CHAPTER ONE: Introduction, by Kieran James.

Chapter 1

Introduction

“Although Australian Rules is often referred to as ‘the people’s game’, on account of its broad popularity and appeal, most writings on the history of football pay insufficient attention to individual people, and the stories they tell often lack a human face” (Lionel Frost, Immortals, 2005, p. x).

This book is my memoir, and details my experiences as co-founder of West Perth Football Club’s unofficial cheer squad from 1984 to 1986.[1] West Perth (WPFC) is one of the leading clubs in the Western Australian Football League (WAFL) competition which is generally regarded today as the third best and most senior Australian Rules football (hereafter “Australian Rules”) competition in Australia.[2] The book describes the experience of being a vital member of this 15 to 20-person unofficial grouping of teenagers aged from 8 years to 18 years which sat behind the northern or Technical School end of the ground at West Perth’s home stadium, Leederville Oval, from 1984 to 1986. It is an important part of Western Australian social history as I was part of the final generation to grow up in the pre-West Coast Eagles era (I turned 18-years-old in 1986) when the WAFL was experiencing its glory years.[3] The West Coast Eagles FC joined the new national competition[4], known as the “expanded VFL competition” from 1987-89 and the Australian Football League (AFL) from 1990 onwards. This event forever changed the position of the WAFL which was immediately relegated to being a second-tier league.[5] Average WAFL attendances of around 8,000 per game in 1986 dropped to around 4,000 per game in the first year of the expanded VFL competition (1987). Attendances dropped further still to around 2,000 per game in 1995 when Fremantle Dockers became Western Australia’s second national-league AFL club. This book compares our group with both the limited literature on Victorian Australian Rules cheer squads and the extensive literature on British soccer hooligans, Italian ultras, and other hardcore soccer supporter groups from around the world.

Early writers in soccer hooligan studies used a Marxist approach (Ian Taylor) or a largely functionalist figurational approach based on hooligan firms as an “uncivilized rump” in an otherwise civilized society (Eric Dunning and the Leicester University group of scholars).[6] The academic hooligan literature has been strongly influenced recently by the “anthropological approach” which has challenged the position occupied by the Leicester University School. Leading works using the anthropological approach are Gary Armstrong’s ethnographic study of Sheffield United’s Blades hooligan firm and an Australian study by John Hughson on the Croatian-Australian Bad Blue Boys (BBB) which used to follow Sydney United in Australia’s former National Soccer League (NSL) (1977-2004).[7] The Croatian community’s sister ex-NSL clubs, Melbourne Knights and Sydney United, have ultra-style supporters operating, to a large extent, in the traditions and ethos of the Croatian and Italian ultras whilst also being influenced by English hooligans.[8] Southern and Eastern European ultras groups, historically, have been more organized, more carefully political, more likely to be accepted as a stakeholder group by the club, and more focused on the visual than the typical English hooligan firm. In this regard, France is an interesting case since it is dominated by English-style hooligans in the north and by Italian-style ultras in the south.[9] We now see ultras-style groups emerging in Scotland such as Green Brigade (Celtic) (formed 2006); Motherwell Ultras; and even at League Two (fourth-tier) newcomers Edinburgh City.

Although our West Perth group never used physical violence, and only once was seriously threatened by it (at Bassendean Oval, the home of Swan Districts Football Club), the football hooligan academic anthropological literature emphasizes the importance of an “illusion of violence”[10] even when actual violence does not occur. It defines the hooligan “firm”, a class-for-itself to use the term usually attributed (incorrectly) to Karl Marx, in terms of a weekly ritual performance of heterosexual masculinity where a group of hardcore fans defends its physical turf and the honour of the city and its supporters.[11]

Australian Rules’ cheer squads in the 1980s, when they were less highly regulated by the leagues and the clubs than they are today, clearly were involved in this “macho posturing” that Peter Marsh and John Hughson both term an “illusion of violence”. This meant physically controlling and protecting the area behind the goals at home games unofficially reserved for hardcore elements of the home team’s support and symbolically “invading” the away team’s suburban ground. However, in Australian Rules, the cheer squads rarely attempted to take over the home team’s area or “end” as was a common practice among British hooligan firms in the 1970s. I believe that, at West Perth, our group would have defended its area behind the goals at the northern end of Leederville Oval if any opposing group of fans had attempted to take it. Given this “macho posturing” and “illusion of violence”, I suggest why a group of aboriginal Swan Districts’ supporters objected to our cheer squad taking up its prime position behind the goals at the southern-end of Bassendean Oval only 25-metres from where the most dedicated Swans fans congregate in the famous R.A. McDonald Stand (see Chapter 4).

