The Sportsmen of Changi by Kevin Blackburn

Author:Kevin Blackburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New South Print

Changi’s soccer league

The Changi soccer competition was organised by the British sections of the camp, where almost all the matches were played. Leonard John ‘Paddy’ O’Toole, of the Victorian 2/29th Battalion, when discussing sport at Changi, observed that while the Australians followed cricket and their football codes, ‘the English played soccer after tea at night, one battalion against the other’. British teams dominated this competition. The Sportman’s Weekly: The Largest and Brightest Sports Weekly in Changi, produced by the soldiers in the British barracks, was almost filled by serious stories analysing soccer matches between the many British teams.

There were few Australian teams in the league. A game on Thursday, 16 July 1942, between an Australian side, the Rovers, and a British side, A Mess, showed that soccer was a code of marginal interest for the Australians, with the players out for a laugh with a bit of rough play against the British side. The British opposition quickly joined in. A Mess won 7–4. Marshall, who was a spectator, wrote:

The match was an absolute scream, the remarks of the spectators were a delight to hear. Vardy [a British Captain and Medical Officer] played a very amusing game, and his effort to bowl a man over, after he himself had been knocked down, was priceless, all he succeeded in doing was to miss the fellow and fall headlong to the ground.

This description of the Australians suggests that they saw it as an opportunity to express their toughness by playing rough, just as they had done with Australian Rules and rugby league. The British players were not slow in taking up the challenge and displaying how tough they were in response, leading to a comical spectacle of male bravado.

Among the British sides, soccer was generally taken very seriously, though. The winner of the first league competition, in 1942, was the Norfolk and Suffolks. They were a strong side. They then played The Rest to a 1–1 draw on Tuesday, 20 October 1942, in a game of a very high standard played at the Hospital Padang. At the end of the year there were ‘national’ soccer games between ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’, on Boxing Day 1942 and New Year’s Day 1943. The AIF appears to have been unable to put up a national team of similar standard for ‘Australia’.

Throughout 1943, in the soccer league competition the dominant teams were the Field Ambulance units of the Hospital Area. The doctors and medical staff were the fittest men in the camp throughout 1943, as the other barracks areas had lost all their fit men to the work parties for the Burma-Thailand Railway and elsewhere. On Saturday, 11 September 1943, the 197 Field Ambulance defeated a combined The Rest team. The dominance of the medical staff in soccer during late 1943 also reflected the fact that Changi was by then basically a convalescent camp for the sick and their medical staff. However, even in 1942 the soccer teams from the Hospital Area were strong teams. The Changi Sportman’s

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