Safe - South Melbourne 0 Port Melbourne 1

Having looked for it in a few places since I first read it several years ago and come up empty, the following anecdote is possibly something I've made up. When the late Les Murray  published his memoir By the Balls, he joked that he wanted to use the title The Great Poison instead, alluding to the hold that soccer has on its most dedicated supporters. And whether my recollection is true or not, the trope of football fans joking about how their support of their team is like an illness is a well-worn one anyway.

Usually we laugh when we talk about such things. In the first place, it's because it's just an absurd thing to say. In the second place, it's because when we say such things we seek to establish a sort of self-valourising and self-justifying aspect to it; we add a moral dimension to our support of the game and our particular club, clothing ourselves in the idea that we are making a noble sacrifice, both misunderstood and not understood by those poor souls who exist outside that cultural milieu. The more dour the experience, the worse the results, the more obscure and downtrodden the club, the more football fandom karma we accrue if not quite the benefit in the next life, then at least the ability to be smug in this one. What would those other people know about loyalty, dedication, and good old fashioned sticktoitiveness?

But there is of course the other side of this fable: that the unconditional attachment to this kind of cause can be very unhealthy. Thus I put it to you, dear reader, that South Melbourne Hellas' 2018 season consisted of little to no nobility, honour, valour or whatever other lofty epithet you want to attach to it. Indeed, it probably actually made people sick. Proximity to the abomination that was this season made just about everyone who came into contact with it much worse off mentally, socially, and in some cases maybe even physically.

Things were bad enough as they were leading into the game, and worse when we saw Sunday's squad weakened by the absence of Luke Adams with injury, Then when Tim Mala got himself sent off a minute and a half into the game with one of the dumbest challenges you'll ever see, all thoughts turned towards waiting to see how much worse it could get, which didn't take long: youth team debutant Ben Djiba, thrust into the left-back position as a starter, gave Sam Smith - one of Port Melbourne's many ex-South players taking the field that day - the perfect chance to give Port the lead and thrust them towards the finals, and send us toward relegation.

At that moment I just wanted to leave, or throw up. I've had nervous spells and felt dizzy at football matches, I walked out (as far as the social club) once, I've had my arms go numb, but the only other time I ever wanted to spew was round one, 2010 in the AFL, when Collingwood dodged a bullet by beating the Demons by a point when some Melbourne plonker dropped a mark with about two seconds left. Thankfully for the patrons in the top deck of the Great Southern Stand that day, I was able to collect myself and not chunder across the row in front of me.

What made things much, much worse on Sunday was that all things considered, we actually started playing well. Sure we were shaky or less than competent across different areas, but we weren't nearly as bad as we had been at times in 2018. One felt that Port were the more likely to score next, but it was not the fait accompli that the previous two weeks had been. At times we even outplayed Port, though you knew the goal was never going to come, and thus we had to do that thing where half our time was spent watching our phones for updates of other games. Hume had taken the lead at Pascoe Vale, but Kingston were doing well against Gully, and thus despite being down in our own game, things were looking up.

Apart from a couple of near miss free kicks, our great moment came late in the first half, when Pep Marafioti squared the ball to an unmarked Marcus Schroen on the edge of th six yard box and right in front, only for Schroen to blast it over the bar. Realistically, we weren't going to save ourselves, and some atrocious refereeing didn't help, as the game threatened to flare up into several scuffles. The worst decision was none of the three officials seeing one of our players getting potted by a Port player behind play in the middle of the field. Not that any of that mattered. Kingston went up 3-0 late in their game, and for good measure Paco equalised late in their match. So, without having to do any heavy lifting of our own over the last four games, we survived thanks to the kindness of strangers - and that 3-2 win against Gully before things fell apart well and proper for the last month of the season.

As our survival was secured well before full time, there was time to ponder things half relevant. Like if we got into the A-League, how good would it be to have Clarendon Corner located in the few surviving spectator amenities of the 1926 Stand? It would fulfil so many of our requirements - in the best Clarendon Corner tradition it would be the worst spot in the ground to watch a game from; it would be perfect for making sure we were nowhere near the returning bandwagon; in a few decades there'd eventually there'd be just a couple of people left, leaving two lucky fans the chance to live out a real life Statler and Waldorf fantasy.