At grounds like East Fremantle Oval, Fremantle Oval (South Fremantle’s ground), and Bassendean, there is no end of the ground that can be regarded as “the away end” meaning the end that is generally neither loved nor patronized by the home fans. (However, at Bassendean Oval, away supporters often congregate in the Bill Walker Stand which is located immediately to the right of the McDonald Stand when viewed from inside the playing arena.) Both ends at those three grounds in the 1980s were effectively occupied, controlled, and monitored by the home fans, making trips to these grounds by semi-organized groups of away fans uncomfortable if not unpleasant. In the period of the cheer squad’s existence, we never took an organized group with flags to either East Fremantle or Fremantle Oval and only once did we take a group to Bassendean Oval. One of the reasons behind this was travel cost since most members of our group were working-class teenagers and all but three lived in the West Perth geographic district north of the Swan River centred on Balga, Carine, and Tuart Hill.

This book is not a conventional history book of the WPFC. The official history has been written by Brian Atkinson.[12] Instead, it examines primarily the so-called “relations of production”, to use Marx’s term, or, in other words, the nature of social relations within our cheer squad including values, cultural norms, ways of relating, and ethics. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin equated communism to “electrification plus the soviets” in his famous formula[13], where the soviets were the workers’ cells that sprung up in the Russian factories and institutions in the lead up to the 1917 October Revolution. The formula can be related to Marx’s own idea of “forces of production” and “relations of production”.[14] Somewhat crudely, electrification might be said to refer to the forces of production and soviets to the relations of production. In the WAFL setting, the “forces of production” were the operations of the WAFL and its semi-professional clubs with the climax being the weekly games between the clubs. The “relations of production”, in our present context, refers to how people watched the games and supported the teams and the nature of the relationships and the values that surrounded and dictated fan interaction within and across the supporter bases.

Generally speaking, our group’s experience conforms to Armstrong and Hughson’s idea of fluid “post-modern” “neo-tribes” where affiliations are very loose and people can easily adjust their degree of commitment to a group and / or leave the group when their personal life circumstances and interests change. Hughson indicates that few people remained integral parts of hooligan firms in the UK beyond their early-20s although Cass Pennant and Rob Silvester’s book Rolling with the 6.57 Crew suggests that Millwall’s Bushwackers firm probably was an exception in this regard.[15]

As with the UK soccer hooligans, people recognized that joining our cheer squad was totally voluntary, without any of the legal and economic ties that define workplace, marketplace, and institutional relationships. As such, the group members were always careful not to “invade” another member’s outside life, i.e. his life outside the group at home, school or work. In this pre-mobile phone and internet era group members rarely contacted each other by phone or met during the week. Group members rarely inquired if someone stopped attending football games. This was not because they did not care but because members recognized that they had no moral authority over another member’s life.

Group members only met five times outside match days during the 1984-86 period. Four of these meetings occurred during regular football seasons. Group members met twice on Sundays to attend Channel Seven’s “World of Football” programme telecasts held within football club social rooms (once at West Perth and once at Swan Districts); once members met at Perth Football Club at Lathlain Park on a weeknight evening to prepare a banner for the forthcoming state match; and once members attended the Sandover Medal Night in 1984 at the now demolished Perth Entertainment Centre (the only time that the WAFL fairest-and-best player award has been opened to the public). Lastly, on one other occasion, three group members (Mike C., Pete C., and me) went to a season-opening one-day cricket match at the WACA Ground.

