Tour of Duty: The 1967 Socceroos in Vietnam

An invitation no sensible country would have accepted

Most of Australian football's great stories run on heartbreak. Witch doctors, penalty shootouts, Iran, the thirty-two years of nothing. This one is different. This one is a ripping yarn, the sort of thing that used to arrive in a hardback annual at Christmas with an illustration on the cover, and the only unbelievable part about it is that it's true.

In 1967 the Holt government sent the national football team to South Vietnam. Not to a training camp somewhere nearby. To Saigon, while the war was on, to play in a tournament.

The tournament was the Quốc Khánh Cup, the South Vietnam National Day competition, also badged as the Independence Cup and sold to the visitors as the Friendly Nations Tournament. It had run on and off since 1961 as a small South East Asian round robin. The 1967 edition was something else entirely: eight national teams, nearly all from countries backing the American war effort, invited into a capital city where the fighting was not a rumour. It was a piece of propaganda dressed up as a football competition, and everyone who boarded a plane for it knew as much.

Australia was already deep in. The 1st Australian Task Force had been established at Nui Dat in Phước Tuy Province the year before, with logistics running out of Vũng Tàu. Conscripts called up under the National Service scheme were serving, and dying. The commitment would eventually peak at around 8,500 troops. As the historian Roy Hay has noted, football diplomacy reached Asia a few years before ping-pong diplomacy did — and this was it. Send the boys over. Lift morale. Fly the flag.

So they went.

Seventeen kids and Uncle Joe

The squad that assembled for a hurried camp at North Ryde in late October had an average age of 23. Exactly one player was older than 26. Picture any Socceroos squad you've ever cheered for, then imagine handing that group their passports and pointing them at a war.

The youth was deliberate, and it caused an argument. Joe Vlasits — "Uncle Joe", Hungarian-born, a fixture of Sydney's migrant club scene at Canterbury, Prague, St George Budapest and Bankstown — had only just taken the national job and was criticised for picking so young. His captain was a 24-year-old named Johnny Warren, one of only two survivors of the 1965 campaign that ended in Phnom Penh with two hidings from North Korea — a trip Warren would later call Australian sport's Gallipoli.

Read the names again. Abonyi from Hungary. Schaefer from Germany. Vojtek, Romanowicz, Micic. This was the new Australia, the post-war migrant intake, being flown into an Asian war under the flag of a country several of them had only recently been allowed to call their own. Pantelis missed the plane because his citizenship paperwork was still sitting in somebody's tray. Most of the others were young enough to have been conscripted themselves.

They boarded a Pan Am flight for Saigon. On the approach they were told the aircraft would stay high over the rice paddies, because the Viet Cong shot at planes. That is the kind of announcement that would end a modern player's tour before it began. There is no record of anyone objecting.

The rooftop, the minefield and the live wire

The teams were put up at the Caravelle Hotel, known locally as the Golden Building, which also housed the Australian embassy and a constant flow of Australian personnel. Warren, writing years later in Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters, thought the name couldn't have been less apt.

What survives from that fortnight arrives at such a rate that you find yourself checking the source twice.

At an embassy briefing shortly after they landed, the players were shown photographs of children maimed by mines. Days later they watched a car explode in the street.

Then the training ground, which sat beside an army base. During a finishing drill somebody skied a shot over the perimeter fence — the one with the skull-and-crossbones signs on it — and, being a footballer, jogged off after the ball. People came sprinting and shouting from every direction. The field was mined.

Half a century later, nobody will own up to the shot. Abonyi has pointed at Ray Richards. Richards has pointed at John Watkiss. Watkiss says he was injured and back at the hotel. It is the most gloriously ordinary detail in the whole story: put seventeen footballers in a war zone, ask who ballooned one over the bar, and every last one of them looks at the bloke standing next to him. Warren's verdict was that it was the finest incentive he'd ever come across to keep your shooting low.

They abandoned that pitch. They trained on the concrete roof of the hotel instead, with gunfire in the back streets, helicopters dropping flares overhead and artillery flashing along the horizon. Matches at Cong Hoa Stadium were preceded by sweeps for mines and played under armed guard.

Dr Brian Corrigan, who had watched Ackerley and Archie Blue go down with food poisoning in Cambodia two years earlier, walked into the hotel kitchen, took one look and banned the squad from eating there. They lived on hamburgers and beer, partly because nobody trusted the water. Ackerley was thrown across his room by a live wire when he reached for the switch on a fan. A New Zealand player fell ill and was left behind in hospital for three weeks after his team flew home. There were reports of a foiled plot to bomb the building.

And every day they ate in the mess alongside Australian soldiers of roughly their own age, who had been sent to the same city for entirely different reasons. Then the soldiers went out to fight, and the footballers went out to play.

And they were also, somehow, very good

Here's the part that usually gets left out, because the war makes better copy. The football was excellent.

Attila Abonyi scored a hat-trick on debut against New Zealand, then another against Singapore six days later — a fortnight most Australian forwards would happily retire on. Warren settled the host nation on a surface closer to mud than grass. Ray Baartz won the semi-final in extra time, in a match where tear gas was used at the ground and security had to keep the two sets of players apart. This, remember, was the Friendly Nations Tournament.

Saigon, match by match

1. 5 Nov Group A

   Australia v New Zealand Attila Abonyi, 21, scores a hat-trick on his debut for his adopted country.

   5–3

2. 7 Nov Group A

   South Vietnam v Australia Warren scores in the 35th minute, and is met with something closer to silence than noise.

   0–1

3. 11 Nov Group A

   Australia v Singapore Abonyi again, with another three.

