Football and War: Australia and Vietnam 1967-1972 – Roy Hay

Sometimes I find a very niche football book on a second-hand book shelf. When I do, I wonder if it would make suitable fodder for review. When I saw Football and War: Australia and Vietnam 1967-1972 by Roy Hay nestled tightly between two hardbacks and barely visible in the shadow of the bowing shelf above it, I knew that it deserved to be given the light of day.

The book—its cover coloured with that familiar Australian sport green of Pantone 348C—possesses a frailty suggestive of self-publishing. It’s a wafer of a book that seeks to describe a forgotten part of national lore in a sport that has fought inwards on itself in civil war as much as it has fought outwards on other codes for recognition in Australia. Football and War—now this was niche, and eminently reviewable. It’s time to put on my green and gold anorak.

Football and War by Roy Hay (one of Australia’s most well-respected and eminent footballing and sporting historians, and Football Australia 2025 Hall of Fame inductee alongside Tim Cahill and Sharon Black) is about the Australian national team’s trips to south-east Asia from 1967-1972 during the height of the Vietnam War. The team played a number of Asian confederacy teams in this span of time, and played many of the games in Saigon as a means for the Australian military in Vietnam “to use football as a vehicle to bridge the cultural divide between themselves and the local population”.

Although the veracity of the trips’ diplomatic function and success are under question in Football and War, through Hay’s thorough research, he portrays a portentous nexus of tour success, embedded team camaraderie, and trial by fire across five years that contributed to the team’s qualification for the 1974 World Cup and helped to inch the footballing needle closer into Australian popular consciousness. The 1967-72 period was one of great significance for the national team, and deserving of the lofty appellation of ‘the missing part of the national narrative’.

“The Australian military in Vietnam had begun to use football as a vehicle to bridge the cultural divide between themselves and the local population. So, the Australian involvement in the tournament could build on that. The conditions in Saigon in 1967 were not conducive to soccer diplomacy, however” (pg. 20)

*Johnny Warren in action against New Zealand in Saigon.*

Hay explores several elements of this now-found, still-unheralded, and long dusted-over missing part in precise detail. Aside from Australia’s glut of wins against other national teams (South Vietnam, South Korea, and Singapore, among others) and local teams (Kowloon Bus Company, anyone?) that led to much fanfare and esprit de corps between players, administrators, and journalists, the players were playing alongside very clear and present dangers on the high-grass pitches of Vietnam. Hay relates anecdotes of partisan local crowds cheering Australia on, and beer-swilling Australian servicemen on-leave cheering the team on even louder; Vietcong intentions of bombing a building where the Australian team was staying; and how amongst the sound of gunfire and artillery in the area, the players were deeply aware of Vietcong match spectators who enjoyed the games enough to lay down their guns for ninety minutes.

“…two Vietcong carrying explosives had been captured half a block from the hotel. Under torture, they said that they intended to blow up the South Koreans who were billeted a floor below the Australian soccer players in the Golden Building” (pg. 22)

Hay thoroughly analyses the costs of the tours, from both political and financial standpoints. He draws upon reliable, first-hand sources to add weight to his observations. One of these sources was the former PM, the late Malcolm Fraser, who combed through his personal archives for a diplomatic basis for the 1967-72 trips. The fascinating player and staff anecdotes and political intrigue aside, however, Football and War reads absolutely as dry as chips. There is a cerebral detachment from the topic that is off-putting in places. Hay’s professorial tone reads like an annual report or a Wikipedia entry, rather than a narrative history. The short length of Football and War facilitates an expediency that allows for brief analyses that provide little connective tissue between chapters. As such, the book is an easy read, but not necessarily a read to remember. This is an important point for me.

As a millennial born a full ten years after the Fall of Saigon, my popular consciousness of the Vietnam War has been bounded by Hollywood portrayals, its zeitgeist of protest music, and a brief bus trip through areas of Hội An. Closer to my cultural and national identity, Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’, the 1979 film The Odd Angry Shot, and my father’s vague re-telling of his birthday possibly being plucked out for national service, have informed my cultural understanding of Australia’s role in the Vietnam War.I’m probably not alone in knowing more about Australia’s efforts in WWI (Gallipoli) and WW2 (Kokoda Trail) than its role in the Vietnam War. I recognise this as a personal shortcoming—not striving to find out more about events that deeply affected the lives of Baby Boomers; in whose ranks I can count my parents, uncles, and aunts.