When the cheer squad began to break up, in the first few games of 1986, members simply stopped attending games or they attended games but did not sit with the group. No-one made any effort to “go against the grain” and revive or resuscitate the ailing squad. The same thing happened around 1987 at Portsmouth Football Club’s 6.57 Crew, as recounted by Pennant and Silvester, when former hooligans found that soccer had lost its appeal and the drug scene became the new object of fashion.[16] Pennant and Silvester state that the prime years of the 6.57 Crew, named after the time that the train carrying fans to away matches left Portsmouth Station, should be regarded as 1981 to 1986.[17] This suggests that the time of the firm’s demise can be pinpointed fairly precisely. Nowadays “Pompey” (Portsmouth FC) firm members only get together for commemorative occasions or for major games against rivals such as Millwall or Cardiff. West Ham United’s (in)famous Inter City Firm (ICF) likewise no longer exists today. No-one officially disbanded either soccer firm; people just stopped actively identifying with the firms and with their past histories on match days. West Ham United ICF’s Cass Pennant views this as a generational thing. He argues that soccer hooliganism was a product of the 1970s and 1980s and soon a new generation would arise which has no memory of the hooliganism of that time. Although news reports of hooliganism overseas will continue to revive local memories (such as Russian hooligans at the 2016 European Championships in France), in the UK it is understood that hooliganism was a product of its time. Few people want it revived.

The West Perth Cheer Squad, I believe, disbanded also as a consequence of new social and occupational divides within the group becoming apparent as well as people’s interests changing. For example, I had left school and begun university study; Mark “Thommo” Thompson had left school to become a plasterer; and others had also gone their various ways. I remember talking with Thommo about his plastering work on the Parmelia Hotel job during one Leederville Oval match in 1986 before the cheer squad faded away. I had also drifted apart from school-friend Mike Blewett as high-school had ended for us in November 1985. He may not even have returned to the cheer squad for 1986. We became a little like the punk-band the Clash without Mick Jones! When group members were all still at school (or most of us), any social or economic divisions within the group did not seem important. Group members all bonded together in an egalitarian atmosphere to support the club and to defend the honour of the team and the district. Significantly all but three members lived within the WPFC geographic district and so members could reasonably think of defending the district and its honour through the cheer squad. 

The cheer squad certainly had a “macho aspect” or an “illusion of violence”. The group was a relatively intimidating bunch; all of the group members were male (except for the four-year-old female niece or cousin of the C. brothers); the group had 15-20 committed members at its peak; and three-quarters of the group members were aged 14 to 18. In addition to the committed group of 20, who knew all of the others by name, there were other people who followed the cheer squad or sat with us during major games.

At one neutral-venue game, at Subiaco Oval[18], cheer squad members sat with another West Perth unofficial supporter group, which exists to this day, known as “Grandstand Falcons” which used to then congregate at the top of the Leederville grandstand at home games. At this neutral Subiaco Oval game, our cheer squad sat in front of the Grandstand Falcons with a third section of seats in front of the cheer squad reserved for our flags and banners. Altogether there would have been over 50 people there that day across both groups combined. The noise the combined group made under the grandstand roof, on the second- (middle-) tier of the three-tier stand behind the Fremantle-end goals, was magnificent when magnified by the echoes. We sang the Grandstand Falcons’ powerful song “This Time (Get It Right)” about England’s 1982 World Cup hopes (with England changed to West Perth and the “white” dropped from “red, white, and blue”).[19] This song summed up perfectly people’s emotions at the time because it had been a decade since West Perth had last appeared in a grand final and hopes had been dashed on quite a few occasions. In hindsight, this was our cheer squad’s greatest day.

This book also considers the cheer squad’s chants and songs (see Chapter 4) as well as the racial or ethnic aspect of supporting a team commonly known as the “Garlic Munchers”, a name with Italian connotations, which was, during that era, in the very unusual situation of having a Chinese-Australian player as captain in the shape of long-serving rover Les Fong (284 games played, 1973-87).[20]

This book also discusses the nature of cheer squad and ordinary fan support for each of the WAFL teams (Chapter 4) and part of Chapter 4 is devoted to West Perth’s on-field performance from 1984 to 1986. That part-chapter within Chapter 4 also looks at some of the best and most loved West Perth players of the era. The team had not played in a grand-final since 1975 but pride in the club meant that, during the period from 1976 to 1986, West Perth never finished last and in the 1980s it never finished in the bottom two.

I believe that West Perth was driven more by pure confidence and emotion than some of the other clubs (which were more clinical and consistent) and, at Leederville Oval during the cheer squad’s era, West Perth was often a formidable team regardless of the opponent.

