The first thing to note is that the senior men's running order is pretty much the 2020 fixture repurposed for 2021. There are a couple of minor changes in the early stages - our opening round fixture against Heidelberg will be at Olympic Village instead of at Lakeside; and our round six game against Thunder will be a Wednesday night fixture at Lakeside, as part of a league-wide midweek round.
Everything else appears to be about the same, except for the allocation of South senior men's home match days. And if you like Sunday afternoon/early evening soccer at Lakeside, you're out of luck. In 2020 we were due to play just the one Sunday home game - the Eastern Lions game early in the season - this year, there will be no Sunday home games.
The club has committed to exclusively trying out Friday and Saturday nights, with a couple of exceptions - the aforementioned Wednesday night game against Thunder, and a Saturday 3:00PM kickoff against Hume, the latter of which is an accommodation for Orthodox Easter.
The only Sunday games are St Albans away (naturally), Eastern Lions away (unusually), and Bentleigh away (final round simultaneous kickoff). All up for home games, it's one Wednesday night, four Friday nights, one Saturday afternoon, and seven Saturday nights.
The senior women's fixture has also been released, and the news on that front is that there will be six NPL-NPLW double-headers on those Saturday evening senior men's fixtures. The women will be relieved at not having to trudge out to Knox or Darebin for their home games.
Because it's the same teams and same venues, it doesn't look like I'll need to update my public transport guide, though I will take a cursory look at that before the season starts.
ReplyDeleteAlso, this news is a little bit old now, but I neglected to mention at the time (a bout three weeks ago) that from next year the FFA Cup (which might not be called that for too much longer) will be a completely random draw from the round of 32 onwards (except for the creation of four geographic zones).
ReplyDeleteNot that I think we need to worry about any of that.
If they didnt want us to watch the stuff thats going to be served up, they couldve just played behind closed doors. *sigh*
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