This is why I found Football and War to be a bridge for my deeper understanding of the Vietnam War from a cultural identity context. The intersections of conflict, politics, sport, and society that occurred during the Australian national team’s trips to Asia across 1967-1972 offer up a grand opportunity for a longer historical treatment in print. Football and War, in its brevity, perhaps passes up the chance to bring the remarkable story of the 1967-1972 tours to a public that responded so well to Johnny Warren’s Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters in 2002. Interest certainly exists in the 1967-1972 tours. The Socceroos website has a few articles and interviews about the tours, and articles by Richard Cooke and Les Murray can still be read online. The following extract, from Murray’s article, describes the riot after the Socceroos defeated South Vietnam:

“When the team finally left the stadium, its bus was pelted with rocks. Windows were broken. Young men representing Australia, part-time footballers who worked as tailors, used car salesmen and milkmen, were in fear for their lives. Johnny Warren spoke to me about this event a lot. He was very proud whenever he did. He was proud of ‘the boys’, the sacrifices they made and the spirit they founded. He even suggested that the Socceroos of 1967 had a right to march in the Anzac Day parades, and he had a point.”

From this perspective, the events of Football and War become as much a ‘missing part of the national narrative’ in an Australian historical and cultural context, as in a footballing context. With the 1967-72 tour members yet to receive the right to march in Anzac Day parades, a 2021 article by Chris Curulli sums up how the 1967 tour was consistent with the cultural values that still hold strong today: mateship, persistence, endurance, determination, and sacrifice. Not picking up a weapon should not preclude the members of the 1967-72 tours from reflecting these qualities.

“The Australians played 10 games on that tour and won them all. The camaraderie in the face of adversity was an important element in the mindset that eventually helped the Australians qualify for the World Cup in 1974” (pg. 42)

Describing something as ‘admirable’ can come across as snide. When I call Hay’s work in Football and War here as ‘admirable’, I in no way mean it to be snide. I use admirable here in the sense that Hay has produced a work of merit within the form and length he has confined himself within. But where the brief taste inspires fascination, so it also easily leaves the palate dry. We look to the past to explain the present, and after being so blissfully drunk on the analysis of our drought-breaking 2006 World Cup qualification, similar analysis and extended treatment should be afforded to the pioneering efforts of the 1967-72 tours to instill that teak-like resilience into the latter-day players. Football and War’s brevity hints at a much greater potential left restrained.

In uncovering something that has been ‘missing’ from public attention or inclusion in national sporting lore, Football and War briefly takes the story out of the archives rather than letting it breathe long enough to be well-remembered.

STARS: 3.5/5

UNDER 20: A rigorous retrospective of pioneering Socceroos who brought some cooling footballing diplomacy to the raging heat of the Vietnam War.

FULL-TIME SCORE: The quality of players on the pitch notwithstanding, there is not much to take away from the 0-0 draw that leaves supporters ruing missed opportunities.

RELATED READING: Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters by Johnny Warren (2002); A History of Football in Australia by Roy Hay and Bill Murray (2016)

Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game – Ian Herbert

You’ve probably seen or heard that Ryan Reynolds’ and Rob McElhenney’s ownership of Wrexham has propelled the club to trophy glory, commercial success, and into American popular consciousness. Welcome to Wrexham, the fly-on-the-wall documentary series and cultural phenomenon that charts Wrexham’s startling rise from National League to Championship over four entertaining seasons, addresses the cynicism of modern-day club ownership by thumbing its nose at PR-massage jobs like All or Nothing.

And if you haven’t seen or heard about it—perhaps that rock that you’ve been living under needs some lifting. For Welcome to Wrexham is stirring viewing, and deserves your attention.

Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game by Ian Herbert is a well-researched and straight-man foil companion piece to Welcome to Wrexham. There is little of the charming snark and wit of the documentary series in Tinseltown, but through Herbert (a Wrexham fan and respected Daily Mail journalist), we can learn more about the club and the city’s history to fully flesh out the angles of anxiety, faded glory, missed chances, and tragedy that haven’t been given the Disney treatment in Welcome to Wrexham.

“Covid’s arrival might have saved Wrexham from relegation but its refusal to go away took what little hope there was left. The turnstile money disappeared, along with the perimeter-board advertisers and the broadcast revenue from occasional live matches on BT Sport. The water and electricity were switched off, the groundsman was paid a retainer to keep out intruders but the turf was no longer cultivated and weeds took over the ground.” (pg. 21)

Herbert writes affectionately about his beloved Wrexham whilst acknowledging the city’s working-class history that is greatly coloured by tragedy. This is a city very obviously under the cosh and living off the fumes of past footballing and industrial glories. Tinseltown’s stories of drug use, juvenile delinquency, and matchday hooliganism underlie the homely football chats over coffee, slow motion redemption shots, and charming stoicism that Welcome to Wrexham routinely serves up.

Tinseltown covers Wrexham’s 2021-23 seasons (which correspond with Season 1 and 2 of Welcome to Wrexham). Familiarity with the documentary series quickly helps us to recognise the knockabout characters around the city (Wayne Jones and Wayne Clarke), the pragmatic heads in the clubrooms (Shaun Harvey, Kevin Mulholland), and the breakout stars (Lili Jones and Rosie Hughes) that are further described in Tinseltown. Herbert also introduces others who don’t appear in the series (for example, club advisor Les Reed, and the shoe repair expert) yet still contribute to the fabric of community and success at the club and around the city.

History features prominently in Tinseltown. Herbert expertly recounts how the Gresford Colliery coal mine disaster of 1934 inflicted multi-generational and shared civic trauma on the city of Wrexham, and how this trauma has infused with the club’s brief snatches of success and its more recent freefall into the depths of the National League. The trauma is palpable as we read that Wrexham’s ignominious survival from relegation from the National League was guaranteed by 0.08 points—a computational reprieve derived from calculating their points-per-game number after Covid lockdown brought an early end to the 2019-20 season. At the lowest ebb of the club’s 156-year history, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney come in and, well, you probably know the rest of the story (or fairytale).

As an invaluable resource the Wrexham story, Tinseltown shines when providing depth and granular detail to what is only hinted at, or glossed over, in Welcome to Wrexham. Such depth includes:a McElhenney thought bubble is followed up by Humphrey Ker as he scours Transfermarkt and FM for a suitable club for McElhenney to invest in (Wrexham? Macclesfield? Hartlepool?); rumours of a Russell Crowe takeover abound; Les Reed’s incisive spotting of playing talent; the sliding doors moment of Stockport signing Paddy Madden instead of Paul Mullin; and the club being happy to eat fines earned from using the wrong kind of signage for a televised FA Cup game. The nature of these details is darkly humourous considering how the club was run on the thinnest of shoestrings not so long ago—a humour that its owners, as they shoot self-deprecating commercials in the Wrexham dressing room, would readily recognise.

“At a stroke, a decades-old narrative at Wrexham was being rewritten. This was a club which had generally prevailed through managers squeezing value and building quality out of players who cost relatively little, though progress this time (if and when it came) would be inorganic. They were spending for success.” (pg. 133)

Herbert casts his journalistic eye far and wide across Wrexham in weaving Tinseltown’s narrative. He occasionally breaks away to give short, italicised vignettes of various characters around Wrexham. These asides do not always emotionally land, and can feel intrusive and jarring. The methodical pacing of relating Wrexham history and Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s genuineness in conducting due diligence on their ambitious new venture, is blunted by pages of quickfire form and result dispatches from the games in the final run in to the 2021-22 season. These dispatches attempt to set up a thrilling denouement, yet since we already know the ultimate result of it all—having already white-knuckled it through the slick production values in Welcome to Wrexham’s final episodes of Season 2—doesn’t impact as much as Herbert intends.

