On Box2Box Offside, former Socceroos skipper Paul Wade opens up on his formative football years in Northern England, and his experiences with legends of the Australian game who shaped the player and person he became.
Paul Wade is one of Australian football’s most endearing, and enduring figures. Only Peter Wilson and Lucas Neill have captained the Socceroos more often in its 100 year history, and while recent skippers including Neill, Mark Viduka and Mile Jedinak have quietly stepped away from public profile, Wade remains as enthused about the game in the country as ever.
Wade’s name may not point as obviously towards family history abroad as those of his teammates Yankos and Krncevic, Durakovic and Ivanovic. But his, too, is a proud migrant story, one of a boy who arrived in Australia with a football education homespun by the streets of Barnsley.
“I’ve found recently on Google Earth where I lived in St Helens, right next to a pub. When I looked down on it there was the pub car park, fifteen metres by seven, where we all played on the weekends and the whole street would join in.
‘The number of World Cups that were played there, the number of goals missed and scored, I can still remember it in my mind now. That’s all we did, we played football. We had great imaginations, playing, commentating, faking dives even back then. That’s where the love came from.’
Wade admits youthful naivety made the family’s move from Northern England to south-east Melbourne in October 1973 easier than it might have otherwise been, not realising he’d faked his last dive in that pub car park.
‘My dad said ‘look, we’re going to Australia.’ Growing up in the north of England, I knew Liverpool, I hated Man United, hated Leeds… but where the hell was Australia? He showed us a map of the world, said ‘you’re going there, it’s called Melbourne.’
‘I was really into swimming at that stage, I could swim for ages and had all my badges. I said to dad ‘ I’m going to swim from Melbourne down to that little island at the bottom there!’ That’s as much as I could grasp, I had no idea.
‘I can remember leaving Barnsley for the last time. I remember driving away; cousins, aunties, the whole family came out and were crying. I couldn’t understand why, it was just a big adventure. But now I think that it was the last time I saw any of them, which is really sad.’
Wade acclimatised to his new home with what he knew, football, joining an organised club for the first time with Dandenong City’s Under 11’s. He moved through the grades with Doveton and Prahran Slavia, and by 1981 to Croydon City, into the presence of one of the gods of the local game.
‘We played at Croydon Park; in the middle of winter you can’t see grass, it’s just mud. And yet Jimmy Rooney just floated on top of it. He wasn’t your miserable, hardworking Scot, he danced, and I stood back and said ‘wow, how does he do that?’
‘They said he’d played 100 times for the Socceroos; I thought ‘Wow, so that’s a Socceroo. He then got a job at Green Gully and asked me to come across.’
By 1986, through time in the NSL with Brunswick Juventus and South Melbourne, Wade had been called into the national team by another storied figure in Australian football history, Frank Arok. The following years in Arok’s dressing room provided memories aplenty, including the 1988 Bicentennial Cup.
‘Raving lunatic, was the first thing I thought… but he was a thinker, outside the box, He’d walk out of a dressing room covered in sweat, he’d say things with so much passion. He got us to believe we could beat these teams if we worked hard enough and we weren’t afraid of anybody.
‘Frank all of a sudden signalled to the world, ‘hey, you may be able to beat the Socceroos, but you’d better be at your best.’
It’s a refrain similar to that often proclaimed by Ange Postecoglou, who was a teammate of Wade’s at South Melbourne and would later follow Arok to the Socceroos job.
‘On the park, if you asked for a captain, there was no way in the world you’d pick Ange. He was relatively quiet, not as if he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t go ranting and raving. In no way in the world would I have believed what he’s doing now when I was watching him back in the day. It’s absolutely incredible.’