Welcome back to the 2021 season

For those of you who haven't yet caught up on last night's news, here it is. A classic case of the Friday night dump, at 5:44PM last night Football Victoria released a press release which required a few attempts at parsing because a) it didn't make much sense, and b) once it did make sense, it came across as insane. Pity the poor communications staffer (though not so much the legal team, who would have also been involved) who had to draft this dross. 

But back to the beginning of this mess, which means going back to 2020. You may remember that we barely got through five games in the top NPL division before the pandemic came in and killed off the remainder of the competition, despite efforts to revive it before the big lockdown kicked in. Since there'd only been five games played in NPL 1, and none of the other leagues had even started, there really wasn't anything for anyone to argue about. The whole year was a bust.

So on to 2021, with knowledge gained about what it would take to survive another cancelled season. Well, some knowledge, but clearly not enough preparation and planning in one regard - what to do in the event that a whole lot more than five games were played, across multiple leagues. And thus we ended up in the situation where it became untenable to resume play and complete the league season, but also the situation where a something in between half and three-quarters of a season had been played.

Football Victoria managed to complete its men's and women's cup competitions at the end of the year, but all the leagues remained incomplete. Many would have been happy enough to dismiss this as another bit of pandemic related misfortune, but not everyone - namely teams up and down the Victorian league pyramid who were leading championship and promotion races, and who had spent a good chunk of money getting into those spots.

Regardless of whether they were even allowed as amateur clubs to be spending that much money on winning games is a moot point. These clubs wanted to be crowned as champions and/or awarded promotion to higher leagues as a reward for their incomplete efforts. Magnanimously, these "winning" clubs also wouldn't seek to punish clubs that had found themselves in the relegation spots, without the opportunity to dig themselves out.

So that meant expanded leagues, and filling in gaps left by disappeared or inactive teams, as the case may be. If only we could say that this was all new. In the last 15 years alone we had the farce of the 2006-2007 relegation shambles whereby muddled yellow card bookkeeping saw both George Cross and Essendon Royals stay up, and the Victorian Premier League expanded to 16 teams. Then there was the start of the NPL, which included as a compromise to its tangled legal wrangling the inclusion of two new country teams that were not equipped for life in the Victorian top-flight.

With a history of such messes in the not too recent past, and a cancelled season in the even more recent past, you'd think someone at Football Victoria would have had the foresight to draw up contingencies just in case something like another cancelled season happened thanks to a pandemic that was not yet over. Maybe they thought that the clubs would be more gracious and understanding of the exceptional circumstances we've all found ourselves in.

If FV did actually set up constitutional or regulatory contingencies for a re-occurrence of 2020's interruptions and subsequent cancellation, clearly none of these rules was remotely watertight enough to withstand even the slightest pressure. Blame the FV board and the lawyers on retainer. And thus into this void of bylaw uncertainty came a set of aggrieved clubs, with Avondale loosely set as its figurehead - and I mean loosely, because the "bespoke" solution adopted seems dedicated entirely to placating them, and setting every other aggrieved party adrift. 

So now we have the patently absurd "solution" of the 2021 home and away season being revived within the confines of the 2022 season fixtures equivalent to those not played last year. There will be no finals, no relegation, just points awarded simultaneously to two different minor premiership races, all to soothe the ego of whoever is funding Avondale.

Apart from a lack of foresight and preparation from FV, part of the problem, too, is an issue of nomenclature. For most of the past 30 years in Victoria, once we adopted a finals system to decide who would be the competition's champion team, the grand final was the be-all and end-all. Finishing on top of the ladder saw you crowned "minor premiers" as was the case in Australian rules, a mostly meaningless title. As a bonus for finishing top, you got a week off, a nominally easier route to the grand final, and a double chance to help you out if you needed it.

Then we had to go and copy the confusing A-League methodology of having "champions" and "premiers", based on the long running New South Wales practice of making it clear as mud as to who was ultimately the winning team from any given season. (we also adopted the A-League's horrendous finals system, which makes finishing on top less of an advantage than it used to be, but that's another story).

Still, there's little enough doubt that in Victoria, it remains the grand final winner who gets the ultimate kudos. So why all this effort by Avondale to win what is still effectively a secondary accolade? Finishing on top of a zombie 2021 campaign won't make add to the list of Victorian title winners. It won't get them to the NPL national playoffs, and with it the chance to qualify for an FFA Cup berth. The entire effort makes so little sense, especially when put up against the concerns of teams lower down the pyramid, who are at least attempting to snatch a place in a higher division.

While it would be ironic if Avondale somehow managed to cock up its chance to finish top of the table, I'd hate to think that there would be other clubs who would attempt to claim such a title as a victory in its own right. Still, as part of this compromise, FV could have at least reinstated the three point deduction Avondale incurred in 2020 for payment irregularities in the 2019 season, and which disappeared into the ether once 2020 was flushed down the drain. Another missed opportunity. 

Friendly against Pascoe Vale tonight

8:15PM at CB Smith Reserve. There's even a 21s curtain raiser beforehand. But there's also heavy storms being predicted, so you know, use your judgement. 

Friendly against Brunswick City tomorrow night

Kickoff at 7pm at an inexplicably open doors Lakeside.

And for the record, Brunswick City is an NPL2 team.

2022 memberships and season tickets available

And the response from some fans to this year's various offerings has been underwhelming at best.

