Ivan England can partly thank the New Zealand Army for his long career in soccer.

Well, perhaps the Army for soccer-proof glasses and nature for his less than perfect eyesight that got him into soccer in the first place.

Ivan has been playing and working for soccer - and in particular Hutt Valley soccer - for 62 years. He started playing in 1935 when training was at the Hutt Recreation ground - if the caretaker let them on - and the club committee met in the Methodist Church Hall on Laings Road. The main game at school then was rugby and like every other kid he was organised into a school team. Alas for the team organiser they weren't aware Ivan's eyesight was less than perfect.

"I ended up in our house team as fullback and of course without my glasses I couldn't see. I took my glasses off and I never played another rugby match."

So he turned to soccer where he could wear his specs. He played at halfback and remembers the best team of the days as being Stop Out and Waterside. Porirua was another good team, stocked as it was with English attendants at the psychiatric hospital there who were also die-hard English soccer players. That team evolved into what is now Porirua City.

In 1942 his squad, which he captained, won the season competition against Diamonds. The team then contained Boz Murphy, a noted New Zealand boxer.

Another memorable, if less critical match during the war years, was at the Hutt Rec when they didn't gave a goalkeeper.

A bystander who was watching the game volunteered. When they found a pair of shorts for him they saw his leg was badly disfigured from a recent war wound.

"He said he played goalkeeper - I don't think he stopped a ball all day, I think we must have got beaten 14-nil."

Ivan was in the Army during the war and it was a challenge to get away from wherever he was based for the weekend for the matches. Some would make it back and some wouldn't so getting a team was always a chancy thing. It was here that the Army supplied him with sports-proof specs that were to come in very handy on the field.

"The Army provided me with steel-rimmed spectacles to fit into the gas mask and they were a smaller, stronger shape so I had them for most of my soccer career later on."

After the war he got married to Dawn, raised the family and was chairman of the Epuni School committee, putting his accountancy expertise to full use. Every club needs its dynamos to keep things moving and with Ivan devoting himself to other things the club went into a recess of sorts. So in the '50s he organised junior teams for Lower Hutt drawing a lot of the players from Epuni (Ivan's son, Claude, was also a Hutt Valley rep player but left the game to become a tennis professional in the United States).

Ivan has also served with the Hutt Valley Football Association as committee member, president, secretary and treasurer and he's been the treasurer of Hutt City from 1966.

For a minority sport it was always tricky to get full senior teams and it remained that way until the junior soccer grew, providing a growing number of players to draw on.

And there weren't any spare people to act as administratiors or fundraisers for the club. If you played soccer then you were it "or the club didn't exist".

Over the years he's been pleased about the growth in junior soccer so more young people now play soccer than any other sport, including rugby.

The probem for clubs comes when players get to school and schools demand they play for them and not their club.

"They get little coaching or encouragement and by the time they've come out of secondary school they've either lost their ability or haven't improved and they drift away from the game."

For the senior game he says there should be a settling down now the national league has been re-introduced. People who don't get in for the summer league can play at the highest standards during the winter competition.

Ivan's prediction for the future is onwards and upwards. The club is financially secure - something to always make a treasurer happier - and it would do his heart good to get the team back into the national league.