Oakleigh Cannons 0 South Melbourne 0 - South win 6-5 on penalties

Let us begin our now customary report for the transport engineer.

Drove to Sunshine station, as only the main car park was closed. Missed the first available train by mere seconds, had to wait a little for the next one. Got to Flinders Street in reasonably good time, and had Pakenham train waiting on platform 7 ready to depart within a minute. Sadly the departure of this service was delayed by quite a few minutes, because of an operational matter further down the line somewhere. I don't know what it was, someone maybe chasing a dog onto the tracks? Train eventually leaves Flinders, and makes good pace down to Huntingdale station, after which it is a short walk by myself to Jack Edwards Reserve through the relatively poorly lit industrial backblocks of Oakleigh, with cars and truck trailers blocking the footpath, and then there was the bit where there's no footpath near the ground.

I was fortunate that as a media pass holder, I was able to skip the queue outside the ground and head straight in. I overheard some people being frustrated with there being no eftpos facilities at Oakleigh (still!) but as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to a suburban ground, you just have to bring cash. I suppose it tends to sort the wheat (those who go to local regularly) from the chaff (those who do not).

A bigger crowd than you would usually get for a league game here these days between these two sides, but not as big as you might have had in the past. Maybe it was too cold, maybe the pandemic still puts people off from attending sporting events, maybe even the FFA Cup has lost a tiny bit of its sheen. God, I hope it's the latter.

Onto the game. This fixture provided irony upon irony, and cliché upon cliché, as well as the chance to revive some of old favourite lines. Not many expected us to win this fixture; not neutrals, and not our own fans. Some of our own fans thought we were going to get buried, based on Oakleigh's recent goal scoring run, and our own flailing efforts where the one (mostly) unquestionably good thing we'd had going for us - our defence - had also gone down the gurgler. 

That wasn't my thinking by the way, the getting buried part I mean. Certainly, I thought we were going to lose because:

a) we were in the middle of a wretched run of form, and

b) I generally think we're going to lose most games, even when we have a very strong team and good form

But getting buried? I didn't think that would happen; or at least not nearly as fervently as some other South fans seemed to think. But props to some of my fellow South fans for fully embracing doomism! 

In retrospect, if there was one game where an overly defensive and cautious set-up could work, it just might be a knockout cup game where no-one expects you do anything good. The morbid joke on the terraces last week was that Esteban Quintas sets up his team to win games 0-0, but a knockout fixture allows you to progress to the next round doing just that, assuming everything falls into place.

And in this case, it kind of did. Though they had a day's extra rest from the previous round of league matches, they'd also had a more congested fixture thanks to the multiple postponements of their previous FFA Cup fixtures. So, you'd hope that fact, as well as the matter of some of their important players being well on the wrong side of 30, would help us.

Additionally Oakleigh's narrow ground provides diminished opportunities for playing the ball into wide spaces. Credit where credit is due, we limited Oakleigh's ability to get wide and behind our back four or five or six players. Granted, the dimensions of the ground - being both short and narrow - make that easier, but the frustration of our fans wanting some of our defenders to step up and press the Oakleigh midfielders sometimes missed the point - that being to keep them at a collective arms' length.

The proof in the pudding was that Oakleigh struggled to get through the defence's middle channels, and were rarely able to get behind us out wide. Often times, when I thought they had the chance to move the ball wide away from the places we'd overloaded our defensives stocks. When they did, things looked terrifying,. but thankfully there was usually no one there to meet the cross in the six yard box. I can't say what the stats said at the end of the full 120, but after 90 minutes Oakleigh had had just one corner for the game. Considering how dire our defending from corners has been of late, that was just sensible risk mitigation.

As for the old line that was revived? It was an old forum chestnut, when critics of Chris Taylor would note that his teams and his methods, were not built for big games. It was, largely, an unfair criticism, because we won two league titles, a Dockerty Cup, and had a deep FFA Cup run 2017 - but it's a criticism that's stuck. It stuck because of notable failures especially in knockout games - against Bentleigh in the cup, in a final, and in the grand final - and of course the calamities of the losses to Palm Beach and Hobart Olympia.

