escaped punishment for using his position on the FIFA Executive to sell World Cup tickets through a family company. But a systematic study of the relationships between success in the game and criminal behaviour remains to be undertaken.

This book will go into many editions so it is probably worth mentioning a few corrections and additions for the files. Professional football did not stop in Britain in 1915 during the First World War. It may have ceased in England, but it continued in Scotland for the duration. When Celtic won the European Cup in 1967, the first British team to do so, Rangers reached the final of the Cup Winners Cup only going down narrowly to Bayern Munich. So we need something broader than the genius of Jock Stein and his home-grown heroes to explain that brief recovery of Scottish influence on the game. John Arlott’s Concerning Soccer long predated Brian Glanville’s journalistic awareness of a game outside England. The role of the proto-syndicalist Colin Veitch of Newcastle United in the players’ union before the First World War would be worth further exploration.

The book will be a huge quarry for those who want to try to understand the place of the game in the modern world and how it got there and a stimulus to research for the next generation. There is something to be learned on every page and something to argue with on every second one

* Though Joey Didulica, Australian born keeper, who went to Ajax, then to Austria Vienna, said that there is a great emphasis placed on the use of space and the training sessions are always geared in a way that they are conscious of space. This is particularly so when compared with his experiences in Austria, where there was no such emphasis. All training sessions are done in very tight areas. Very rarely will skill-based drills be undertaken in areas over 20 x 20 metres, it is always very tight. During matches, there is a massive emphasis on making the pitch as big as possible when you are in possession and then contracting the playing field when defending. Joey even used a Dutch word (something like "brekt") to describe how the shape needs to expand when the players are in possession. Flankers drift to the touchlines and the striker sits as deep as possible. The players are then to use this space to outwit their opponents with the close, in-tight skills they have developed. John Didulica, former CEO Australian Professional Footballers’ Association and elder brother of the goalkeeper, now with AZ Alkmaar in Holland. See also ‘His willingness to chase lost causes comes from his experience as a winger at FC Utrecht, a period that also honed his awareness of space. “I play mostly behind the striker and because in England the team hardly play man-to-man defences but with zonal defences, it’s great to find the spaces to play in,”’Ben Lyttleton, ‘Dirk Kuyt’, FourFourTwo, January 2007, p. 84.

Rasic, Rale, The Rale Rasic Story: The Socceroos First World Cup Coach, as told to Ray Gatt, New Holland Publishers, Frenchs Forest, NSW, 2006. ISBN 1741104645, RRP $24.95.

Rale Rasic, the first coach to take an Australian football team to the World Cup finals in 1974 in West Germany has a special place in the history of the world game in this country. To understand the man you have to appreciate that he lost both parents in early childhood and spent more than a decade in orphanages in Yugoslavia and lost contact with his three siblings until he was in his late teens. His memories of time in the orphanages come across as overwhelmingly positive, but there is no doubt that they taught him survival skills, self-reliance and a ruthlessness which enabled him to become a good player and an exceptional coach.

Rasic’s coaching record is in the history books and he makes one brilliant encapsulation of the special problems facing anyone coaching an Australian team in the post-war period. Unlike others overseas who had to chose from a basically homogenous domestic pool, the Australian coach had to be a barman, having to mix the cocktail of different nationalities and styles in one effective team. Mind you he had to act as bouncer as well. Among the influences on him Rasic notes that of Helenio Herrero of Inter Milan whose catenaccio formation oozed the ability to close up a game after taking a narrow lead. Hence Rasic is scathing about Terry Venables’ failure to bring on Milan Ivanovic and prevent the successful resurgence by Iran on that fateful night in 1997 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, when Australia conceded a two-goal lead and hence failed to get to the World Cup in France.

In his foreword, Kevin Sheedy makes play of the fact that Rasic’s Socceroos had to be one of sixteen teams to qualify, whereas now there are 32 places up for grabs. What Sheedy and some commentators fail to note is that, in 1973, 94 teams set out on the journey, 91 competed and 14 were successful. The hosts and champions were already assured of places. In 2005, 171 countries took part vying for 31 spots, with only the hosts already in the final draw. The levelling up in standards among competing countries makes Guus Hiddink’s narrow triumph with the 2006 Socceroos quite impressive, though he had fewer months in charge than Rasic had years.

Much has been made of the fact that Rasic’s team of ‘the greatest players produced in this country’ does not include Mark Viduka and Harry Kewell, but it is arguable that the biggest absent names include Joe Marston, Craig Johnston and Tony Dorigo who either starred before Rasic’s arrival or chose to play in England for English teams (including the national side in Dorigo’s case). Then there were all those unsung heroes of the early days of Australian football at state and national level who seldom got a chance to test themselves against world standard players.