Some people broke out some chants, willing us to score to get Kingston into the finals as payment for rescuing us. Milos Lujic got benched, to his disgust. Everyone has the feeling that he's on his way out, probably to Oakleigh and Chris Taylor. We can talk about ignominious ends, but there almost no one came out of this year clean. You looked out onto the field, at the players who took part on the day and even those who weren't there, and wondered how many would be back next year. Brad Norton, probably. Leigh Minopoulos, if he feels his body is right, perhaps. Kristian Konstantinidis, if his head's screwed on right. Luke Adams if he wants to settle down in Australia permanatently. But the rest? Makeche, Howard, Foschini, Jawadi, Mala, Marshall, Minatel you'd all assume our likely to be gone.

Will we keep one or either of the Marafioti brothers? Pep did well enough I thought to earn another season; Giordano was meant to be the great white hope of the youth system, for whom so much was sacrificed for, but injury and insanity meant his season was a wash. Will the once implausible but now perhaps merely unlikely happen, and Nikola Roganovic stick around? We went through four goalkeepers this year - one injured, one discarded, one flew in and flew out, and the last came back in our hour of need but can he commit to something more substantial? What's the fate of the several youth players we tried once Sasa Kolman left? As promising as almost all of them looked at some point, did anyone of them do enough to warrant anything more than fringe bench spot next year? Next year, eh? What a luxury to be able to say that without a complete and overbearing sense of shame.

Those who still listen to 3XY say that they heard president Leo Athanasakis had re-appointed Con Tangalakis as our coach for 2019, but as usual with these things, I'll believe it when I see it. A strange coaching decision at the start of the season set all of this in motion, to the point where we were two bad results away from a relegation playoff, and our now on the verge of a player exodus the likes of which we haven't seen since the end of the NSL. Now maybe the sacking of Chris Taylor was necessary, maybe it wasn't - regardless one gets the feeling that things were coming to a head one way or another behind the scenes for reasons that probably have as much to do with interpersonal dynamics between Taylor and the board than any issues of competence.And even if his sacking was executed brilliantly from a Machiavellian, didn't see that coming point of view, clearly everything else to do with that decision was done so poorly, that one wonders if people actually thought this through properly.

At the end of the day and at the end of our season, there was relief, and time for a rum and coke. But there was also the feeling for me that had this season gone on any longer, then I would have had to follow in the footsteps of Julianne Moore's character in Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe, and remove myself to an igloo in the desert, where none of this mattered, or even existed.

But, please, South, don't drive into that chasm!
Now a lot of this next segment originally made its appearance on Twitter, so if you've already seen it there, you can skip to the bit.

As much as South Melbourne's car crash 2018 season was (rightly) the focus of many people's attention, let's not let it obscure Green Gully's remarkable decline. After round ten, where Gully had crunched us 3-0 at Lakeside, Gully sat in fourth spot with six wins, two draws and two losses. They were eleven points clear of us, and in a good position you'd think to make a finals run, and certainly not be considered a likely candidate for (provisional) relegation. Yet Gully picked up just one win and three draws in their final sixteen games. For a club with a stable income, no obvious external sponsor and supporter expectations to live up to, as well twenty years of alternately successful/competitive teams, it's quite an astonishing situation.

Gully also have some quality players - who many clubs will be circling in the event they lose the playoff game - played some decent football, and seldom got belted (especially in the way that did). One shouldn't write them off in the upcoming playoff, of course - but you have to wonder how they of all clubs ended up in this situation. The on again/off again affair with Arthur Papas hasn't helped; and for a coach touted by some as part of a young generation of up and coming Australian coaches, that should put a solid dent in what's left of his local reputation.

