12 Days of NSL Talkback - Doug

Doug thinks the game needs more characters

12 Days of NSL Talkback - Dave

Even more Collingwood Warriors stuff... and Joe Simunic

12 Days of NSL Talkback - Gunther

More stuff about Collingwood Warriors

12 Days of NSL Talkback - Gary

Gary talks about his trip to Israel to watch Maccabi Haifa

12 Days of NSL Talkback - Dragi

Here, Dragi talks about the tremendous comedy act that was the Collingwood Warriors

12 Days of NSL Talkback - John

What kind of soccer will Eddie Krncevic's team play? And does Red Star play from behind?

12 Days of NSL Talkback Radio - Daniel

A Melbourne Croatia/St Albans fan uploaded these some time ago. Some of these are pretty funny. This first one is not too funny though, and is in quite poor taste, being the day that some of our fans attacked the Adelaide City bus, with Angelo Constanzo being the most notable victim of the broken glass.

Five Fabulous Years

Another year over.

Being honest here, there are times when I do consider stopping the blog, but that feeling doesn't tend to last too long.

I'm still not too sure about this project's purpose, but even after another loss, another minimum of an hour's journey home on public transport, and no light at the end of the irrelevance tunnel, I'm still drawn here.

Perhaps if I was someone with something better to do, I would have given up already. But that's enough self--pity for one year, because we also had a lot of fun.

That whole Toumbourou/3XY/Ta Nea/Greek Media Group thing entertained us something special during November. It also saw us get a large increase of visitors and comments. So many comments! And then the issue died and you all disappeared. Typical.

For what it's worth, this was my favourite post of mine of the year, because it shows my love of free to air television. I also liked this one, because it has a picture of a very tasty looking piece of cheese burek. And who could forget board member Tom Kalas stealing/borrowing/reinterpreting the first half of this post for his presentation to South members on the NCR?

Unless something major happens, we'll be keeping a low profile on the blog for the next couple of weeks, but do tune in every now and again, as I have about a dozen posts lined up which will entertain you for about two minutes per day. Anyway on to the thankyous.

Thanks to
All my readers, whether you like what you see or not. You add an incentive to keep going. Double cheers if you left a comment at some point.

The South Melbourne Hellas Hattrick crew.

Arthur Papas, for being a good sport.

Krizar, who balances out my loose anarcho-syndicalism with his western suburbs fascism.

Gains, for sanity and perspective. And for dinner options that weren't run of the mill souvlaki joints.

Steve from Broady, for his exquisite story telling.

Big thank you
Kiss of Death for providing match previews, and an aggressive angle to an enterprise which often veers too close to the maudlin and the mawkish.

And of course
Ian Syson.

2013 fixtures are out

Came out yesterday I think it was. Let's see, what's interesting about them... oh, we play everybody twice, which isn't always a guarantee. We have our third Greek derby in a row to finish off the season, and this time it's also local derby, what with it being away and against Port and all. Will we have to pull out the heroics of 2011 against Northcote again? Or will it be a nothing game like the 2012 Bergers match up?

What else... oh, we start off with four consecutive away matches. Now, I'm lead to believe that there will be athletics events during the first two rounds of the season, so I don't have any problem with that. Curiously though, the FFV claims that the precinct will be out of action for eight weeks while works to remove the grand prix infrastructure take place.

I find this odd because, well, apart from the athletics people using Lakeside just two weeks after the grand prix (scheduled for 17 March), I can't recall ever having to miss that many consecutive home matches ever because of the grand prix, and certainly not six weeks after the race is finished. The mysteries of life I suppose.

Whatever You Do, Don't Panic!

Remember this crap? Well, because Melbourne Heart got another crappy crowd, we're once more at the stage where two things are happening. First, the usual South suspects have come out to dance on the Heart's impending grave, without noting the inherent ironies of doing so, while on the other side of the equation, Heart's supporters are by and large looking either to blame everyone and everything bar the model their club is based on, or attempting to come up with ever more ludicrous solutions to their plight.

I won't bore you with the full range of those ideas (examples include moving the team to Geelong, buying a Greek marquee player, getting a 10k capacity boutique soccer stadium built at Glenferrie Oval), but one idea that comes up from both sides of this issue is a merger/amalgamation/takeover scenario with our very own South Melbourne Hellas.

The South supporters who are keen on this train of thought put forward the idea that our club should wait until Heart is just about dead (or not, in some variations), and then buy a stake in that franchise and change it South Melbourne by stealth. Never mind that like any half astute Australian sporting body, the FFA controls the licensing and naming arrangements. Never mind entering a competition with high overheads and almost no one making a profit. Never mind that our main goal should be to try and get what we're doing now right, because there are a lot of people who would love it to fail.

