By Greg Blake
As a stand-alone Thursday night 2025 season opener, Heidelberg United’s expedition west to wrestle the Melbourne Knights at their place fairly bristles with anticipatory potential for “summer is too damned long” fans of both clubs.
It also marks 63 years of an astounding roller-coaster, on-field association between Alexander and Croatia, as these two flagships of the game in Victoria were known when they first formally met in Victorian competition back in 1962.
Slightly digressing, but in current day If you are travelling west along Maribyrnong Road towards Highpoint Shopping Centre, less than a kilometre after you’ve traversed the Maribyrnong River, on the right you’ll spy a splendid stretch of parkland, flanked on one side by two seemingly out of place old-fashioned grandstands. That is Maribyrnong Park.
It is where I had my first and only training run with a senior club – Polonia – in 1974 and was evaluated as “utterly hopeless”. It was also the place I listened to my transistor radio with ABC Radio’s Martin Royal calling the action as coach Frank Arok’s ‘Mad Dog’ Socceroos pulled off a massive upset by beating Yugoslavia 1-0 at the Barcelona Olympic Games of 1988.
Alexander champions Jeff Olver and Charlie Yankos played starring roles for the Socceroos that day as I basked in afternoon sunshine and watched Western Suburbs beat Polonia 1-0 in a Victorian State League game at the picturesque Maribyrnong Park Reserve. And I reckon one-time Alexander midfielder John Metaxas was part of the Wests team. In that same year – 1988 – Alexander avenged its relegation from the NSL and cantered away with the Victorian State League title.
So this has what to do with the Croatia v Alexander rivalry? Well, as gentrified and pretty as Maribyrnong Park appears today, it was once much more well-known as Traceys Motor Speedway, the home of massive crowds, petrol fumes and loud, manic, greasy, smoking, oval-racing motorbikes, hot rods, sprint cars and motorbikes with passenger sidecars attached (do those even exist any more?) between 1946 and 1964.
After the exhaust fumes had cleared, inside the racing track lay a near pristine soccer pitch and it was the long-time home deck of Polonia Maribyrnong, a powerhouse of the local game back in the day. In 1962 Croatia moved up from Geelong’s Corio Oval and made the same Maribyrnong venue their primary home for the next four years.
And so it came to pass that Traceys Motor Speedway was the venue for that the very first meeting of Alexander and Croatia in Victorian competition, on Saturday May 8, 1962, in round 8 of the Metropolitan League 1st Division season. The only engine revving that day was Croatia’s, as they beat Alexander 4-2 on their way to winning the league title that season. For the record, Alexander finished fourth that year.
Over the subsequent six decades Alexander/Fitzroy/Heidelberg United and Croatia/Essendon Lions/Essendon Croatia/Melbourne Croatia/CSC/Knights have shared an odd Sliding Doors-type rivalry. The two clubs have only met 56 times as a result.
In 1968 Croatia won Victoria’s State League title. Alexander finished last and were relegated. But fortunes reversed into the 1970’s with Croatia suspended from competition for two years and was only slowly rebuilding after buying out the Essendon club known as Lions and only returned to Victoria’s top tier in time for Alexander’s ascent to greatness, which peaked with the 1975 Victorian championship.
Alexander then slipped into the new national competition, where it did not finish in the bottom half of the table for ten consecutive seasons, a remarkable effort in the new elite NSL. Twice runner-up, third three times, a fourth and fifth placing and that 4-0 Grand Final win in 1980 were testimony to the club’s greatness in that period.
Over the same period Croatia mirrored a similar record in Victoria, winning the Victorian championship in 1978 and 1979 before finishing runner-up over the next four seasons. In 1983 Croatia became the last Victorian senior club to score100-plus goals in all competitions on a single season, until Avondale’s managed 101 goals some 40 years later.
Croatia’s inevitable elevation into the newly expanded NSL meant the first meeting with Alexander in eight years. The Warriors – led by four goal hero Steve Winn – welcomed Croatia into the big time by winning that game 5-2. In an odd twist, both clubs made the top five and played finals in each of the next three seasons without ever meeting each other in the play-offs.
The late 1980’s and Alexander’s slow demise as a national powerhouse was best exemplified by the loss of the club’s top two all-time games record holders, as Jeff Olver (379 games) and Theo Selemidis (344) both joined Croatia, where Selemidis won that club’s player of the year award in 1989.
Alexander’s first NSL goalkeeper, Peter Blasby, moved on to Croatia and was named in that club’s team of the century. Jimmy Campbell (244 games with Heidelberg) heads the list of many other notables who’ve played with both clubs. Yakka Banovic, Willie Herd, Nick Marinos, David Miller, Nick Sabljak, Adrian Zahra, Tom Cahill, the Franjic brothers, Alex Kiratzoglou and Daniel Vasiliadis are a few others that come to mind.
Vlado Vanis was a genuine champion for Croatia as that club became a dynasty and won the national championship twice and played off in another couple of grand finals. Vanis went on to coach Alexander and the likes of Ken Murphy, Peter Ollerton, Terry Hennessy and Jimmy Adam also coached at both Somers Street and Olympic Village.
It was another eight years before the NSL collapsed in on itself and Croatia returned to senior Victorian competition and waiting for them was Alexander, who welcomed their old rivals back with a 2-1 win. In 2012, Alexander won just two games for the season and were relegated after finishing dead last. Their only two wins that year came against, you guessed it, Croatia.
Since the formation of the NPL, the Somers Street mob struggled to get the better of Alexander and went eight seasons without success from 2015 until 2023, when vengeance came in the form of 5-0 thrashing of the Warriors in the regular season and a dramatic follow-up win in the quarter finals of the Australia Cup.
Thursday night’s round one NPL Victoria game between these two giants of Victorian soccer cannot come quick enough.
Bring it on. Warrior Nation.
Footnote –
Miron Bleiberg also coached at Croatia and Alexander and Steve Iosifidis played with both clubs. In a quirky connection both went on to later become senior coach at the Western Eagles, the current incarnation of the old Polonia club, whose long-time home ground – including 1962 – was Traceys Motor Speedway, on Maribyrnong Road. The very same ground upon which Alexander and Croatia first met in Victorian competition back in 1962.