Australia played in the Friendly Nations Tournament with the Vietnam War in the background. Photograph: Getty Images.
Did you know that Australia’s Socceroos played in an invitational football tournament in the middle of a warzone: Saigon, 1967?
Richard Cooke has written an article in the Guardian titled, The forgotten story of… the Socceroos in Vietnam.
Below is an excerpt.
Australia’s first piece of silverware was won despite the threat of landmines, teargas and rancid spam…
The Friendly Nations Tournament, a delusional propaganda exercise, even in name, was a bad idea. But from Botany Bay to Gallipoli, Australian history is built on bad ideas, and so it was with the country’s football. The birthplace of the Socceroos success wasn’t Sydney, it was Saigon, where the team won their first international tournament under flare-lit skies rumbling with helicopters with the Vietnam War in full flow…
“it was going into the unknown,” says striker and hall of fame inductee Ray Baartz. He was only 20 then. “We really didn’t know what to expect – we knew there was a war going on there, but it never did at any stage feel that we were going into a warzone or anything like that. But once we got there, it was a real eye-opener.”
Not only was the city crawling with military, with fighting close enough to hear the mortar pops, but all the international teams were a target for the Viet Cong, who made an abortive attempt to blow up the team hotel. Given its condition, a bomb attack might have been an improvement.
“The place was called the Golden Building,” recalls striker Atti Abonyi, the tournament’s most prolific scorer. “We all thought ‘oh gee that sounds good’ but … [the hotel] was absolutely atrocious – it was filthy, it was run-down. Nowadays nobody in their right mind would even stay there for two minutes. But because we were so excited, we put up with it regardless.”
The food was rancid spam; the rooms even less appealing. Former Manchester United youth player Stan Ackerley went to switch on his fan, touched a live wire, and was shocked across the room, the burn going straight through his sock. And then there was the “training ground”.
“There were no training facilities,” says Abonyi. “They took us down to this little park – just a local park. It was terrible.”
“The goalpost wasn’t a proper goalpost. Somebody just made it up. And behind the goals there was a six- or seven-foot fence. We were having shooting practice, and a couple of the balls went over. And someone – I forget who it was now – was about to go retrieve the balls. And as he was half-way up, people were coming from everywhere screaming: “Don’t go, don’t go! No, no, no, no!” And we found out that the field behind us, where the balls had landed was full of bloody landmines. So the balls stayed. They could still be there now.” Match prep was confined to gymnastics on the roof of the Golden Building…
To read the rest of the article, click here.