A study of the comprehensive statistics section of Atkinson’s It’s a Grand Old Flag shows that, in the era between the premiership in 1975 and the introduction of West Coast Eagles in 1987 (termed the “drought era” by Atkinson), West Perth often beat the eventual premier team two or three times a year during the qualifying rounds. For example, the club achieved two or three wins a season against Perth in 1977; East Perth in 1978; Swan Districts in 1982 and 1984; and East Fremantle in 1985. As such, the club as a whole during the drought era could be termed an under-performer, although arguably it never had the true superstars like Cable or Wiley or Rioli or Mainwaring or Moss or the Krakouer brothers or Hunter needed to move it from fourth (1985) or third (1982) into second or first. The cheer squad mirrored the team in spirit. I believe that the group possessed a larrikin charm, good humour, warmth, and a good attitude to life. We were all relaxed but committed. Nearly all group members sat with the group for every game during its lifetime.

The cheer squad’s favourite player was Phil Bradmore (139 games played, 1981-88)[21], a maverick character with long arms and shaved head (many years before a shaved head became an obligatory fashion accessory for the over-35s). Bradmore, restless and wild, each match day used to prowl vast stretches of territory centring on his centre-half-forward position. The group members loved his exaggerated gestures and his body language; his Victorian sophistication (he had played a few games at Footscray); and his perpetual good-natured teasing grin. He really looked like he was playing for the camera in an era when most WAFL matches were not televised. One of the cheer squad’s favourite chants was “Phil Bradmore”, followed by the standard three claps, whenever Bradmore scored a goal or did anything impressive. Sometimes the chant would break out for no obvious reason at all. Bradmore affirmed a part of the group members themselves as the members were mostly mavericks and misfits. Bradmore was an above-average and arguably a brilliant player who was authentic enough to allow his true character and personality to shine through on the field. Brian Atkinson comments as follows about Phil Bradmore:

“I always thought that Phil Bradmore was underrated (so did [1982-84 West Perth coach] Dennis Cometti). I thought he was closer to ‘brilliant’ than to ‘above average’. He was different and ‘clowned around’ a bit. He played the very difficult position of centre half forward. He was an outstanding mark, a very very good kick, and his accurate creative long handball to players streaming downfield was fantastic. He kicked 193 goals and played in the NSW State of Origin team at the 1988 Australian Football Championships in 1988 in Adelaide. It must have been a good team because it defeated the John Todd coached Western Australian State Team”[22]

Another of the cheer squad’s favourite players was John “Duckie” Duckworth (117 games played, 1977-78, 1981-83, 1985)[23], a strongly-built ruckman or key defender and an ex-Fitzroy (VFL/AFL) player, who missed the 1984 season but made an impressive comeback in 1985 at the age of 35 under new coach John Wynne. Vietnam veteran Duckworth was the physical presence of the West Perth sides of the mid- to late-1970s and the early-1980s. He would bring some strength and machismo into West Perth teams which were badly needed especially during heated encounters with arch-enemy East Perth. Despite his reputation as a tough player, Magarey Medallist Duckworth had a charm, a sense of humour, and a sense of ethics that East Perth’s strong-armed players of that era arguably lacked. The “Central District” page at Full Points Footy, a South Australian website authored by football traditionalist John Devaney, writes as follows about John Duckworth:

“Vietnam veteran John Duckworth became Centrals’ second Magarey Medallist in 1979 after a barnstorming debut season with the Dogs. Duckworth was the latest in a series of outstanding West Australians to represent the club, and although he only played a total of 42 games over two seasons at Elizabeth his impact on the club as well as on the game in South Australia in general went well beyond this”.[24]

The same webpage lists Duckworth as one of the top nine best ever Central District footballers in a list which starts off with the great Hawthorn (VFL/AFL) rover John “The Rat” Platten. Part of this humble, charming, and warm West Perth ethos that the cheer squad members identified with in the 1980s could be said to have been a legacy of the West Perth greats of the 1960s and 1970s, Bill Dempsey, Mel Whinnen, and Graham “Polly” Farmer, all of whom were fair ball-players and committed team-men who never wanted to give undue attention to their own efforts. Years later I would often drive along The Graham Farmer Freeway, actually a tunnel for most of its length, which follows the same pathway that Farmer took from East Perth to West Perth, and silently offer my respects to the great man. Long-serving players John Duckworth, Les Fong, and Geoff Hendriks (170 games played, 1975-85)[25] linked the West Perth of the mid-1980s with the West Perth of the mid-1970s. In the same way, the arrogance and aggression of former captain Mal Brown lingered on in the East Perth teams of the late-1970s.   