The Heart fans' idea tends to run a different way - that they should play out of the cheaper and smaller Lakeside Stadium in order to tap into the supposed latent A-League support buried within the South Melbourne community. Never mind that:

• Our actual active support, like every other state league club, is poor.
• Most of those people who could become enchanted with the A-League are already there.
• If you want to find big numbers of Greeks at sporting events in Melbourne, you're more likely to find them at a Collingwood or Richmond AFL match.
• And what's the obsession some Heart fans have with attracting Greek-Australian fans anyway? Aren't they meant to be a 'mainstream' operation?

The best parts of this situation (which seems to come up at least once every season) are the ever more ludicrous lengths people will go to back up their particular point of view. The person who created the two logos included in this entry deserves a prize for creativity, and for highlighting the difficulty in establishing whether anyone on either side of this issue is being genuine in this debate. That they are the views of a small minority of internet warriors is not much consolation.

More Spanos/Learning Greek Is Fun/Fixtures! Wait, Fixtures?

James Spanos Wins Under 21s Best and Fairest
I don't know why we're surprised anymore - James Spanos does it again, winning the under 21s best and fairest. The man is incredible, especially since he goes almost completely unnoticed by this blog and even most other pundits. Maybe it's time we truly admitted that our infatuation with one particular under 21s player this season has clouded our judgement to the detriment of our reporting.

So well done to Spanos, and well to the South Melbourne Super Duper Academy Revolution 3000, for not needing to actually have a proper voting system for finding out who the best 21s player was this season, and just going for Spanos. Excelsior!

Pateraki and Rombotis, Behind the Bike Sheds After School
Congratulations to all my non-Greek readers, you're about to get an off-season lesson in this beautiful language.

• Τζαμπατζήδες, tzambatzithes - freeloaders or cheapskates is a good start, but this Greek phrase its own certain je ne sais quoi.
• ψευτες, pseftes - liars
• Kύριος Kεραυνος, Kyrios Keravnos - Lord (or Mister) Thunder
• παπαγαλοι, papagali - parrots
• Βραζιλία, Vrazilia - Brazil 
• σπορια, sporia - seeds

If you missed the 3XY sports program, well hooley dooley, did you miss some fireworks. Host Kostas Paterakis was mad. Really mad. It seems as if Stathis Rombotis said so0me really nasty things about Pateraki and 3XY, because Pateraki was breathing fire.

Now, I haven't read the original article that seems to fired Paterakis up so much, but for the next hour or so, he laid into Rombotis. For once South wasn't copping the brunt, or indeed any flak in their coverage. This was personal.

It started off with παπαγαλοι and σπορια, and got more hilarious from there. Judging by Paterakis' tirade, Rombotis (whom Paterakis kept calling Kύριος Kεραυνος) seems to have made the allegation that the whole 3XY (and perhaps by inference, Greek-Australian sports journalist fraternity) are Τζαμπατζήδες. Well, Kostas didn't take kindly to that, nor the allegation that he and his colleagues were ψευτες.

During elaboration of the matter, we somehow ended up in Βραζιλία, and the 2000 World Club Championships and who paid for who to get over there. Then we moved into the 2004 efforts to save the club, from which Paterakis claimed that Rombotis was absent.

Then Paterakis, absolutely fuming at this point, basically called Rombotis out, daring him to call, as long as he kept his call to five minutes, because they didn't want it to drag on for an hour. If Rombotis did call, he didn't make it to the air.

Some other highlights:

• The thunder sound affects they played at one stage
• Playing, I'm pretty sure it was this παπαγαλο song. I nearly died.
• Once again confirming why they have no time to cover anything on their show, by talking about this issue for about 50 minutes (and let's not forget the 20 minute chat with Kevin Muscat - I switched it off for that discussion).
• Mind you, they had finished with the issue, then George Karandonis turned up and it kicked off again.
• The claim made by Paterakis that, if they wanted to, they had plenty of other ways of hurting South. 

What was great about this hour long tirade, is that apart from the times when they're wrestling with whose microphone is supposed to be on, and callers dropping out, is that there was some actual effort put into the show. Little things like song selection and sound affects add so much. More please.

Still, disappointed that there was no sign of the promised extended talkback session on South's recent crisis. Nor was there any reference made to the previous week's promise to have a South representative on the show next week. Don't tell me that's going to end up not happening like the last time they made that promise?

2013 Fixtures
Apparently these were supposed to come out today. No such luck. A certain παπαγαλο has told us that the season will be starting on the week of April 6th.