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.