Lastly, most UK soccer hooligans, including Bill Gardner and Cass Pennant of West Ham United’s ICF and Rob Silvester of Portsmouth’s 6.57 Crew, although they regret their involvement in certain incidents, claim that their years with the firms were the best of their lives and that overall it was an experience that they now look back on with extreme fondness. I can say the same about my time as co-founder of the West Perth unofficial cheer squad that operated during the years of 1984-86. Brian Atkinson references this cheer squad as follows: “I certainly remember the support and enthusiasm coming from behind the goals, but because it was unofficial nothing was retained on the record”.[26]

With the WAFL now no longer a first-tier competition[27], and average crowds having stabilized in this post-Fremantle Dockers era at around 2,000 people (compared to average crowds of 8,000 to 10,000 people during the 1980s), this book is an important social and sporting history of a special element of Western Australian life during a special era. The days of the 1980s will never be repeated. That was an era when the most watched and followed Australian Rules competition in Western Australia was one owned and operated by Western Australians. Now Western Australia is only a distant outpost of Melbourne in football terms and Perth’s two AFL national-league clubs are highly corporatized and generic. The AFL monitors and controls the entire football world like the communist party in a dictatorship, a trend which only worsened under the leadership tenure of one Andrew Demetriou. The atmospheric concrete terraces and grassy bank at Subiaco Oval are long gone (as are most of the Aboriginal supporters clearly visible behind the city-end goals on grand final DVDs from the 1970s) and supporting high-level football is now very much a commodified and financially expensive pursuit. Football in Western Australia will never be the same.

As the Full Points Footy website comments about South Australia’s entry into the AFL in 1991 through the Adelaide Crows FC: “[This was] a development ... [which] contributed significantly to the SANFL’s transition from being the ‘shop window’ of the state’s football talent to little more than a breeding ground for the AFL”.[28] The same webpage goes on to add that: “[T]hrough no fault of its own, the SANFL had in a few short years been irreversibly transformed from a major player on the Australian football stage to an incidental cameo of comparatively negligible importance and interest”.[29] The SANFL and WAFL are in identical positions of having once been tier-one football leagues in their respective states but having now dropped down to being second-tier competitions.[30] The former East Perth and Richmond player and South Fremantle coach Mal Brown made the following comments about the sad decline of the WAFL in the post-West Coast Eagles era:

“Sadly, from Perth’s [Football Club] point of view the West Coast Eagles were hovering overhead, and came into being the next season – and that was the end of an era. The West Australian domestic competition took a nosedive from which it can never recover lost status or spectator appeal.

“We have produced one mighty football team but to the detriment of the competition that had flown the Aussie Rules flag with distinction for many years. ... The shift of the power base from the domestic competition to the Eagles literally decimated the local competition – those opportunists [in control of the Eagles early on] gave no thought to the future”.[31]

I can accept that most Western Australian-based football supporters prefer the status quo or at least view it as “inevitable” (and a more discouraging word is yet to be invented). However, others, such as me, look back at what Perth football had in the late-1970s and early-1980s, in terms of the WAFL at its peak, and think how could we have been so silly to throw it all away? Those who would like to dare imagine a national competition other than the AFL remember fondly the National Football League’s Wills Cup series of 1976 (revived, to some extent, from 2011-14 by the Foxtel Cup national competition for second-tier clubs).