Inevitably the book enables Rasic to pay back some of those with whom he fell out and vent his contempt for the English influence on the game in Australia perpetrated by numerous coaches and administrators. Rasic claims several current coaches are inadequate in various respects. His praise is reserved for non-English coaches, including Les Scheinflug, one of the 1974 Socceroos, who took the Australian Under-17 team to a Youth World Cup final, only losing to Brazil on penalties, an achievement that Rasic ranks as second only to his own World Cup qualification. Others to meet with his approval include ‘Uncle’ Joe Vlasits, whom he succeeded as Australian coach, and Yugoslav legend Drago Sekularac.

The book is presented ‘as told to Ray Gatt’, and Gatt claims authorship even though the book is written in the first person. This makes it hard to be certain what is Rasic and what is Gatt, though the former’s strong opinions and sense of self almost certainly indicate that little appears here which does not come in spirit from the coach himself. As a coach Rasic was seldom one to sit back and let the opposition dictate the game, and he was a master at shutting up shop when things got tight. This time he has got his retaliation in first in what is sure to be a battle in the bookshops in the lead up to Germany 2006.

(This review appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website <www.footballfedvic.com.au> on 27 April 2006.)

Adrian Harvey, Football: The First Hundred Years: The Untold Story, Routledge, London, 2005, 0415350182, 0415350190 (pbk).

Adrian Harvey has set out to rewrite the history of football and indeed of sport in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Based on his Oxford DPhil thesis he has written two books which challenge the prevailing orthodoxy in significant ways. The first was The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain, 1793–1850 and he has followed this with Football: The First Hundred Years: The Untold Story. His focus in the latter is on the origins of the modern game of football and he challenges two widely accepted interpretations. One is that the old forms of folk football were destroyed by the twin forces of puritanism and the industrial revolution, the other that football as we know it was invented in the public schools of early nineteenth century and spread first of all throughout England and later around the world by the former pupils of these schools or people who had been influenced by them. So he tackles head on questions of disruption or continuity on the one hand and invention and transmission on the other. He does so with remorseless use of newspaper and other source materials which reveal the existence and persistence of forms of football in those periods when the popular forms of the game were supposed to have all but disappeared. He also attempts to change the focus of the origins of the modern game from the centre to the regions, particularly Sheffield and (though he does not emphasise this in his interpretation, despite the fact that much of his evidence is drawn from there) Scotland.

More than a decade ago I wrote. ‘The current somewhat inconclusive debate about the origins of soccer in Australia fits into a wider one about the origins of soccer generally, with the majority view still being a top-down cultural diffusion model, in which the founding public school educated Britons gradually exported their game to the lesser breeds without the law, within and beyond the United Kingdom. There is a growing minority perception which seizes on new interpretations of the industrial revolution and the advance of capitalism which suggests that these phenomena did not result, as was once thought, in the total destruction of folk football and similar rough games. Hence, there was a continuity in lower or working class sports and pursuits out of which modern association football grew. The rules and the codification may have come from the scions of the upper classes and from Great Britain, but the explosion of popularity of the game from around the 1880s, in which Australia shared, owed more to the way it was grafted on to existing patterns of activity and transformed by lower orders, colonials and foreigners who already had their football games embedded in their social lives. ’ Earlier still in 1988, Richard Holt posed the question, ‘How far should we see football not as an invention but rather as a form of cultural continuity, especially as far as the traditions of male youth are concerned? Perhaps we have taken on board too eagerly the heroic accounts of the public school men, who founded the Football Association in 1863, and assumed in consequence that traditional football was suppressed lock, stock and barrel during the first half of the nineteenth century to be re-invented and re-popularised in the second’.

What was needed was not more theoretical speculation but hard empirical work in the archives and this Adrian Harvey has done unrepentantly and we are all in his debt. In reply to a generally favourable reviewer Harvey set out his credo. ‘He is quite correct in noting my lack of interest in abstract theorising, typified by my ignoring such concepts as ‘social control’, which I tend to regard as being of limited use. Indeed, on occasion it seems to me that abstract theories are quite harmful and have a tendency to obscure our awareness of what is really going on. This is not to say that such concepts are useless, for they can occasionally help to sharpen our focus. The important thing, so far as I am concerned, is to ensure that our focus is primarily on source material, with the key questions usually being ‘Who is telling me this?’ and ‘why are they telling me this?’ History is essentially a matter of evaluating sources and I am particularly conscious of the limitations of much of the material that was utilised in my book.’

