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.