Peter Desira
by Roy Hay
PETER Desira is best known as a hard-hitting football journalist for the Herald-Sun
in Melbourne, but he is an all-rounder who also contributed to a
path-breaking radio program and wrote the history of Green Gully club.
Born in Malta in 1955 he came to Australia in 1974, an auspicious
year for the sport in this country, and played for the Broadmeadows
clubs, doing the club program. He found his way to Victorian State
League club Green Gully two years later.
He turned his hand to writing and then editing the Green Gully Gazette for five years. That gave him an insight into the running of one of Victorian football’s most successful clubs.
In turn that formed the basis of his well-informed journalism, but it was also underpinned by his deep love for the game. Even at his most critical of the performance or behaviour of those playing or administering the sport, he was always aware of the greater good of the game.
But he was never just a ‘fan with a typewriter’, as my colleagues in the Scottish press were once described. He was genuinely upset when people who should have known better did not appreciate his sense of balance and the justice of his judgments.
He broke many stories which people would have preferred to keep hidden. His incisive take on the game appeared regularly in Laurie Schwab’s Soccer Action in the 1980s, where he was eventually succeeded by Kyle Patterson.
Ron Reed gave Peter a start in mainstream journalism with a column in the Sporting Globe in 1979 and, in his own words, Peter ‘pestered the Sun‘ for a job with the daily paper, which he began in 1980.
When the Herald and Sun amalgamated it was Peter who got the soccer position and from then until his retirement this year he was a fixture in the role of critic/promoter/investigator and in many ways the conscience of the game.
Peter has kept an amazing range of accurate statistics of the game at international, national, state and club level.
Recently, a number of his colleagues gathered at a lunch in his honour to recognise his contribution to the game in Australia. Murray Shaw from the Football Media Association of Australia presented him with a plaque from the Association and Jack Reilly, Board Member of the Football Federation of Australia and the Socceroos’ goalkeeper at the World Cup in Germany in 1974, spoke about Peter’s career.
Peter will be missed in the press boxes around the country but his contribution to our great game, and journalism, will never be forgotten.
March 2010
He turned his hand to writing and then editing the Green Gully Gazette for five years. That gave him an insight into the running of one of Victorian football’s most successful clubs.
In turn that formed the basis of his well-informed journalism, but it was also underpinned by his deep love for the game. Even at his most critical of the performance or behaviour of those playing or administering the sport, he was always aware of the greater good of the game.
But he was never just a ‘fan with a typewriter’, as my colleagues in the Scottish press were once described. He was genuinely upset when people who should have known better did not appreciate his sense of balance and the justice of his judgments.
He broke many stories which people would have preferred to keep hidden. His incisive take on the game appeared regularly in Laurie Schwab’s Soccer Action in the 1980s, where he was eventually succeeded by Kyle Patterson.
Ron Reed gave Peter a start in mainstream journalism with a column in the Sporting Globe in 1979 and, in his own words, Peter ‘pestered the Sun‘ for a job with the daily paper, which he began in 1980.
When the Herald and Sun amalgamated it was Peter who got the soccer position and from then until his retirement this year he was a fixture in the role of critic/promoter/investigator and in many ways the conscience of the game.
Peter has kept an amazing range of accurate statistics of the game at international, national, state and club level.
Recently, a number of his colleagues gathered at a lunch in his honour to recognise his contribution to the game in Australia. Murray Shaw from the Football Media Association of Australia presented him with a plaque from the Association and Jack Reilly, Board Member of the Football Federation of Australia and the Socceroos’ goalkeeper at the World Cup in Germany in 1974, spoke about Peter’s career.
Peter will be missed in the press boxes around the country but his contribution to our great game, and journalism, will never be forgotten.
March 2010