The Full Points Footy website also makes some important observations about the great traditions of clubs such as South Fremantle and Swan Districts compared to new clubs such as West Coast Eagles and Fremantle Dockers. It is worth quoting the relevant paragraph in full:

“In 1993, the widespread popular perception was that the status of clubs like Swans and South had been diminished by the emergence of a locally-based AFL club, the West Coast Eagles.  Within two years there would be further erosion of status - or so it was widely contended - after the arrival on the scene of a second West Australian AFL side, Fremantle.  Whether or not you agree with this viewpoint probably depends on your definition of the word ‘status’.  However, one way in which newcomers like the Eagles and Dockers are clearly inferior to the likes of Swan Districts and South Fremantle is in terms of tradition.  All WAFL clubs other than Peel Thunder have traditions deriving from decades of aspiration, frustration, achievement and despair, whereas clubs like West Coast and Fremantle are still fumbling towards the basic sense of identity that is needed before any genuine sense of tradition can develop.  Moreover, with games like their round 16 clash in 1993 at Bassendean Oval, Swan Districts and South Fremantle are continuing to build on and enrich both their own unique traditions, and that of the sport of Australian football as a whole.  Long may it continue to be so”.[32]

Furthermore, the same website comments pertinently that:

“The sport of Australian football needs clubs like Claremont (and Subiaco) every bit as much as it needs the West Coast Eagles, or Essendon, or Collingwood. Indeed, without the likes of Claremont, Subiaco, Central District, Norwood and so forth, the likes of West Coast, Collingwood, Essendon, Adelaide etc. could not exist, and neither, arguably, would the sport of Australian football”.[33]

Very few Western Australian football supporters, and perhaps only a slightly higher percentage of South Australians, would give much more than lip-service to the above proposition today. Despite this, it is the position unashamedly adopted by me as football traditionalist. I agree with 27-year-old Kova, leader of traditional soccer club Melbourne Knights’ hooligan firm MCF, who makes the following relevant comments:

“Another thing MCF stands for is traditional football; football for football’s sake. ... That [corporatization trend] is a massive [object of] hatred for us. We think a club should be formed organically, not just by five guys in suits. ... They say soccer is a business [but] it’s not. I support Melbourne Croatia; I’ve been here since day zot. I don’t want to support a plastic club”.[34]

This book aims for a writing style that is accessible to the wider public but still academically rigorous. It also draws upon the memories of the other cheer-squad co-founder, Mike Blewett, based on personal conversations I had with him in Kalgoorlie on 14 July 2011. Mike supplies a key story of the cheer squad’s heated confrontation with the Swan Districts’ ruckman-enforcer of the 1980s Ron Boucher. This is one as yet untold story from the heated and spiteful clashes between West Perth and Swan Districts during the 1980s.

As an author I was personally influenced by Nick Hornby’s best-selling autobiographical account of his life as an Arsenal supporter in Fever Pitch.[35] Hornby’s opening section in Fever Pitch, where he describes the alienation he experienced eating Monday night dinners in lonely airport hotels with his divorced father, certainly gives his book an early dose of grim social-realism and he captures the reader’s interest early on. Hornby’s book is a tragic fan’s reminisces of life as an Arsenal supporter. He recounts moving into a home near the Arsenal soccer ground at Highbury and recalls his disappointment that the area had moved on and few supporters of the club could be seen in its streets. He expected men at every house to open their doors in perfect synchronization at 2.45pm on home match days and then all walk down the footpath together to the ground. In Marxist terms it could be said that Hornby then realized that he had previously “reified” his idealized perceptions of the Finsbury Park district around Highbury by sub-consciously removing the imagined world in his mind from the actual “out-there” reality. The world of the soccer supporters who inhabited Highbury on match days had also become increasingly divorced from the actual life of the surrounding Finsbury Park district.

We also saw these demographic and identity issues arise in West Perth’s controversial move to Arena Joondalup from Leederville Oval in 1994 and issues of West Perth’s identity have been brought to the forefront of many people’s consciousness because of this move. Can you relocate a club and keep its spirit and identity? Can West Ham United’s soul survive its 2016 move from Upton Park? The fact that arch-rival East Perth has now taken over the hallowed turf at Leederville Oval is a distasteful fact for some old-time West Perth supporters including me. Mike B. claims that the WPFC has “detached itself from its community”[36] because of its relocation to the far northern suburbs which are culturally, socially, and demographically very different from the area around Leederville Oval. West Perth has had a multicultural identity since the Second World War (much like South Fremantle) and its Italian, Greek, and Croatian players and supporters earned it the racist tag of “Garlic Munchers”. Can the club keep this multicultural identity after moving to a very-white and very-British area such as Joondalup and surrounds where half the population speaks in an English accent and stickers supporting various lower-division English soccer clubs adorn so many car windows?