The quickened pace in the final third of Tinseltown also throws up some avoidable errors, with the most glaring being whirlwind striker for the women’s team and legitimate star of the series, Rosie Hughes, being called ‘Rosie Jones’ across several pages, including a reference to Paul Mullin being “the male Rosie Jones”. These editorial lapses chip away slightly at the credibility that Herbert has worked hard to establish.

One of the most fascinating insights that Tinseltown offers (and is hinted at by the connotation of glittering superficiality of the word itself) come with Herbert’s brief observations of Wrexham becoming a commercial vehicle for advertisers and content creators. Welcome to Wrexham shows replacement goalkeeper Ben Foster coming out of retirement to continue his vlogging of goalmouth scrambles, and using the content for his online channel and podcast. Herbert even writes of how attempts to bring in Hal Robson-Kanu and Gareth Bale to wreak havoc on hapless lower league defences fell through. “Fans didn’t want the club to become a content factory” Herbert writes, “a place where old pros went for a last pay cheque.” As objective viewers of Wrexham’s bankrolled success, we cannot help but feel cynical in an age of contemporary football that gives us more than enough reason to be so. Herbert continues: “…amid the team’s inconsistency, the documentary team began seeing the potential of an episode built around that. It would be called ‘Sack the gaffer’. Again, sensitivities were not spared in the quest for creative output.”

Reading Tinseltown is important because it contextualises and voices our cynicism to Wrexham’s newfound success. What can we make of Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s ownership and social philanthropy in an age when ruthless asset-stripping owners and oligarchs who mobilise the wealth of nation-states to launder reputations, continue to run roughshod over proud club histories? “Why had this story of Rob, Ryan and Wrexham captured the zeitgeist in such an extraordinary way?” Herbert asks. He parses the elements of the Wrexham rags-to-riches story and excels in cutting through the cynicism to give us some answers. These answers help us to cheer Wrexham and Reynolds-McElhenney on, even if only begrudgingly, as the freewheeling counterpoints to the scores of irresponsible owners who have, and continue to, grind proud clubs into dust.

Following Tinseltown’s publication, Welcome to Wrexham has stretched to four seasons, and a fifth (filming Wrexham’s Championship tilt in 2025-26) is forthcoming. Over seasons three and four, we watch as footballing journeymen Steven Fletcher and Jay Rodriguez join Wrexham. These expensive signings are the predictable, banal trappings of bankrolled success; the kind of well-worn names that are somewhat antithetical to the community-focused mandate that Reynolds and McElhenney espouse. Where there’s money to spend, there will be a late-30s, in-from-the-cold big earner to vindicate the realists who know that the price of the relentless push for success in the short-term is long-term unsustainability. When will the fatigue hit? Or even the content fatigue? In Herbert’s Daily Mail article from 4^th March, 2025, he writes:

“…it sounds perverse to hope that the club actually don’t win a third successive promotion and make the unprecedented leap from National League to Championship inside three years this spring. I don’t think I’m the only one feeling a sense of unease about that, though. In the cold light of day, I don’t want it to happen… It’s hard to dispel a sneaking suspicion that the breakneck pursuit of Championship football is, to some extent, driven by [Reynolds’s and McElhenney’s] ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary. While the Championship secures more documentary seasons, it’s hard to see a year’s consolidation in League One providing quite the same streaming gold… Wrexham don’t have a training ground. They still only have a temporary stand in place of the old Kop, so the Racecourse will be three-sided when work on a permanent Kop starts… The football journey may have been incredible, but at ground level, little has changed in the five years since McElhenney and Reynolds bought Wrexham.”

Whether Herbert likes it or not, Wrexham currently sit in a respectable 15^th place in the 2025-26 Championship season. Tinseltown, in covering up to Wrexham’s promotion to League Two, only tells half of the Wrexham story under Reynolds and McElhenney. And considering Herbert’s recent scepticism, perhaps he has only told half of his story. On the strength and depth of his writing in Tinseltown, a follow-up would undoubtedly be warmly welcomed and similarly fascinating to read.

“We want to become part of your story. We don’t want you to be our story.” (pg. 378)

STARS: 4/5

UNDER 20: A gripping exploration of the Welcome to Wrexham phenomenon that provides a counterpoint to the soullessness of modern club ownership.

