It must be acknowledged there was a need for change as the game had stagnated in terms of its mainstream appeal. It had also, sometimes with apparent glee, been marginalised by a media that in many ways was still happy to think of it as a sport for "Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters", as the book by Johnny Warren and Andy Harper, the current Fox caller, was named. But it must also be remembered that without "old soccer" there would not have been any basis upon which to construct "new football". I was at the media conference at Sydney's Imax Theatre in Darling Harbour in the spring of 2004 when Frank Lowy, John O'Neill (then CEO of the newly constituted FFA) and a host of luminaries were present to crank up the promotional push for the new league as they announced how it would be structured and which clubs would be part of it. There was little harking back on the past as the emphasis was on the way forward. Warren, by then in the final stages of the battle with cancer that was to kill him not long after, was a gaunt presence in the auditorium, but there were precious few heroes from the old game wheeled in to support the new concept. It was football as year zero, the creation of a new order in which the future would be written on a blank piece of paper with nary a look to the past.

Lowy, the then FFA chairman, might at some point during that conference have sensed that a mistake might be made by wiping out the past completely. Months later, before the inaugural season kicked off in August 2005, he urged during his speech that the supporters of "old soccer" should not desert the game. He called on them to rally in support of this new creation, despite the fact their clubs were being trashed, their history ignored and everything they had worked and built during nearly five decades when "traditional" (read migrant-developed) clubs had given the game its foundation. It says a lot for the forbearance and tolerance of the majority of football supporters that they did just that and began, almost immediately, to support the new franchises as the A-League grew and some of its clubs began to develop an identity of their own. But there were always those at the FFA who either simply didn't get it, or didn't want to acknowledge that there had been a game before the A-League's inception. Presumably they felt that drawing attention to the sport's antecedents would somehow damage its current image. There was often the feeling that it wasn't really approved of to mention, for example, something like Archie Thompson's early days at Gippsland Falcons, Carlton or Marconi and suggest they were were key stages of his development as the league's most deadly marksman.

How those in the corridors of power must, back then, have winced when then Socceroos captain Mark Viduka used to say that his proudest moments in the game were not just leading Australia or scoring goals in the English Premier League but the early days as a teenager when he first pulled on the shirt of the Melbourne Knights, the club he still regards as his best-loved team. Things began to thaw a few years ago, thankfully, as the realisation set in that to continue trying to deny the past was not just pointless but in many ways discriminatory. Either the FFA felt more secure in itself, or it realised that it needed to reach out and reconnect with its past, but the decision to set up the FFA Cup was a major step forward in reconciling what had once been derided as "old soccer" with the game as it currently exists. The concept has been embraced at all levels and has done more than anything to remind those supporters who were not around before 2005 that a whole world of football has always existed - and that those "ethnic clubs" and their fans are not as scary as some of the media have always tried to suggest. It is to their credit that they have established this competition and supported it, and the rewards have been evident. More than 10,000 turned up at one of "old soccer's" most iconic clubs, Heidelberg United, on a cold wintry night last year to see their Cup quarter-final against Melbourne City.

Putting the records and achievements together is another step on the road to further legitimising what went on in the past and building the sort of narrative that puts all current achievements in context.