That it came to the lottery of a penalty shoot-out was also fitting, because part of Taylor's reputation for failing at South comes down to penalty shootout losses. Again, that's a little unfair, because there were only two penalty shoot outs during his time with the club, which just goes to show that more often than not his teams got the job done well before it came to the point of needing a shootout to resolve a situation.

(as for Taylor's dislike of practicing for penalty shootouts, I tend to instinctively agree with him that the anxiety of the actual shootout can't be replicated in training; still, here's an opposing argument backed up by some sort of legitimate science; and there's something to be said for the chat some of us had at the game that it was practicing at least for the sake of making our players be comfortable with a penalty taking routine)

But the penalty shootout was still a long way away from happening during the game. We'd set up a tight defence which made it hard for Oakleigh to score, but also made it even harder for us to score. Poor Daniel Clark was left floundering up forward like Brodie Mihocek under Nathan Buckley; an undersized forward being asked to do too much against too many, without nearly enough support.

Chances were few and far between for both sides. We had two good chances - one sequence of play with a header onto the crossbar and a follow up attempt cleared off the line, and Henry Hore hooting the post from a tight angle. Oakleigh managed to get behind our defence and around Pierce Clark, only for (I think) Luke Adams to clear off the line. 

If this was not a cup game, with the knowledge that one team would win, and one would lose; that one team's prize would be the national stage, and the other's a return to the drudgery of the league; if all the tension built up in the crowd creating an atmosphere of expectation; without any of those things, this game would rightly have been called a dour, frustrating, and poor spectacle of local football. 

There's no way of getting around that. It was not a good game to watch. I commend the players from both teams for giving it all their all, especially ours, but it was a difficult game to watch as a piece of entertainment, as a showcase for what teams in this league can achieve. A good thing for all concerned that that's not what people are going to remember then.

What they'll probably remember is atmosphere in the stands, and the no quarter given on the pitch, and even some of the back and forth between South's fans toward former Hellas boys Tyson Holmes and Matthew Foschini. The fans might also remember a pretty ordinary and one-sided performance from the referee, which saw us collect yellow cards at will (and in the manner and rate in which we were collecting at the start of the year), while Oakleigh seemed to get away with a lot more.

(And as has been noted to me elsewhere, when will Victorian referees finally tell Holmes that he is a not referee, and to just piss off? And Foschini kissing Oakleigh's cartoon cannon badge was just bizarre theatrics)

But what they'll remember is the penalty shootout, taken to the railway end of the ground, which started well for us, until it was almost scuppered by Gerrie Sylaidos' smashing his penalty - which would have won us the tie - against crossbar. I don't blame Gerrie for his miss, in much the same way I wouldn't blame anyone for missing a shot in a shootout. I felt sick just watching the shootout preferring to sit down instead of getting a dizzy spell and losing my bearings.

And I don't even blame Gerrie for taking the shot the way he did; maybe it was a correction against the penalty shot he had saved against Avondale earlier this year, but he's entitled to try and score anyway he likes - and if that means a powerful blast down the middle that'll be strong for any keeper to save should they even avoid diving left or right, then so be it.

As it was, we got into the sudden death element of the shootout, with Lirim Elmazi's squib of a shot trickling underneath the Oakleigh keeper, and then Pierce Clark comfortably saving Oakleigh subsequent and just as squibbish shot. And there it was. the cup tie won, and onto the next stage of two tournaments to much rejoicing. And maybe, whether by accident or design, it was revealed that this team is one built not so much for league success, but for cup runs. Maybe all it needs to prove its worth is a Dockerty Cup title; or somehow sneaking into the finals, and grinding its way through three do-or-die fixtures.