Despite his consciousness of the limitations of his material Harvey has done enough to show that it was not just the rough folk football which survived but rule-bounded and organised and sometimes regular games approximating much more closely to modern Association football than the melées in the villages. This, if it can be fully substantiated, is a vital discovery for it allows for an alternative source of organisation and diffusion of the game from that portrayed by those who believe that the rules flowed down from the upper classes.

Harvey has been engaged in a debate with Eric Dunning on the issue of the influence of the public schools and the Football Association on the emergence of the modern game in the mid-nineteenth century. Harvey argues that the Sheffield Association was much more than a peripheral regional body quickly subsumed by the public school led FA. He provides substantial evidence that Sheffield was the centre of a vibrant football culture and that the involvement of the Sheffield Association more or less saved the FA from collapse. The Sheffield rules were more influential on the progress of the game than the versions put together by the public schools and universities. Dunning has hit back querying facts and interpretations and there is still room for differences of opinion and assessment in these key areas, but the emphasis has at last shifted back to more archival investigation to underpin any interpretative claims which may be advanced in future.

The key areas which need investigation are whether the games reported in newspapers and journals are the tip of the iceberg or approximate to the total number of football games played at any period. The nature of the games being played needs further elucidation, though Harvey has pointed the way with his distinction between the intermittent, rough games of folk football and the more rule-bounded, organised and team structured forms of the game which he has detected. The relative strengths of regional versus national activities need to be teased out as they evolved so that we can be clearer about the dissemination of forms of the game at each level. It is hard to dismiss from one’s mind the features of the tightly structured modern game to appreciate how inchoate and fluid the early football games were. Finally the precise ways in which the rules of the game related to the development of the emerging sport still need to be clarified. Since Allen Guttmann focused debate with his Ritual to Record there has been considerable research and argument about the transition from traditional cultural practices to modern sport. Harvey’s work opens the possibility of much closer examination of the social processes involved in a formative period. It may be that the results of this research may overturn some of the distinctions between what has been labeled traditional and the modern.

So the early history of the world game has been revitalised and the path for improvement in understanding of the processes by which the game emerged can now be explored by those who are prepared to follow Harvey and get the their hands dirty in the quarrying of source material and then interpreting it convincingly.

Roy Hay, ‘British Football, Wogball or the World Game? Towards a social history of Victorian Soccer’, in John O’Hara (ed.), Ethnicity and Soccer in Australia, ASSH Studies in Sports History Number 10, Australian Society for Sports History, Campelltown, 1994, pp. 44-79.

Bill Murray Football. A history of the world game, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1994; Bill Murray, The World’s Game: A history of soccer, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1996 are the classic histories of world soccer, discussing the diffusion of the game in class and geographic terms. The high priest of the cultural diffusion model is John Mangan whose works on muscular christianity and imperialism have been very influential, see for example, J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1986.

For a social structural analysis which stresses the attempts by the authorities to stamp out rough football, see John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 20-37. Hargreaves concludes that many sports did resist attempted emasculation.

See, for example, Neil Tranter, ‘The Chronology of Organised Sport in Nineteenth Century Scotland: A Regional Study I - Patterns’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 7 (No. 2), 1990, pp. 188-203; and ‘II - Causes’, 7 (No. 3), pp. 365-387.

Richard Holt, ‘Football and the urban way of life in Nineteenth Century Britain’, in J A Mangan (ed.), Pleasure, Profit and Proselytism: Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad, 1700-1914, Cass, London, 1988, p. 70.

Adrian Harvey, reply to Rohan McWilliam’s review of The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain, 1793–1850 in the Institute of Historical Research Reviews Section, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/harveyresp.html accessed 12 January 2006.

Largely conducted in the International Journal of the History of Sport. See for example, Adrian Harvey, ‘Curate’s egg pursued by red herrings: a reply to Eric Dunning and Graham Curry,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2004, pp. 127–131; Eric Dunning, ‘Something of a Curate’s Egg: Comments on Harvey’s ‘An Epoch in the Annals of National Sport’ Volume 18, The International Journal of the History of Sport Number 4, December 2001, pages 88–94; Adrian Harvey, ‘An Epoch in the Annals of National Sport’: Football in Sheffield and the Creation of Modern Soccer and Rugby,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport Number 4, December 2001, pages 53–87

For an excellent brief study blending historical evidence and critical theoretical analysis, see Tony Collins, ‘History, Theory and the “Civilizing Process”,’ Sport in History, vo. 25, no. 2, August 2005, pp. 289–306.

