Wednesday 23 July 2014

(Un)Social Club Artefact Wednesday - The Maverick

The Maverick was the newsletter published by the then South Melbourne Supporters Group, a little of whose experience you can read about here, in an article we've reproduced from the old Studs Up magazine.

From my understanding - and I'm by no means an expert - the South Melbourne Supporters Group that existed at the time (a more low key version came into existence for a couple of years during the VPL era) seemed to be a collective of mostly young, progressively minded South fans. What seemed to unite them was:
  • That they were fed up with the way the club was being run
  • They were fed up with the idiots on the terraces who kept messing up
  • Their desire to see the club brought into the modern age and closer to mainstream Australia.
  • In addition to that, they wanted to and did contribute to the club as volunteers.
I don't know what happened to this group, its members and whether the people involved deemed their efforts a success. I think it's a story worth telling. If any member of this group has more information, and especially if they have old copies of The Maverick, or at least the rest of this one, I'd love you to get in touch. As part of my abstract goal of documenting and preserving South related articles and missives from independent, non-mainstream South and non-South related sources, I'd love to be able to add further depth and breadth to that history.

I'm not sure when or where I sourced this lone scan of the first page of The Maverick's first (only?) edition, but my suspicion is that I somehow got it off Damian Smith, the Australian soccer historian and creator of the first South website, among many, many other things.

4 comments:

  1. lol @ this quote "one of the other concerning issues raised was; How did SM family day turn into Athens 2004 day, with Greek flags and music greeting the guests."

    You've got to be kidding me ffs

    Who needs the FFA clamping down on the ethnic identity of the clubs, when you blokes have been doing it to your own club for the past decade. Unbelievable.

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  2. Go to a victory game a few of them are there. Perhaps that's how the see victory, as the new south they wanted. I say fuck them. I have heard rumours that one of them now works for victory and another for etihad stadium (due to the victory connection).

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  3. MelbCro - unlike the majority of your supporters, South Melbourne fans came from all walks of life, and nationalities. We were striving to be a truly multi-cultural Club, not one which represents one single ethnicity. The warnings o the Board that the Club needed to change it's core structure have now unfortunately proved true. YES Melbourne Victory are the Club that progressive SM supporters wanted us to be. The true irony at the moment is that there are more 'SM' supporters who are members of Victory, than there are actually SM fans who support the Lakeside entity. As they say the proof is in the pudding - Victory will survive and thrive - while the others got left behind. Only themselves to blame.

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    Replies
    1. Here we go. The overwhelming majority of your supporters are Greek, so no need for your exaggerations champ. You had more non Greek fans during the NSL, funny how back then you guys were more fiercely Greek when you actually had the demographics to go the other way. Deadest you cannot make this shit up.

      Anonymous your reading of Australian football is amateurish at best. You guys have done more than any of the major ethnic clubs to try and break away from the ethnic reality. There is nothing more than you guys can do in that respect. And tell me after all these years, please show me the evidence of how the club is actually better off having gone down that path? These types of tactics are proven failures. We have decades of evidence in this country of de-ethnicising of clubs, be it from clubs self policing or being aggressively forced by football administrators, which has shown to have no impact on those clubs. If anything it drives people away rather than bringing new people in. So the fact that you adhere to something like that is just laughable. You know when I go to South's ground now, only one word comes to my mind, 'generic'. Its not the South Melbourne Hellas that I remember.

      I've said it before with discussions I've had on the web with South fans including Paul, I've never understood how all of a sudden we saw the fans stop singing in Greek. The argument that keeps being thrown up is 'Oh CC has a number of non Greeks'. So what? When Liverpool did their little world tour recently and played in Jakarta, did the Indo's sing an Indo version of You'll Never Walk Alone. Of course not. Why only earth would any club modify its traditions for new people coming into the club. The newbies should be joining into to the pre-existing traditions. Surely it was that unique identity of the club that attracted them in the first place ffs. You guys didn't even choose to compromise, and find a half-way point. Instead you chose to go the complete extreme of no Greek singing/chanting. Wtf? It makes no sense and I don't understand why you guys are ok with it. When did you become a club that was driven by political correctness and a club more worried about the image is portrays to the general public. You guys were always such a hated club, but everyone was still able to respect the Hellas of yesteryear. The Hellas that would stand up to the football hierarchy and tell them to get fucked. A club that used to be fiercely protective of its identity and fought against anyone who would attack that identity. Where has that Hellas gone?

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