The Great Catastrophe - Hume City 1 South Melbourne 2

It may be a bit rich for me to point this out, what with having a solid stretch of documented negativity to fall back on, but for some South supporters it appears that the greatest tragedy to emerge from this game was that we had, in fact, won.

Apparently this was an appalling outcome, which will only serve to further mask the fact that we are comparatively out of form, playing disjointed, wonky football going both forward and back. As if the coaching staff are oblivious to this.

Still, the naysayers do have a kind of point. After the debacle of the second half against Richmond, Chris Taylor promised lots of changes. However in a classic example of misdirection, this meant only one change, but what a change - the man omitted from the entire match day squad was none other than captain Michael Eagar, replaced by Kristian Konstantinidis.

Now Eagar hasn't been in the greatest of form recently, but this was still a huge move. Luckily for all concerned, Konstantinidis had a very good match, and will be a hard luck story if he is dropped for the next match. There is talk, too, that Luke Adams is in line for another extended tour with New Zealand (not sure which squad, nor for what purpose they're reputedly touring), so Eagar shouldn't be on the outer for too long.

Old mate Rama's second yellow card got tongues wagging. Was it deserved? Did it, in the end, lead to South winning a game they wouldn't have otherwise won? Did his send off, in the end, actually make South's performance look even less impressive?

For whatever it's worth, I think there was a yellow card in it. It wasn't that it was a malicious tackle, or that he was 'the last man' (a rule which does not even exist). It was purely situational. Milos Lujic is about to get past Rama, gets clipped (or not, but since the foul has been pulled up, that's what has to be dealt with in that moment), what other choice do the officials have at their disposal?

Anyway, the send off and free kick lead directly to our first goal. There are goals which glisten with style, and there are goals which very clearly don't. The old adage still applies though, that they all count the same. So Matthew Millar's header, looping high but straight at Chris Oldfield, somehow slips through the gap between Oldfield's hands and the crossbar.

Some of those who have seen the replay have said that it spun in, which whether true or not seems like a ludicrous concept, but whatever, it went in, we behind the goals went wild, and South went into halftime 1-0 up. All this after we had faced a ten minute period where we could barely exit our own half, and where those shots we did have often ended up missing by distances inconceivable.

The second half from us, I thought, was much better, and while it took an atypical Shane Rexhepi mistake to help put Millar in space for his well taken second goal, at least we managed to make the most of an opposition mistake. In Ken Bray's fairly meh and now long out of date book How To Score, Bray makes the point that most goals are scored not from elaborate build ups from the back, but from turnovers caused by the attacking team close to the goal they're attacking.

Since much of last week's disaster was due to a complete lack of pressure on Richmond's defence, should we not then celebrate this statistically minor (albeit statistically appropriate and consistent) incident? Of course not, because while the supporters behind the relevant goal end decided to once again celebrate prematurely - including by watching the replay of the goal on MFootball's live stream, which was delayed by a minute and a half or so - Hume worked their way back into the game, and pulled a goal back.

This caused a lot of angst everywhere. The supporters lost heart, but the South players, too, seemed to lose whatever confidence they had built up during this match. So instead of finishing strong, we ended up trying to scurry towards the corners, and what should have felt like a solid performance ends up looking and feeling a lot shakier and inconclusive than perhaps we would all have liked.

Still, while we can focus on how badly we supposedly played and how out of form we may or may not be, it's easy to overrate the opposition as well. Not that Hume are a bad side by any means, but Oldfield's blunder looks even worse on replay, and Rexhepi's poor touch which lead directly to our second goal was an absoluter shocker. It makes one think of some of the comments they'd cop if they made those mistakes playing for us. It's worth recalling last week's ponderings on the players at this level being here for a reason - and that goes for South Melbourne and opposition players alike.

So seeing as how we started this post with a misplaced sense of tragedy, it seems only fitting that we end it with the real tragedy that occurred on Saturday night.

Matthew Millar just ruined my Typical Taylor 1-0 Result headline. @smfc 2-0 up. #hcvsm #PS4NPLVIC

— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) April 2, 2016

Great, another week of people arguing in the comments section about a 1-0 result that didn't happen.

Next game
At home, against Bentleigh.

Broadmeadows, it's a hell of a town. Or maybe Westmeadows. Whichever one the game was played at. Plus Coolaroo.
There was the game which included a rolling maul which ended up in the car park. The game were Gianni De Nittis scored four goals. The game where Ljubo and Jesse got sent off on a day where Hume thought it was a good idea to celebrate the glory of Ataturk.

Suffice to say you go to a game at whatever they're calling this stadium these days, and interesting things are a good chance of happening. But interesting doesn't mean good. So, they started with music blaring so loud that it made one pine for the awfulness of the Lakeside pre-match music. They played the chicken dance. They played the hokey-pokey. They even stooped so low as to play the Macarena.

So yeah, that sucked. But they also had a drumming group of sorts, with their own section of the grandstand. Which OK, it's great that other clubs that previously had no active support of any kind are making an effort to get stuff going (and people attract people), but it was also bloody irritating. Irritating because they weren't drumming in syncopation, which apart from being incredibly off-putting aesthetically, made it much harder for those few of Clarendon Corner who made the trip to be able to piggyback off the beat for their own chants.

A flare lights up the area occupied by Hume's newly
 formed active support area. Photo: David Alter.