I have also been influenced by the books written by West Ham United ICF lead men, Bill Gardner anJud Cass Pennant, and Celtic Soccer Crew’s John O’Kane.[37] I hope that this book can be seen as having been written in the same spirit, by someone who is both a football fan and an academic researcher.

The chapter of his book Good Afternoon Gentlemen, the Name’s Bill Gardner that the lead ICF man Bill Gardner (ably assisted by Cass Pennant) devotes to his favourite West Ham United players over the colourful era of the ICF demonstrates that not all soccer hooligans were stupid people nor did they all lack a genuine interest in the actual games of soccer.[38] As the Amazon customer reviewer of Gardner’s book Peter H. Burns writes: “[h]is book exceeds the genre's standards because he actually speaks about the game and its players as much as the aggro that occurred off the pitch. Most of these [other] books have very little to say about the [actual] game at all”.[39] Similarly, in this book many of the great and not-so-great West Perth players of the mid-1980s are recalled as well as many of the stars from rival clubs.

In the next chapter, I tie in my discussion of the West Perth cheer squad with the academic literature in the disciplines of sociology and cultural studies that have explored the English, European, and world “soccer hooliganism” of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Readers not interested in soccer hooliganism and / or with academic approaches to this topic may prefer to skip the next chapter.

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[1] A cheer squad is a semi-organized group of hardcore supporters (typically teenagers) which sits in the same strategic place at home games and which supports the team through chants, songs, flags, and banners. Cheryl Critchley documents that the first Australian Rules cheer squad was formed at VFL/AFL club Richmond in 1959. Critchley, C. (2010), Our Footy: Real Fans vs Big Bucks (Melbourne: Wilkinson Publishing), p. 17.

[2] Since the entry of Swan Districts into the WAFL in 1934 the only new club to enter the league has been Peel Thunder in 1997, which increased the total number of WAFL clubs from eight to nine.

[3] Regarding Perth Glory soccer supporters, as opposed to Australian Rules’ supporters in Perth, see Brabazon, T. (1998), “What’s the story Morning Glory? Perth Glory and the imagining of Englishness”, Sporting Traditions, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 53-66.

[4] Frost, L. (2005), Immortals: Football People and the Evolution of Australian Rules (Melbourne: John Wiley & Sons), p. 277.

[5] Ibid., p. 234.

[6] Hughson, J. (2002), “Australian soccer’s ‘ethnic tribes’: a new case for the carnivalesque”, in Dunning, E., Murphy, P., Waddington, I. and Astrinakis, A. E. (Eds.), Fighting Fans: Football Hooliganism as a World Phenomenon (Dublin: University College Press), p. 41, emphasis original.

[7] Armstrong, G. (1998), Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score, paperback edition (Oxford: Berg); Hughson, J. (1997a), “Football, folk dancing and fascism: diversity and difference in multicultural Australia”, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 167-86; Hughson, J. (1997b), “The Bad Blue Boys and the ‘magical recovery’ of John Clarke”, in Armstrong, G. and Giulianotti, R. (Eds.), Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football (London and New York: Berg), Chapter 12, pp. 239-59; Hughson, J. (1999), “A tale of two tribes: expressive fandom in Australian soccer’s A-league”, Sport in Society, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 10-30; Hughson, J. (2000), “The boys are back in town: soccer support and the social reproduction of masculinity”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 8-23; Hughson, “Australian soccer’s ‘ethnic tribes’”.

[8] Author’s group interview with Pave Jusup, Kova, and Sime of MCF hooligan firm at Melbourne Knights, Sunshine North, 11 January 2011; Mignon, P. (2002), “Another side to French exceptionalism: football without hooligans?” in Dunning, E., Murphy, P., Waddington, I. and Astrinakis, A. E. (Eds.), Fighting Fans: Football Hooliganism as a World Phenomenon (Dublin: University College Press), pp. 62-74; Roversi, A. and Balestri, C. (2002), “Italian ultras today: change or decline?” in Dunning, E., Murphy, P., Waddington, I. and Astrinakis, A. E. (Eds.), Fighting Fans: Football Hooliganism as a World Phenomenon (Dublin: University College Press), pp. 131-42.

