Friendly result - Brunswick City 2 South Melbourne 5

I trundled out to Brunswick West today. Bloody hot. Not sure of the sensibleness of playing matches in the middle of the day with such heat. Anyway, defensively very messy again, but going forward we were a lot better. Brunswick City missed a ton of very gettable chances throughout the game.

I suspect that the teams being out on Wednesday nights are a little stronger than the ones on Saturday afternoons, if for no other reason than the fact that Nikola Roganovic is in goals in the midweek games. There's not a lot of time left for Con Tangalakis to sort out his preferred starting eleven and formation.

I was asked a few times today to put forward what my starting eleven would be, and I don't know if it's fair to do so based on me seeing so few games during this pre-season... but I'm thinking some variant of 

Roganovic / Norton - Adams - Marshall - Djiba / Gage, Schroen, Sylaidos / Pep Marafioti, Krousoratis, Gio Marafioti

might be we close to what we end up with. Minopoulos will be off the bench, and that's fine. Konstantindis hasn't been fully involved with this pre-season, I'm not sold on Lambropoulos, and who knows what the coaches will decide in terms of how they'll use Bereveskos and Stratomitros, let alone George Howard who played in central defence today.

Members night this Wednesday
This coming Wednesday it looks like there will be a members/membership night in the social club, where our supporters have been invited to come down to the club to purchase and collect memberships. Not sure if there will be any merch available, but here's hoping. 

Apart from coming down and collecting a membership before our first home game, it's also a good chance to road test the food on offer in the social club as well - I had a burger the other night, and while no world beater, it was more than passable, and a definite step up from last year's offering.

Keep an eye on the club's social media for more on this.

Everyone is off to Adelaide
Or so it seems - senior men, senior women, and all of our NPL junior teams are apparently travelling to Adelaide to play against various opponents as part of pre-season. The senior men will be taking on West Adelaide, the senior women I think Adelaide City and another team. This seems like a very interesting enterprise to send basically the whole club interstate, in some ways echoing the intent of AAFC's interstate junior tournament proposal from last year.

2019 SMFC senior squad roster as of 2/02/2019
Thank you to my Twitter friends for letting me know where Christos Intzidis ended up. I've seen Iqi Jawadi's name attached to Dandy City in some form. Whoever the English striker was who trialled with us in late 2018, he's almost certainly gone.

So what we have then, barring some massive surprise in the next two weeks, is basically what you see below. with most if not all of the players listed under the "seen hanging around pre-season training" list likely to be made senior South players.

It is also possible that the injured Alastair Bray could be ready by round one based on stuff I heard today, but we'll have to see on that.

As to why the club hasn't announced official signings with a bit more frequency... I'm not too sure. Apparently we'll be well under our player points-cap, even without using points from Matthew Millar's move to Central Coast, so there's room to move if we do decide on a surprise late notice marquee type signing. 

Signed

• Dean Bereveskos (Bonnyrigg White Eagles) 
• Ethan Gage (Bentleigh Greens)
• Kristian Konstantinidis (signed until end of 2019) 
• Nick Krousoratis (Green Gully)
• Perry Lambropoulos (Port Melbourne) 
• Brad Norton (signed until end of 2019) 
• Kostas Stratomitros (Oakleigh Cannons)
• Gerrie Sylaidos (Northcote) 

Seen hanging around pre-season training

• Luke Adams 
• Manny Aguek 
• Ben Djiba
• George Howard 
• Amir Jashari
• Giordano Marafioti 
• Giuseppe Marafioti 
• Jake Marshall
• Andrew Mesorouni
• Leigh Minopoulos 
• Will Orford
• Nikola Roganovic
• Marcus Schroen 
• Melbourne Heart Ball Hog
• Zack/ch Bates?
• "Calvin"

Injured

• Alastair Bray 

Out

• Rory Brian (Preston) 
• Matthew Foschini (Oakleigh) 
• Josh Hodes (Oakleigh?) 
• Christos Intzidis (FK Palanka, Lithuania) 
• Milos Lujic (Oakleigh) 
• Oliver Minatel (Canada) 
• Ndumba Makeche (Penang FA) 
• Tim Mala (North Sunshine)

Unknown / MIA / Assumed dead from 2018

• Giorgi Zarbos