A defining moment in the beautiful game
It was Atilla Abonyi who turned me onto the beautiful game. He was a fellow student at Princes Hill High, Carlton North.
The son of Hungarian refugees, Atilla arrived in Australia in 1956 as a 10-year-old boy.
His family had fled their country of origin after Soviet Union tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution earlier that year.
Atilla attended Princes Hill in the 1960s when the school was alive with postwar immigrant kids. Australian Rules Football was the name of the game back then, the prime choice we had as a means of finding approval with the Aussie boys. Princes Park was our playing field, a relief from the concrete schoolyard. ‘Go Arnie, go’, my teammates yelled, as I risked my neck burrowing head first into packs. I received the badge of acceptance in return.
Then along came Atilla, and other kids playing the round ball game. I can still see him to this day, my first sight of him in action, the ball at his feet, running with grace in the open spaces of Princes Park. Atilla was a magician. He juggled the ball with ease on the toes and heels of his boots, and drove it into the net with both head and foot. He ran rings around opponents and swivelled clear with razor-sharp passes. He formed the nucleus of the Princes Hill team that became one of the best in the state.
Abonyi went on to debut with the national team in 1967. He was a key member of the first Australian squad to make it to the World Cup finals in West Germany in 1974, and in all, played 88 games for Australia, scored 36 goals, and took part in three World Cup campaigns. He remains the equal fifth-highest Australian goalscorer in international games.
I have an earlier memory of watching someone play the beautiful game: Valerio, as I call him in his fictional guise in my novel Scraps of Heaven. Valerio arrived in North Carlton as a young immigrant in the mid-1950s. He possessed a variety of athletic skills, could do handstands on the handlebars as he rode a bike. He practised soccer on the median strip on Canning Street. He would hit the trunks of the poplars and palms with bullet-force drives, catch the ball on the rebound, and volley it back into the trunk. No one had seen such artistry on the block. Many of the local boys laughed at his moves, saw them as effeminate, and mocked the game as ‘wog ball’.
How things have changed since then. Or have they? Some things remain the same, with players from immigrant families forming the backbone of the team. Members of the Socceroos’ squad are conscious of what they represent. In the weeks leading up to the World Cup finals, the players union produced a short video clip, affirming that the squad was ‘not only a team, but a reflection of modern Australia’.
“There are defining moments in a nation’s life, a twenty-year-old former-refugee kid grabbing his chance on the international stage. A single kick that is greeted with instantaneous collective joy — in pubs and bars, in living rooms, and in live sites, such as Federation Square, nationwide, a kind of call and response that implicitly asserts: ‘We belong. All of us. This is who we really are’”
One by one players front the camera to celebrate ‘the many journeys behind the jersey’, their varied roots: ‘I was born in Kenya and my parents are South Sudanese.’ ‘My parents were born in Cyprus.’ ‘I was born in Italy, raised in Perth.’ ‘I was born in Guinea and I came to Perth with my family as a refugee.’ ‘Our family emigrated from Scotland to Western Australia.’ ‘I fled my birthplace in Croatia as an eighteen-month-old baby. I lived as a refugee in Serbia until I moved at the age of six to Sydney.’ And the through line, the mantra: ‘No matter where you come from, football is for everyone. Our diversity is our strength.’
There is an undercurrent that courses through the video clip, an implicit defiance in the face of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, here in Australia, as elsewhere, as well as an expression of hard-earned pride.
Yet, it is the artistry I wish to focus on, the relentless training, the years that go into making a player. All of this: the hard work, the honing of skills, the love of the game, and of the team, was personified in one glorious moment — Nestory Irankunda’s rocket of a goal against Turkiye in the opening game of the Socceroos’ finals campaign.
Irankunda was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania in 2006, after his parents fled Burundi. He plays the game with uninhibited joy. Named in the starting eleven, he seized his chance and split the narrow gap between goalkeeper and the bottom left corner, with centimetre-sharp precision and his trademark explosive power off the boot.
An estimated six billion people, in total, will watch the World Cup finals. Football is a sport with a global reach, a means of finding a way up and out. It can be seen wherever one travels, when one strays off the path: a child dribbling that perfect sphere along alleys and lanes, in town squares and on war-torn streets — a congregation of children charging over a make-do football pitch in a vacant lot, a kid raising their arms in triumph as they whip the ball between makeshift sticks.
There are defining moments in a nation’s life, a twenty-year-old former-refugee kid grabbing his chance on the international stage. A single kick that is greeted with instantaneous collective joy — in pubs and bars, in living rooms, and in live sites, such as Federation Square, nationwide, a kind of call and response that implicitly asserts: ‘We belong. All of us. This is who we really are’ — a counterweight to that insidious game of blaming ‘the other’ for a nation’s woes, a populist ploy for political gain.
I return to that glorious moment. After the ball hit the net, Irankunda headed straight for the corner flagpole, hit it with a flurry of punches punctuated by a final right hook. He had planned the gesture in advance. He was emulating his idol, Tim Cahill’s signature celebrations of his 2006 World Cup goals, a homage to Australian football lore. As the corner pole swayed, another World Cup finals campaign came to mind, Australia’s first. West Germany 1974, and Atilla Abonyi, another refugee kid who had made it to the biggest stage of the beautiful game.
- Arnold Zable is a writer, novelist and storyteller. His novels include Café Scheherazade, Sea of Many Returns and Scraps of Heaven, set in postwar immigrant Carlton. He was recently awarded an honourary Doctor of Letters from Melbourne University for services to literature, multiculturalism and human rights.
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