[9] Mignon, “Another side to French exceptionalism”.

[10] Marsh, P. (1978), Aggro: the Illusion of Violence, hardcover edition (London: J M Dent & Sons); Hughson, “Australian soccer’s ‘ethnic tribes’”, p. 40.

[11] Armstrong, Knowing the Score, p. 148.

[12] Atkinson, B. A. (2008), It’s a Grand Old Flag (Joondalup: West Perth Football Club).

[13] Vladimir Lenin cited in Slaughter, P. (1975), Marxism & the Class Struggle (London: New Park Publications), Chapter VII; available online: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/slaughte.htm [accessed 23 August 2011]; Souvarine, B. (1939), Stalin: a Critical Survey of Bolshevism, James, C. L. R. (Trans.) (London: Alliance Book Corp. Longman, Green and Co.), Chapter VIII; available online: http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/souvar/works/stalin/ch08.htm [accessed 23 August 2011]; Stalin, J. V. (1976), “The results of the first five-year plan: Report delivered at the Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission

of the C.P.S.U.(B.) January 7, 1933”, in Problems of Leninism (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press), pp. 578-630; available online: http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/RFFYP33.html [accessed 23 August 2011]; Vattimo, G. (2010), “Weak communism?” in Douzinas, C. and Žižek, S. (Eds.), The Idea of Communism (London and New York: Verso), pp. 205-7.

[14] Marx, K. H. (1976), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, Fowkes, B. (Trans.) (London: Penguin Classics), p. 1065; Marx, K. H. (1977), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface (Moscow: Progress Publishers); available online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm [accessed 23 August 2011].

[15] Pennant, C. (2003), Congratulations, you have just met the I.C.F. (West Ham United) (London: John Blake Publishing); Pennant, C. (2008), Cass (London: John Blake Publishing); Pennant, C. and R. Silvester (2004), Rolling with the 6.57 Crew: the True Story of Pompey’s Legendary Football Fans, paperback edition (London: John Blake Publishing).

[16] Pennant and Silvester, Rolling with the 6.57 Crew.

[17] Ibid.

[18] This was the Round 13 (30 June) 1984 West Perth versus South Fremantle match, according to my 1984 season notes compiled during 1984. The WAFL Online website states that the official attendance was 10,496.

[19] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk9LzuoBTWk [accessed 18 February 2017].

[20] Atkinson, It’s a Grand Old Flag, p. 356.

[21] Ibid., p. 350.

[22] Brian Atkinson, personal e-mail communication to the author dated 19 November 2011.

[23] Atkinson, It’s a Grand Old Flag, p. 355.

[24] Devaney, J., Full Points Footy website, http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/Central_District.htm [accessed 22 December 2010]. The website can now be found at http://australianfootball.com/

[25] Atkinson, It’s a Grand Old Flag, p. 360.

[26] Brian Atkinson, personal e-mail communication to the author dated 9 December 2010.

[27] Frost, Immortals, p. 234.

[28] Full Points Footy website, http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/central_district_part_2.htm [accessed 22 December 2010].

[29] Ibid.

[30] Frost, Immortals, p. 234.

[31] Brown, M. and B. Hansen (1994), Mal Brown & Mongrels I’ve Met (Mt Waverley: Brian Edward Hansen), pp. 179, 188.

[32] Full Points Footy website, http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/cliffhanger_at_bassendean.htm [accessed 23 December 2010].

[33] Full Points Footy website, http://www.fullpointsfooty.net/Claremont_Part_Two.htm [accessed 5 January 2011].

[34] Group interview, 11 January 2011.

[35] Hornby, N. (2009), Fever Pitch (Melbourne: Penguin Australia).

[36] Personal interview with the author, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 14 July 2011.

[37] Gardner, B. (2006), Good Afternoon Gentlemen, the Name’s Bill Gardner, with C. Pennant (London: John Blake Publishing); Pennant, Congratulations; O’Kane, J. (2006), Celtic Soccer Crew: what the hell do we care? (London: Pennant Books).

[38] Gardner, Good Afternoon Gentlemen.

[39] Peter H. Burns quote cited at Amazon.com [posted 24 October 2008, accessed 8 October 2013].