FULL-TIME SCORE: Home-grown Herbert, the defensive cover, works tirelessly to ensure that the depth of glittering new talent further up the pitch put in a shift to win the game 3-0.

RELATED READING: My Wrexham Story: The Inspirational Autobiography from the Beloved Football Hero by Paul Mullin (2023); From Hollywood to Wrexham by Peter Read (2023)

Find Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game on Amazon

Football – Jean-Philippe Toussaint

“I cannot dissociate football from dreams and childhood,” Jean-Philippe Toussaint writes in Football. And we, as readers, can be thankful for this. Across eighty-five pages of evocative writing, Toussaint treats us to a selection of lingering vignettes across a life of following football. Framing most of his writing across five World Cups (1998-2014), Toussaint is the aging, harried, and thoughtful everyman who shuffles and scuffs along and against the passing of time.

“This is a book that no one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.” (pg. 7)

Football begins in 1998, with Toussaint at forty years of age. The year, “though still intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history…had accidently sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century, and inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past.” In experiencing this transition into middle age, Toussaint recounts early footballing memories. He introduces a recurring motif of the lag and mismatch with time, first in a description of players at the 1970 World Cup, colourised on TV for the first time, leaving their “physical envelope behind and now pursued [their] moves in black and white, leaving behind him the colour of his jersey, which followed him in slight delay.” Despite such vivid memories, he feels a growing detachment with football (realised through his inability to name more than one player of the Belgian national team at the 1998 World Cup). This detachment hints at his general melancholy with life.

“Never have I, as I did in Japan in 2002, sensed such a perfect concordance of times, in which the time of football, reassuring and abstract had, for a month, not substituted but slid, merged into the most enormous gangue of real time, and had made me feel the passing of time like a long protective caress, beneficiary, tutelary, apotropaic.” (pg. 27)

One third of Football is dedicated to Toussaint describing his experiences watching the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Japan is clearly a place that he is comfortable describing in equally rich colour and gloomy substance. Through the neon signs of Shibuya, rain dripping from the ribs of transparent umbrellas, and the convenience culture of 7-Elevens and Family Marts on every other corner, Toussaint effortlessly portrays the buttoned-down culture and colourful, waterlogged kitsch of Japan. The striking scene of a torrential downpour in Yokohama following the end of the World Cup final, where overcautious and polite stewards herd fans with fluorescent truncheons into the Yokohama Metro, is particularly memorable for what it represents: the clashing and melding of cultures at a time when the term ‘globalisation’ was still an unfamiliar concept to many. The 2002 World Cup ushered in an exciting new age for football, represented by Senegal defeating France in the opening match; co-hosts South Korea narrowly missing out on overall third place; European teams flattering to deceive; the raucous partisan Japanese crowds reminding the European and American markets of the UTC+9 time zone…

Like Toussaint does, I must also beg my readers to forgive me for wandering off and dawdling here, for I’m getting to my central point. The 2002 World Cup was a formative footballing moment for many of us, that “perfect concordance of times” that in memory becomes melancholic and slightly discordant. And this is the take-away from Football: thatwhere there was once colour will soon fade and become monotone. As Toussaint tells us plainly, “I am pretending to write about football, but I am writing, as always, about the passing of time.”

Throughout less-than-satisfying experiences attending and watching subsequent World Cups, Toussaint wrestles with his disaffection until difficult times in 2014 force him to face another concordance—that of professional crisis and the absence of existential meaning. The passage where Toussaint struggles with the buffer and lag in a paid stream of the Argentina v Netherlands semi-final in the 2014 World Cup illustrates him as a man also discordant with technology, and with technology being a gauge of progress, he becomes further displaced in modern times. Another storm and downpour frames this closing to Football, providing a form of cleansing and reconciliation to finding some contentment in his existential lag.

“A cycle was coming to an end, leaving me empty and lost. I experienced a crisis, a fleeting moment of doubt, uncertainty and dejection, which lead me to inquire into the meaning of my life and my commitment to literature” (pg. 63)

Toussaint’s claim that everything contained within Football will appeal to nobody is somehow appealing and endearing. The terse title may already put off pontificating intellectuals and raging tribalists (who both think they don’t need to be told about football) who may not commonly seek the middle ground with the each other. Toussaint appeals to those who are fed up, overindulged, and out of time with football, and those who recognise that football isa middle ground, sitting in light and shadow, that we merely dip in and out of as one means to live, rather than an end to live.

