It’s Saturday 7 September, 1974, and the final whistle sounds on the Under-13 National Championship. The bumper crowd rise to cheer the West Australian squad who are celebrating a hard-fought 1-0 win over New South Wales in the tournament final played at the Velodrome in Mount Hawthorn. The sixteen players have written themselves into the history books as the State’s first national champions at any level.
“To be the top team in the country was pretty hot. No West Australian team had achieved that before – not a junior team, not a senior team,” said State junior team coach Jim Crone, reflecting on the events of 50 years ago. “We had kids who were good players and who enjoyed playing football together. You could not match the spirit of the team. They took West Australia from being an also-ran side to one that everyone looked up to. We suddenly had that respect.”
“There was some good football played over that week. We started really well with a couple of big wins and then we knocked over Victoria – after that game I could see that the boys started to really believe in themselves. We made it through to the final where, to be honest, New South Wales were the better team. But we took our chance when it came, worked hard to hold onto that lead and came away as national champions.”
The seeds for that success were sown some months earlier when Jim had a chance conversation with Frank Schafer, the State Director of Coaching. “I was coaching Inglewood Kiev’s Under-14s,” recalls Jim, a former Wimbledon apprentice who played for Irish league teams Portadown and Bangor prior to emigrating to Perth in 1972. “Frank came to watch one of our games and afterwards asked me to apply to coach a State team.”
“At the time it was a bit of a closed shop with a lot of guys who hadn’t played the game coaching. I applied and I got the job with the Under-13s. Before picking the squad I went to junior games every Sunday looking at and assessing players. I went to about 20 games, watching the kids at Azzurri, Olympic, Tricolore and a lot of other sides… I got a speeding fine one day driving to Rockingham!”
“The sixteen boys selected were a good bunch and they got on well together. There were no prima donna’s in the team. Being selected meant a hell of a lot to everyone and these young kids deserved it. We used to train on an open park and everything we did was about technique and skills, not running laps. We played about five practice games against Olympic, Windmills and the like. We always played the team above us, so the Under-14s.”
Six of the squad – John Spanos, Robbie Voorn, Brad Holden, Adrian Vacca, Drew Graham and Lee Rowlands – were drawn from Morley Windmills. Belmont contributed Phil Cavener, Colin Connors and Terry Wheatley while Andrew Harrod and Paul Tombides were with Kingsway Olympic. The remainder came from five different clubs – Charles Iannantuoni (Azzurri), Mark Scibilia (Bayswater United), John Szelica (Cracovia), Greg Hestelow (Melville) and Jamie Cameron (Tuart Hill).
For striker Paul Tombides, who went on to play for Australia at youth level, it was his first experience of representative football. “We trained on the back pitch at Inglewood on cold winter nights,” Paul remembers. “We were training four nights a week – two for the State and the other two for our club – then we played twice on the weekend. It was a lot of football but we were young kids and this is what we wanted to do.”
“John Spanos was the spiritual main man, he was a young boy in a man’s body. Instead of playing football for fun, John was out there saying ‘We’ve got to win’… if you’re going into battle you wanted John there with you. Jim had picked a team of speedsters, real quick young kids. We had a winger, Robbie Voorn, the quickest winger you’ve ever seen. Overall we had a really well-balanced, competitive team.”
“But I didn’t believe we could do it physically. We used to see national championships with other sides in Perth. The standard was really good but it was men against boys all the time, Victoria and New South Wales seemed to dominate and the other States just made up the numbers. Jim was a fierce motivator and was always confident in what we could achieve. He’d be saying ‘We can win this’ and we’d be thinking ‘This guy is mad’.”
The opening game of the National Championship pitted West Australia against the Australian Capital Territory, the latter proving no match for the hosts who ran out winners by 4-1 with Spanos scoring twice alongside Tombides and Voorn. The goals continued to flow the following day when Tombides and Spanos helped themselves to a hat-trick each with Connors getting the remainder in a 7-1 thrashing of Tasmania.
West Australia next faced perennial powerhouse Victoria, a team that was to be feared. In their toughest game so far, the home team clawed out a 2-1 win with Scibilia getting the opener and Tombides the decider to propel the west to the top of the leaderboard. It was a turning point for the young team. “We rose to every game and once we knocked off Victoria we started to believe when Jim said ‘We’re going to win this’,” Paul commented.
“Also, after the Victoria game the media hooks on and TV cameras started showing up. Suddenly we’re on Channel 7 news, at the end of the 6 o’clock news they featured us in a 15-second slot. So we’re playing in the middle of the day and rushing to get home to watch the news. Everyone is thinking ‘This is pretty big, isn’t it?’ and as a result a lot of neutrals start coming down to watch. The Velodrome was a great stadium, it created a big atmosphere.”
Day four of competition brought together the top two sides, West Australia and New South Wales. Tombides, Voorn and Spanos found the back of the net in an epic encounter, however, it wasn’t enough as New South Wales ran out 5-3 winners to shoot to the top of the table. West Australia dropped into second place, edging out Northern New South Wales by way of superior goal difference.
A spot in the final was up for grabs when West Australia and Northern New South Wales met in Friday’s last round of fixtures. Tombides and Voorn were on target to book the hosts into the championship decider with a 2-1 win. And Victoria’s surprise 4-2 defeat of New South Wales later in the day meant it was West Australia that sat top of the ladder at the end of the qualification stage.
Despite that, West Australia entered the final as underdogs to a far more fancied New South Wales outfit. The games’ only goal arrived 12 minutes in, Spanos slipping past the defence to crash a powerful low shot beyond the goalkeeper’s reach. “After John scored, Jim said ‘back’ and he played the rest of the game as a deep lying midfielder,” Paul reflected. “They dominated play, had something like 80% of the possession and we were parked in the middle of the park.”
The crowd of 1,000 were kept on the edge of their seats as New South Wales launched wave after wave of attack, shots hitting the crossbar and skimming the uprights. They did find the net in the second half when a long throw bounced over goalkeeper Szelica and into the net, however, it didn’t count as it wasn’t touched after being released. West Australia’s relief arrived only with the final whistle.
Post-tournament, five West Australians – Szelica, Cavener, Holden, Wheatley and Spanos – were named in the honorary Australian Under-13 squad. And in the days after Jim was put forward for Coach of the Year by respected journalist David Andrews. “One coach that must come into calculations is Jimmy Crone, who led WA to their first win in an interstate championship,” Andrews wrote in ‘the West Australian’. “Crone’s effort combines results and development.”
Jim was in charge again twelve months later when the Under-14s produced an encore performance. “We went to Canberra and we did it again,” Paul said of the 1975 National Championships. “We needed penalties in the final but we didn’t lose a game at that tournament.” Played in bitterly cold conditions, the final against Northern New South Wales was another nail-biting affair which, deadlocked after extra-time, was decided from the spot.
1975 was a high water mark for West Australian junior football with the Under-12s, Under-13s and Under-14s crowned National Champions. The Under-12s, coached by Alf Zimmer, returned from Gosford with the trophy while Jim Ward’s Under-13 side were rarely tested in Coffs Harbour. The Under-15s went agonisingly close but had to be content with second after controversially being denied silverware on home soil by Northern New South Wales.
The Under-14s made it back-to-back titles when they defeated Victoria in the 1976 final in Darwin. But West Australia has won only two further junior National Championships since the halcyon days of the mid-1970s. In 1981 the Under-15s, under the guidance of Brian Gillespie, finished first in Perth. And the following year Dick Jones’ Under-13 side brought silverware home from Tasmania.
