+1.5 goal - Hume City 1 South Melbourne 1

So last week soccer came back and what did we see? A competent performance I suppose from our end, and many of the same problems also. But 2021 has gotten to the point where the season has become garbage. It's not anyone's fault, the pandemic is what it is, but locking down and opening up again on multiple occasions has made the whole thing feel farcical.

Maybe even worse than farcical - how about pointless, a dirge, something we are collectively pushing through just to say that we made it to the end. Well, I hope that we manage to get there, because even though we've had some awful seasons of late, where every game felt like a chore, each game worse than the last, this season feels worse than the lot put together.

No spectators especially just makes the whole thing feel like it's being put on for the sake of the gambling fraternity. And I know that it's (probably not), and I know that Football Victoria and everyone else pushing through are merely performing their civic duty, but by god, I think the only ones actually enjoying themselves are the gamblers.

I mean, that's who I was stuck with on Saturday night, earphones plugged into my phone, watching the blurred action play out on a screen the size of half a Salada biscuit, while trying to munch down on chicken patties at the dinner table with my family. And there we were, me, Our Resident Cockney, a handful of gamblers asking which team was which, and trying to appease the YouTube football live stream gods for +2.5 goals.

It's sad enough when we can go to games and chide ourselves for the insanity of supporting South Melbourne andNPL Victoria as a whole, but at least there you are with like minded souls in the shared delusion that this thing (and your support of it) matters, no matter how tenuous; it's a whole other level of sadness when we are compelled to keep our distance from our heroes (and the players we hate), and most of the people we have to share it with are people who fill up the Facebook comments section with abuse that the various club appointed moderators have to delete, delete, delete...

I could fill this report with more hatred and bile for the way we play, and the people who are responsible for it, but it feels kinda pointless. I'm not even inclined to say that everyone gave it their best or their worst, because does it even matter under the circumstances? The point is to get to the end. That's it. We might even make the finals (we probably won't), we could win the Dockerty Cup (I suppose anything's possible), but the main point is to make it to the end. 

Next game

Dockerty Cup semi final tonight, against Hume City. No, you're not allowed in.

Final thought

Downloaded the most basic, near fool-proof video editing program I could find, so I can extract more morsels from the South compilations I've been given alongside the clips that were already cut up for me. Also, while it's still a work in progress, I've created and begun maintaining an inventory of every South Melbourne Hellas match video that's been uploaded to YouTube, and the format (short, extended, full) it exists in. More for my benefit really, in order to have a more user-friendly list at hand for my uploading work, but someone else may find it useful as well.