Part of the word on the street is that Papas shared at least one trait with fellow young full-time coach Sasa Kolman, in that his expectations of semi-professional players - especially the time they could reasonably be expected to give to their soccer careers - were wildly optimistic. I'm talking extra training sessions, before work morning sessions and the like. Now well may we say that for the money players in the NPL are getting, they should be doing more than what they do (especially since their ability to draw cards is negligible at best), but as long their chief source of income comes from a day job, that's not going to happen.

Alongside playing in a second tier cut up into a dozen pieces, we are all aware that the differing levels of professionalism between the A-League and the aforementioned second tiers is one of the most-significant barriers to Australian players making the step up to professional ranks. As we all know, there are people working on fixing at least one part of that issue, by virtue of getting a national second tier up and running, but one wonders whether it'll be worth it if the players are full professionals. But that's for the optimists to figure out.

In summary, this is another warning that in NPL Victoria you don't even have to completely sabotage your own season like we did to find yourself in trouble - just the slightest complacency in a tight season, and you're in the relegation playoff. And it's only going to get tougher next year with Altona Magic and Dandenong City getting promoted. For the moment just be grateful that were at least three teams worse than us in 2018, remarkable as that might be..

Off-season winding down mode, pending...
Usually when the senior men's team season ends, South of the Border goes into our half-arsed off-season mode. In recent times that's meant at least a few more weeks of blog action, but since this will be the first time since 2012 that the men won't be involved in any post-season antics, we find ourselves in the slightly anomalous situation insofar as the blog is concerned. That's because even though our men have greatly disappointed all of us, the senior women's teams are still very much alive and kicking, and looking to add several pieces of silverware to their collection.

This week they're aware to Bulleen on Saturday afternoon, hoping to clinch what I still anachronistically call the minor premiership, and after that they will be embarking on a finals campaign which will hopefully see them make an appearance at AAMI Park on grand final day. It'd be great to see a few more people at their games, because they are worth watching, and lopsided as the NPLW can be, at the business end of the season things get a lot more competitive.

Now that's all well and good for those who have an interest in our women's teams, but I get that's not a sentiment shared by everyone at South Melbourne. As noted ad nauseum recently (OK, twice), I'm a bit busy with work and stuff at the moment, and I don't expect that to let up until early November. Nevertheless, along with the women's stuff, there'll eventually be the usual off-season winding down of South of the Border. So that means the usual patchwork awards, book reviews, maybe some historical guff, and possibly drawing into the archives for draft pieces that maybe should see the light of day at some point.

There will also be some A-League bid news (not that any of that matters), and I assume there'll be an AGM at some point. So, there'll be enough to talk about: just gotta find the time to do it all.

Speaking of the A-League bid
The club has confirmed that it has "submitted its formal bid to join the Hyundai A-league in season 2019/20". Some have mocked the "60 years in the making reference", though I'm not sure why. If anything they should be congratulating the club on at least making the sensible decision to post the notice after we had avoided the relegation playoff, rather than putting it up beforehand.

Final thought
It's well before my end of year round round up, and it'll sound typically self-pitying as I write this, but I feel as if in a lot of ways I've let down the South of the Border readership this year with my writing efforts. There are some personal reasons for this - which I can hopefully let you all know about in due course - but mostly it comes down to me being utterly depressed and demotivated by the experience of watching and attending South Melbourne matches this year.

That goes for almost the whole experience - the performance of the men's team, the often self-serving and self-preservation antics of the board, the decline in quality of the social club (I'm leaving out manager Tegan, and Noula the cook, who did the best they could with the resources given to them), and the sometimes (often) embarrassing antics of the fans, myself included. The things that kept it all together? The fact that enough players gave enough of a stuff for just long enough to get us over the line, showing us that there was at least some residual pride left in the squad; the persistent camaraderie of the ramshackle operation that is Clarendon Corner, including some of the younger boys; lastly, the fact of what else are you going to do when there's a South game on?

Here's to the hope that this is a serious wake up call to the club that a half-arsed approach to running and supporting South Melbourne Hellas is going to end very badly. Here's to the hope that 2019 will provide us with a much better season on the field than the rollicking shambles that was 2018.