Rochedale Rovers

In November 1972, Tommy Vance put a notice in the local paper asking anyone in the area interested in football to get in touch, and enough people answered that the club had a team ready for the 1973 season. It opened that campaign by beating Redlands United 4:0, and by then the side was already training on a scrap of ground behind the Glen Hotel in Eight Mile Plains, its landlord Brian Fitzgibbon among the local backers, alongside estate agent Graham Hogg and garage owner John Bierling, who kept the club afloat in its first years.

Rochedale Rovers moved on to leased land at what became Underwood Park, in the Brisbane suburb of Priestdale, and volunteers built the pitches, the canteen, the office and the changing rooms themselves. A brick clubhouse went up in the late 1970s, bars and all, and stood until 2019, when it was pulled down and replaced with a new building carrying stands named for Tom Vance and Kairan Cooper. The ground, still known to regulars as Old Mac Stadium, holds 5,000.

The club plays in white and blue, home shirts trimmed dark navy over blue, and competes in the Queensland NPL and the Australia Cup — the national knockout that gives a suburban Brisbane side its rare shot at senior opposition from other states.