2022 fixtures are out

A long time ago now, it didn't used to be this way - but nowadays Football Victoria does a consistently excellent job of getting its fixtures out before the arrival of a new year. You can see our fixture here.

Of course in these pandemic times, who knows how long any of these fixtures will stay in their allocated slots, or whether they'll get played at all. 

But let's assume that everything somehow ends up going smoothly, here's the gist of the fixture as it relates to our senior men's team. What days are our home games on? 

NPL match days

One Thursday night home match, our opening round game against Heidelberg. Four Friday night home matches, with two of those in the early part of the season. Eight Saturday evening home games, all with 6:45PM starts. 

The Thursday and Friday home games will all be standalone affairs - no reserves curtain raiser, as was mostly the case in 2021 for Friday night home matches. All eight of our home Saturday games will have an NPLW match as a curtain raiser, expanding the experiment that the club has been tinkering with for a little while now.

Home and away, seven of our matches will be on Friday nights, while the majority of our matches will be on Saturdays, with most of those being night games. That marks an interesting shift away from Friday nights, a situation which had reached saturation point when five games would be played on the same night. 

For fans of old fashioned Sunday soccer, you'll have three away games - St Albans, Heidelberg, and Avondale on the final day of the season.

FFA Cup rounds

If my understanding of Football Victoria's 2022 calendar is correct, it looks like cup rounds for all matches involving NPL teams will be midweek affairs, scheduled initially around NPL rounds 6 and 7. Usually an NPL team's first match in the tournament would be on a free weekend allocated for this purpose, but not in 2022 it seems. 

The final of the Dockery Cup is scheduled for the weekend between rounds 24 and 25, which is otherwise designated as a catch-up round.

Easter complications

In 2022, Catholic/Protestant Easter is on the weekend of April 16th/17th. We have a home NPL/NPLW double-header on the Saturday night of that holiday weekend, which is no big deal for us.

The big deal is the following weekend, with Orthodox Easter coming through to create fixturing chaos for everything below Australian soccer's top tier. 

Somewhat strangely, on Orthodox Easter Saturday we are scheduled to play away at Altona Magic; a club which, like us, has a heavy Orthodox Christian contingent withing its supporter base. 

Usually the fixtures are arranged to try and avoid having any team with a predominantly Orthodox supporter base from hosting games on Orthodox Easter weekend. 

An early Saturday evening time slot seems like an OK compromise, outside of the solution Oakleigh are adopting of playing on the Monday after that weekend, or playing on the Saturday afternoon up against most state league fixtures. 

I somehow can't see Heidelberg sticking with its scheduled game on Sunday afternoon, but that's not our concern.

The grand prix

What is our concern is the scheduling of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix, and the chaos which sets in for us every year as preparations for the event see us go on long streaks of away games, and which flings us far and wide looking for training grounds.

The 2022 Australian Grand Prix is scheduled for the weekend of April 7-10th. We're, sensibly, playing away that weekend, but have NPL/NPLW double headers scheduled for the weeks immediately either side of the race. Can we really believe that we'll somehow have almost minimal disruption to our schedules from this event?

One more thing

I can't see anything on the Stadium Trust's calendar for upcoming events at Lakeside. Usually local athletics has its big events in mid-to-late February, which occupies entire weekends and scuffs up the playing surface a bit, usually requiring repair and resurfacing works.