Prices have gone up - that happens - but other little things seem to have been pared away. Every member or season ticket holder gets two "bring a friend" tickets, social club members get a $30 voucher that I assume is for use at the club's merchandise shop... and that's it.

Now I'm not one for angst about what comes in my membership package apart from voting rights and entry to matches. I don't need that many scarves or hats, and goodness knows there's enough of that stuff clogging up my wardrobe.

I can understand removing the heavily discounted 2021 "covid renewal" option, but the lack of a promise of free entry to FFA Cup matches is disappointing. More concerning to me is that the membership offering as presented here has the sense of an austerity budget.

Friendly against Mornington on Saturday evening

Just like the headline suggests, a 4pm kickoff this Saturday at Dallas Brooks Park. Since attending this fixture would require a five-hour round trip by public transport, I won't be there. But you kids enjoy it if you make it out that way.

Little bits of news from the first week of January 2022

Preparing for another season that, at best, might only partly be

The fixtures are out, but still we wait for news of memberships. Maybe next week or the week after. And as for the scheduling of the 2021 AGM, that's still largely a mystery to me. But I'm not panicking, because I've been assured that everything is above board, and that all the necessary things will happen in good time. There's a pandemic on, just in case you haven't heard.

Meanwhile the senior men's team - or at least some of that team, because it's hard to tell from the social media output exactly how many made the trip up - are in Shepparton for their now customary week long trip. The club's social media output - mostly vox pops with select players - is emphasising camaraderie, fitness, and even new tactical approaches. 

My expectations for many things South Melbourne Hellas are so laid back, they're horizontal; still, new tactical approaches, eh? I can't say I'm not mildly intrigued, while also anticipating disappointment. Can you believe the new season is just over a month or so away?

Still here

While you shouldn't trust anything you read on the internet, just because, it has been fun this week looking at a small subsection of the Indonesian football social media scene, and their speculating on who historic club PSM Makassar will be signing as a new forward option.

The speculating led to suggestions that PSM were looking at one Harrison Sawyer - our Harrison Sawyer - as a possible signing. Now I had to put all the relevant tweets and websites through the not altogether trustworthy filter of Google Translate, and it was a wild wide for the ten or so minutes it took to get through the commentary.

I can't vouch for the credibility of any of the sources, but it seemed to be a toss-up between Sawyer and A-League journeyman Golgol Mebrahtu. Debate centred around who PSM fans would prefer, about Sawyer's age, why another white guy, and most curiously, doubts about Sawyer because he played a second tier, semi-professional level with no promotion to the top league. 

Maybe someone should work on fixing at least that last item, but I digress.

Anyway, for those keeping track, the club signed Sawyer to a two-year contract at the tail end of 2021, which doesn't necessarily mean big transfer bikkies if he was to be signed by PSM. Are Indonesian clubs even accustomed to paying transfer fees, or are they a bit like us? 

At any rate, someone edited Golgol's Wikipedia page to add the "citation required" detail of him being signed by PSM. Meanwhile, Sawyer was verifiably in Shepparton at Camp Moray Agnew as recently as yesterday. Whether Sawyer did indeed follow PSM on Instagram - as mentioned in of the Indonesian reports or tweets - is something only someone who bothers with Instagram can know for sure. That's not me by the way.

 

Collector Graeme McGinty found this runners up
medal from the 1970 Dockerty Cup in the UK,
suggesting that one of South's British players returned
home, and either he or his family discarded
 his personal football collection at some point.

Piece by piece, bit by bit, one scrounged detail at a time

The next item is of little concern to anyone but the most obsessive, but the match details for the 1970 Dockerty Cup final have finally been completed. Previously both starting eleven's had a player missing, and as it turned out, one of Juventus' subs was also unknown. The missing Juve players were Keith Lackey and Alistair Sandison, while the missing player for Hellas was David High. 

1970 was a bit of a bust for South. Sure, we won the Ampol Cup, but coach Lou Brocic was gone by round 1 (despite a win), and the team muddled its way through the league campaign for a mediocre finish of fifth, four games behind champions Juventus. A league leading nine draws from 22 games probably didn't help.

The one remaining chance for silverware was the Dockerty Cup, which to that point we had not won. Reaching the final thanks to narrow wins over Polonia and Hakoah, and a 7-1 win over Alexander, here was the chance to salvage something from the year. Instead we put in what a very thorough Neos Kosmos match report described as a soulless performance. So it goes.

It was thanks to that article that we found the missing players, which just goes to show, that even sources that amateur researchers have likely gone over multiple times, can still yield useful details.

Speaking of which

One name missing from the South lineup in that final was Ulysses Kokkinos, who passed away seemingly suddenly on Monday. Kokkinos leaves behind a complicated footballing and personal legacy, which South of the Border may or may not muse on at some point, perhaps after the round 1 memorial planned by the club. I wouldn't hold your breath though.

Anyway, back to 1970. South were scratching around for form, but Kokkinos was in good touch, at least for the first half of the season - and then his name just disappears from the team lists and scorers sheets. What happened? Well, it looks like a serious leg injury suffered during South's fifth round Cup fixture against Polonia kept Kokkinos out for what seems like the rest of the season. 

Apparently Kokkinos wasn't the only star player to come out of the relevant cup weekend with a serious injury, with George Cross' Lou Kastner and Juve's Sandy Irvine also suffering heavy knocks. Kastner and Irvine ended up playing out the season, while Kokkinos unfortunately missed out. As with much to do with Kokkinos, it's another case of what have been had he been around more during the peak of his powers; but that's a story for another time.