Best South Melbourne Hellas starting XI: 2005-2015

At some point during the 2015 season, one of our readers made the suggestion that we should (on here and/or smfcboard) start thinking about who would be in our best 11 from our first eleven VPL years. And really, 11 years for 11 players seems like a fairly neat sort of framework.

Criteria would of course be one of the hardest things to come up with - how many games and/or how many seasons should a player have had to play with us in order to be a legitimate candidate? How many bench spots? Should we take into account the NSL stints of players who were with us both in the VPL and NSL? To make it as easy as possible, I propose the following straightforward minimum criteria:

• Eleven players only. Seeing as this is looking for a starting eleven, we'll have no bench players.
• One coach, no assistant.
• No minimum games required.
• For those players who were with us in both the NSL and VPL, only the VPL tenure should be taken into account.
• Any recognisable/legitimate formation - you could even make a claim for an early 20th century style 2-3-5 formation!

But if you think there's criteria that's missing I'm willing to be flexible, or you can use your own criteria to shape your team. And if you need help with how many games or goals a particular player has for South, I have access to that data and am happy to fish out the details for you.

You can email your suggestions to me (blackmissionary@hotmail.com), or leave them in the comments. Those starting XIs which seem to gather the most support across the commentariat, as well as an amalgam of the preferred players and formations, will be published in a separate post towards the end of the month. Those submissions offered with some justifications/explanations will probably be looked upon more favourably, but it's not mandatory.

Apart from a best starting XI, I'm also after more creative starting elevens - I myself will be providing my own Contrarians' XI. You could make an XI of players that went on to bigger and better things, or best XI made up of overseas players or players recruited from other clubs. Non-South fans are also more than welcome to contribute their ideas. I'm looking forward to what people come up with - the floor is yours people!