New Books In Sports

Today we are joined by Trevor Thompson, a journalist who has reported on association football in Australia and around the world since the 1980s. He is also the author of Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia, and World Football (Fair Play Publishing, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the limitation of Australia’s connection with British football in the interwar period, Australia’s Asian football connections, and the future for Australian football in the Asia-Pacific. In Playing for Australia, Thompson investigates the Asian context of some of Australia’s earliest international soccer matches. He notes that Australia’s engagement with Asian football did not start in with their adherence to the Asian Football Confederation in 2006. Instead, Thompson illustrates the long durée history of Australian connections in Asia-Pacific football. In 1922, Australia competed in their first internationals against New Zealand. The next year, a side from China visited Australia touring Queensland, New South W