Allen Guttmann, From ritual to record: the nature of modern sports, New York, Columbia University Press, 1978; John Bale, Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda, University of Minnesota Press, 2002; John Bale and Mike Cronin, eds, Sport and post-colonialism, Berg, Oxford, 2003;Two articles by Douglas Booth contain some challenging discussion of the theoretical implications of the Guttmann model. Douglas Booth, ‘Theory: Distorting or Enriching Sports History?,’ Sport History Review, 34 ,2003, pp. 1-32; Douglas Booth, ‘Theory: The Foundation of Social Change,’ Sport History Review, 34, 2003, pp. 103-132.

(An edited version of this review will appear as part of a review article, Roy Hay, ' Approaches to Sports History: Theory and Practice', Sporting Traditions, vol. 22, no. 2, May 2006.)

Richard Kreider, The Soccerites, Sports West Media, Cloverdale, Western Australia, 2005, 256 pp., ISBN 0646435213, RRP $24.95: John Harms, The Pearl: Steve Renouf’s Story, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2005, 226 pp., ISBN 0 7022 3536 9, RRP $29.95.

We take the mobility of high-profile sports stars for granted these days. A day after concluding a rapid-fire Ashes and one-day cricket tour of England, Ricky Ponting and his team are back home in Australia. The Socceroos have been and gone to Australia and the Solomon Islands in a ten-day gap in the European football season, where the bulk of the players ply their trade. So it is fascinating to read about the first senior interstate tour by a Western Australian team to New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia in 1909. By ship, train and horse-drawn carriages they travelled to Newcastle, Wollongong, Sydney, Granville, Melbourne and Adelaide, playing ten matches, winning three, drawing five and losing only two. The tourists and their opponents were mainly migrants, or sons of migrants and devotees of the game played under British Association rules.

Richard Kreider has made good use of the normally sparse newspaper reports of the day and a few scraps of memories from descendants of the tourists to show the conviviality of the reception in the eastern states, though, not surprisingly, the turn-out of fans in Victoria was poor compared with the other two states. The book also has many sidelights on Australian social history of the period. It is a good amateur history of a largely amateur sport and a fine quarry for researchers.

The players who took part in the three-month tour, elegantly turned out in dark suits with straw boaters decorated with a swan for official occasions, survived sea-sickness, illness, rough play, cloying mud and a variety of counter-attractions to demonstrate what was possible by those who had a desire to play and promote the game in their day. As the author concludes, rather sadly, their pioneering work was not emulated by the other states, who showed a great reluctance to tour the west, but that is no reason to forget the Western Australian Soccerites of 1909.

John Harms has established himself as one of the finest sports writers in this country and his three volumes of picaresque autobiography, including Loose Men Everywhere, the story of a long-distance Geelong fan, are a delight to read. He was asked to turn his hand to biography and write the story of rugby league star, Steve Renouf, of the Brisbane Broncos, Wigan and Queensland, known variously as Pearl and Bucko to aficionadas of that other code of football.

Renouf grew up in Murgon in rural Queensland in an Aboriginal family and showed his talent as an attacking player from very early days. Advancing through the junior grades he came to the notice of legendary coach Wayne Bennett who was putting together a Brisbane squad to challenge the heartland teams in the Sydney competition. Renouf teamed up with superstars like Alfie Langer, Glen Lazarus and Kevin Walters and, latterly, a very young Darren Lockyer to make the Broncos a marvellous attacking outfit. In State of Origin matches he played alongside one of his own heroes, Mal Maninga, sometimes with success for the Maroons. Renouf’s career was punctuated by Rupert Murdoch’s Super League intervention, from which Renouf benefited financially, and he later played a for a brief period in England, as Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns is doing to great acclaim in 2005.

Steve Renouf faced a degree of discrimination and prejudice in his youth, though much less than his parents and grandparents, especially when he married a non-Aboriginal Australian Elissa Bishop. She turned out to be the force which kept Renouf going when things got ugly or tough inside and outside the game, enabling him to reach the heights his talents warranted.

As a commissioned work about a still young man, whose post-football career in sports administration and Aboriginal affairs is still forming, the book lacks some of Harms’ characteristically quirky and vibrant writing, though it is very perceptive at times and tries hard to explain to those not steeped in the code, the peculiar features which make rugby league the game it is.

This review appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Saturday 8 October 2005, p. 54. A slightly modified version will appear in Sporting Traditions in 2006. © SESA