With a single utterance Johnny Warren encapsulated the agony and ecstasy; the moment that defines him is the moment that defines Australian football. He captained Australia to its first international trophy in 1967 and its first World Cup in 1974, and played in its first World Cup match. He won four New South Wales state championships, his final as the team’s player and coach, and he even scored the winning goal in the grand final before substituting himself – but off the field he was one of the most influential footballing figures of the 20th century. He wasn’t just a player, captain and coach but also a journalist, administrator, author, broadcaster, lobbyist and revolutionary. When asked what his defining legacy should be weeks before his death his response was: ‘I told you so.’ The defining moments of every other great Aussie footballer are evidence he was correct.
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Warren entered Australian football in the midst of a revolution and left in the midst of one. Born in 1943, he was the youngest of three boys in a sixth-generation, quintessentially Australian family that lived metres away from where Captain Cook’s first fleet arrived in Botany Bay. As his ocker autobiography Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters makes clear Warren wasn’t born into football like the European migrants who dominate Australian teams, but his love ran much deeper than Australia’s cultural divide.
He and his brothers Geoff and Ross were typically competitive young boys at a time when street cricket on quiet cul-de-sacs was the rite of passage. ‘Wogball’, as it was widely derided, may never have entered his consciousness if it hadn’t been for a chance visit to watch Croatian club Hadjuk Split – on tour for the city’s booming and fanatical Slavic population – play in Sydney. At only six years of age Warren couldn’t have realised what hooked him that day, but while he and his brothers were excelling in the suburb’s homogenous soccer tedium for teams such as the Botany Methodists and Protestant Churches, he knew a crucible of real football passion was bubbling