   5–1

4. 12 Nov Semi-final

   Australia v Malaysia (aet) Baartz settles it in extra time. Tear gas at the ground; security separates the players.

   1–0

5. 14 Nov Final

   Australia v South Korea Korea score inside the first minute. Vojtek answers with a solo goal around the half-hour; Abonyi and Warren finish it.

   3–2

Tour record Played 10 · Won 10 · Lost 0 · Home 1 December 1967

Two scenes you would not dare invent

The first came at half-time of the group match against the hosts. With South Vietnam trailing to Warren's goal, Vice-President Nguyễn Cao Kỳ walked into his own team's dressing room and offered the players six months' salary to turn it around. They didn't. The Australians had rocks thrown at them afterwards for their trouble, which is an emphatic away-day review in any language.

The second came before the final. The Australian servicemen who had adopted the team — drinking with them, feeding them, filling the terraces — were told there was no room in the stadium for them. The players said fine, then there's no final. The soldiers got in.

Vlasits, for his part, had promised the squad they could keep their tracksuits if they won. That one sentence tells you everything about the economics of Australian football in 1967. No bonuses, no boot deals, no charter flight. Win a trophy in a war zone and the polyester is yours to keep.

South Korea scored inside the first minute of the final. Vojtek answered with a solo goal around the half-hour, and Abonyi and Warren finished the job. The local crowd, having pelted the Australians a week earlier, spent the final roaring them on — which, if you've ever changed your mind about a team over the course of a tournament, is the most human thing in this entire story.

Saigon was only the middle of it

The day after the final the squad travelled down to Vũng Tàu to visit the troops, and played a match against them — a fixture that no longer exists on any calendar anywhere, and probably never should have. On the way home they played Indonesia and New Zealand in Malaysia.

Played 10. Won 10.

They landed back in Australia on 1 December 1967 carrying the first international trophy the national team had ever won.

And then they went back. In April 1970 Australia returned to Saigon for the Friendship Cup, beat Kowloon Bus Company 6–2 and South Vietnam 1–0 again, and won that tournament too. There was a further tour in October 1972. The men who went in 1970 and 1972 sit even further outside the national memory than the class of '67, which takes some doing.

So why has nobody heard of it?

Australia won its first international trophy and the country shrugged. The reasons stack up almost comically.

Parliament wasn't sitting when the tournament was won or when the team came home, so there was no obvious moment for anyone to stand up and say something. The Tet Offensive erupted roughly two months later and turned the war decisively unpopular, at which point a sporting victory won in support of Australian involvement had no constituency left on either side of the chamber. And on 17 December 1967, Harold Holt walked into the surf at Cheviot Beach and never came out. The Prime Minister who sent them disappeared sixteen days after they got back.

Then the slower forces. Australia failed to qualify for the 1970 World Cup. The Asian Football Confederation spent the seventies ambivalent at best about Australian membership, so a trophy won over South East Asia's best was not something anyone in Asian football administration was in a hurry to commemorate. Whitlam came in, and wins recorded under Holt were never going to be trumpeted by the new lot. Rale Rasic took over in 1970, and the 1974 qualification story understandably swallowed everything that came before it — even though Rasic himself credited Vlasits' groundwork. Saigon was quietly demoted from an achievement to a prelude.

And beneath all of it, the thing Warren spent his life naming. Football was the game of sheilas, wogs and poofters. A team of migrants winning something in Asia was never going to be the story the country told about itself in 1967. Australian football has a long record of turning up in places it supposedly didn't belong — it had been doing it since at least 1923 — and an equally long record of being told it didn't count.

Eight of them made it to West Germany

Eight of the men who went to Vietnam were in the squad that took Australia to its first World Cup, in West Germany in 1974.

Ask them and they'll tell you the two facts are connected. Baartz has said the hardship and the conditions built a team spirit that fed directly into what came afterwards. Warren said the same thing in different words for forty years. You're entitled to be sceptical about how much a single fortnight can forge in a group of young men. But seventeen of them trained on a hotel roof under flare light, ate hamburgers because the water was suspect, refused to play a final until their soldiers were let through the gate, and won ten out of ten. They came home with something.

They just weren't given a parade, or a word for it, or much of a mention.

Warren spent the rest of his life arguing that this game mattered here, and spent most of it being told it didn't. He got his four words in the end. The class of '67 are still waiting for theirs.

A footnote we're saving for another day: the popular story that the Socceroos got their name on this tour is repeated everywhere, and the primary sources don't support it. That one deserves its own piece, and it's coming.

Sources

1. Roy Hay, As Socceroos face moment of truth, let's remember our football triumph of 1967, The Conversation, 9 November 2017 — theconversation.com
2. Chris Curulli, 'We were young and bulletproof': the 1967 Socceroos reflect on when they went to war, Football Australia — socceroos.com.au
3. Tournament Profile: 1967 Quốc Khánh Cup, Football Australia — myfootball.com.au
4. How the Socceroos got their name, Football Australia — footballaustralia.com.au
5. (South) Vietnam Friendly Football Tournaments — full match and scorer records, RSSSF — rsssf.org
6. 1967 South Vietnam Independence Cup, Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org
7. James Parkinson, At Height Of Vietnam War, Australia Tried Soccer Diplomacy, WBUR Only A Game, 23 February 2018 — wbur.org
8. Fergus Dowd, The birth of Australian soccer in the Vietnam War, The Football Faithful, 10 April 2020 — thefootballfaithful.com
9. Vietnam War 1962–75, Australian War Memorial — awm.gov.au
10. Johnny Warren with Andy Harper and Josh Whittington, Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters, 2002

Strip Tees The Archive · Saigon, November 1967