Again, credit where it's due - this has been our most difficult cup run to date in combined opposition calibre, certainly at least since the FFA Cup was attached as the main thread of knockout of football as opposed to the Dockerty Cup. Aside from the terribly youthful Werribee City, we had to face three NPL opponents in a row, when in other seasons we'd had difficulty getting just past one. And while Eastern Lions aren't one of our division's better teams, they still put up a good show in most games.

And winning two ostensibly "rival" games to get to this point is not worth sneezing at either; we'd overcome Knights, who knocked us out of this tournament two years ago, and who prize our scalp above all others; and this was our first "win" over Oakleigh (however you want to define it) since 2017, and against them at Jack Edwards since 2013.

That's not to say the journey has been anything close to aesthetically edifying, though it's had its moments of moral schadenfreude. Apart from the six goal Werribee romp, we won the remaining games by scoring just three goals, two of them penalties. In two of the games we played football that was beyond dour,. and most troubling, those were the recent games; but we won, and thus we are expected to be in nothing other than a good mood.

Me though? I prefer the linearity and subtlety of league season over cup football, which is for the excitable and the easily distracted fan, who can't commit to an ongoing storyline with depth; cup football is the pay per view event of local soccer - you come for the endless high spots, and forget about the graft that's needed to keep things going on and off the field for the rest of the year.

But that's just me I guess, a man renowned for taste in all things subtle and sophisticated.

One more thing

The day after the game while I was at home, my brother picked up the phone; he mumbled something about "Hellas", then passed the phone to me. It was my mum calling from her work - a customer in her shop was a mostly lapsed South Melbourne supporter from days of yore, asking to find out whether we'd won the cup tie the previous night. To which I replied that, yes, we'd won the game on penalties after the game had finished 0-0, but that geez it was very hard to watch.

Which when put like that, is a much shorter version of everything that I'd written before that paragraph, so sorry if you had to wait until here to get the summarised version.

Next game

Back to league action, against Green Gully at home on tonight. I wonder if we tried to get this game moved to the Saturday? Anyway, here's hoping the team don't feel the pinch too much from 120 minutes of effort, as well as last Saturday's game. Here's hoping also that at least some of the bandwagon from last night turns up as well.

FFA Cup draw

The draw for the national stage of the FFA Cup was held last night, with its new and not so national zoning system. I'm not sure if the zoning system is a pandemic related change, or something more permanent; then again, who knows what's permanent anymore? This greatly reduced the range of possibilities for a match up, making it more likely that we would get an NPL Victoria team as opponent. Except that's not what happened, with us getting Melbourne City instead. 

There are, broadly, three schools of thought on what an ideal FFA Cup match up is once you reach the national stage. One stream of thought suggests that the best course of action is to avoid an A-League team for as long as possible, which allows you the best chance to go deep into the tournament; people in this camp are divided about you want to play more home games (to maximise crowd revenues). The second stream of thought is that it's best to get an A-League opponent first up (ideally a local one), which will get you the biggest chance of a full-house, and the best chance of winning a game against an underprepared and understrength top-flight team during their off-season.

The third stream of course, is your correspondent's island of one position that the FFA Cup is a horrible competition wholly without merit.

But under the circumstances, a game against the current A-League champions is probably the best draw we could get. For those who'd prefer to travel, the pandemic continues to wreak havoc thanks to sudden border closures and lockdowns. And considering the suddenly increased workload Tuesday's night win has brought forth - at least one FFA Cup game, one Dockerty Cup game, to add to the three catch up games lost due to the lockdown - how deep do you expect our players to go? How many games do we expect semi-pros to be able to play in a short amount of time?

And for those who don't care about the FFA Cup

A reminder that our Dockerty Cup semi final will be against Hume City, after they beat Monbulk Rangers 3-0. No date or venue has yet been arranged for this fixture, but if recent practice is any guide, the semi-final venue will likely be a neutral venue.

Final thought

Thanks once again to Johnny for the lift back to Footscray.