Yet don’t misunderstand—Football is a work of philosophic literature from Toussaint, an established literary intellectual of the nouveau nouveau roman (‘new new novel’) school that pushes narrative experimentation and fragmentation in prose writing. As such, Football can be analysed for what underlies the words beyond their surface meaning (and there will be times when Toussaint’s flair for expression will prompt you to consult a dictionary). Toussaint’s writing style of parataxis and cumulative build-up befits his melancholic recollection and a harried search for a place in time (a shoutout is due here to Shaun Whiteside for his sublime translation). Yet despite Football’s intellectual bent, a familiarity with literature isn’t needed for us to understand what Toussaint is telling us.

For although the experiential knowledge gained with the privilege of attending one World Cup, let alone three, is beyond the means of most of us, the spiritual journey of falling in and out with the world game as fortune and time dictates, is familiar. It is above literary pretensions. One of the many things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that sport is inextricably linked with culture and society, and acts as an identity-forming crutch for so many who are marginalised and ignored by society at large. The belaying rope snaps hard against our falling out, but we are inevitably pulled back toward the safety of midweek and weekend fixtures in due time. We keenly know the disenfranchisement of being ‘apart from the main’, and existing in that space where the lack of colour means a lack of meaning. Yet when we do return from that emptiness, we are forever trying to chase back the time lost.

“At every hour of the day, whether I am walking on the beach or strolling up the path through the scrubland to the old tower, whether I’m swimming in the sea or reading in the little garden, when I’m sleeping, a tireless process of ripening is still at work.” (pg. 67)

Toussaint offers this ‘passing of time’ in Football, but in 2025 we can recognise not just the passing of time, but the compression of time with jam-packed fixtures and never-ending content instantly vying for our attention, resulting in the acceleration of time making games, moments, and player careers highly perishable and easily forgettable. Would Toussaint consider his struggles with technology quaint in current times, when we continue to pay top dollar for subscriptions and streams that still buffer and lag despite greater bandwidth to deliver gigabytes of content on-demand? Despite the distortion of our time so that we may more readily consume the increasingly inconsequential, we, like Toussaint, fall into that melancholic middle ground where it takes all of our attention and energy to keep up, only to remain perpetually off the pace.

So, along with Toussaint, we drift back to our memories and to that ‘perfect concordance of times’ to give us spiritual relief. A wisp of Toussaint’s concordance lies in the common denominator between Roberto Carlos, Shinji Ono, Carsten Jancker, and Pierluigi Collina. Such subtle renderings of time and place make Football sparkle. We desire our own “perfect concordance of times” again, like the return of a cleansing storm. Football is Toussaint’s connective tissue with the world. In a football context, what could be more relatable?

“Football does not age well, it is a diamond that only shines brightly today.” (pg. 24)

Football as a means to ‘life sketch’ is an acclaimed substratum of writing, the brilliance of which is shown in works such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Gary Imlach’s My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes. The rich base of reporting and storytelling constantly broadens and deepens. Toussaint’s Football can be added to this. And when ninety minutes seems such a long time to do anything nowadays, you won’t regret the ninety minutes spent reading Football. So, embrace the lag, throw yourself into shadow, silence, and solitude as Toussaint does, and let the time pass without raging against it.

Note: This Fitzcarraldo Editions print of Football also contains Toussaint’s essay ‘Zidane’s Melancholy’, which is not reviewed in this entry.

STARS: 4.5/5

UNDER 20: A hidden work of football literary brilliance that in warning off the wilfully scornful, warms to discerning and disaffected fans.

FULL-TIME SCORE: When the majority of the crowd have left the stadium to beat the traffic before the closing of an uneventful 0-0 draw, the unknown substitute comes on to provide a dazzling cameo, long remembered by those who stayed behind.

RELATED READING: Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (1992)

Find Football on Amazon