Most surprising though was that section of the Hume support lighting two flares. Apart from being $1500 a pop - in this case the equivalent of 200 full adult tickets - you wonder if in future Hume's management will be so pleased to allocate that space to these fans. This is more the case if in fact FFV are planning to be even stricter with their punishments, with some suggestion that a second offence (where on the first instance the persons responsible were not identified) that points deductions could come into play. It's weird seeing flares at consecutive league matches now - we went through so many years where even one being lit was something rare.

And then there's the nearest train station. Coolaroo is a monolithic monstrosity; a mountain of steel and concrete rising out of the surrounding flatness, that would defy any attempt at being rendered majestic or noble by even the best attempts at urban poetry. But on a Saturday night, with the next train to the city still 25 minutes away, at least you've got time to think, with no distractions.

Basking in a barren and eerie post-victory glow at Coolaroo station. #hcvsm #PS4NPLVIC pic.twitter.com/2zgH39hO6y

— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) April 2, 2016 

Jersey night this week
I don't know if you can still book tickets for this, but I put mine and Gains' names down for this, and we seem to have been accepted. $70 for tickets, it's on this Friday night at (sigh) Beachcomber. Is $70 too much for an annual sit down, three course meal with plenty if complaining? Of course not.

FFA Cup news
We have been drawn against Altona Magic for the next round. We are the designated away team, and as Paisley Park has lights, I assume we will be playing this fixture at Paisley Park. The next round is scheduled to be played over the last two weeks of April. More info as it arrives. While Altona Magic is one of the stronger teams in state league 1 - and have recruited accordingly, including Marinos Gasparis, and as our mate Johnny has noted, also Daniel Vasilevski, Jonathan Munoz, James Stefanou and Benji Vahid - it's another ex-South Melbourne reunion, which as we saw against Richmond, doesn't always work out for us. Still, this is one of the better outcomes we could have hoped for.

International Year of the Fence
Segment on temporary hiatus because frankly, this is such a stupid segment. Also, I forgot to take a photo of Hume's fence.

Match programmes
Uploaded the recent Richmond effort. Have a whole stack of non-South fans, but need to get cracking on developing the match programme/library website project.

Some brief thoughts on the passing of Bob Ellis
The other day, after the comedian Ronnie Corbett had passed away, one of my Twitter compadres compared my work here to Corbett's monologues, a description intended as praise, no doubt, but one which left me shrugging my shoulders - Corbett was before my time, and so there wasn't much I could add to the discussion.

But then Bob Ellis (finally) died, and I have to say I was saddened by that. Not because I had known Ellis, let alone read more than a couple of the things he'd ever written - I read his First abolish the customer: 202 arguments against economic rationalism, probably over a decade ago now, and raced through the brief The Ellis Laws, which contained short bursts of his typically incendiary forms of wisdom and some stabs at common sense (keeping in mind Friedrich Engels' maxim that common sense is the worst sort of metaphysics) which while sometimes bland or obvious, at least made one think and react. In a personal review of this book and its 'laws', I noted that:

The best one of the lot is clearly the one that talks about the internet being the chief cause of a worldwide lack of sleep, and subsequent unhappiness. The internet never sleeps, but you, a human being, do. So go to bed, and wake up refreshed. If the world has ended during the time you've been asleep, well, it probably wasn't you who would have prevented it from happening.

The kind of advice that many of us could do with. Despite having not read or taken an interest in much of what Ellis has written over the years, there was a time in my life when I had just started taking an interest in alternative radio, and would fairly religiously listen to Tony Biggs' programme On The Blower. Biggs' taste in music can be wayward, his opinions dogmatic and even smug, and those of his callers in the talk-back segment even more so.

But during my early days of listening to On The Blower, during the worst of the Howard years, there was a space for Bob Ellis to provide a spiel. For a few minutes each week (or was it each fortnight?) Ellis would pour forth simultaneously rough and elegant elegiac ramblings on the state of the nation. And however bad the progressives of Australia felt at the time, there was always that relief that a) someone could express those feelings of despair with Ellis' ragged elegance and b) that as bad as you felt about the situation, Ellis felt much, much worse. There were times during these weekly reports from the front where Ellis could barely muster the enthusiasm to provide anything to the show, such were the depths of his progressive despair. But even these moments were compelling listening.

As a novice writer back then, and still as a somewhat insecure writer, I would wonder where I fit, and who was worth imitating. Some years after I had started this blog, it occurred to me that, even though I'd read so little of his work, the style of those weekly sermons on 3RRR, and especially their tone of lament for a seemingly lost cause had seeped through, sometimes in the form of entire pieces, but more often as a general sense of feeling.

It's fair to say that that sort of lament, while nourishing in its own way at the appropriate times, can quickly turn into nasty self-satisfaction - and thus you need wit and charm and all the other things that hopefully make people come back to read your work. It's probably for the best that I've seldom ever tried to mimic Ellis' attempts at gratuitous factual libel.

I don't intend this sort of obituary to be about politics, because people like Ellis are involved at far deeper levels than most of us ever will be, and I am aware that my own mishmash of re-heated, hand me down politics and ideals is not to everyone's taste - and that's not why people visit this blog, anyway. But sometimes I like to indulge and talk about the writing process and how voices are developed over the years, and where style may come from.

Final thought
Here's to good sports.