Glad to be back - South Melbourne 3 Heidelberg United 1

After everything that has happened over the past two years, it was just nice to be back, again. Coming in on the train, I had that sick feeling in the guts which means that I still care; that's a good thing, as I have been reassured by others, because if I didn't care, then the whole thing would be work, and not mangled joy. It was opening day, it was derby day, it was South Melbourne Hellas day.

I am now 16 years into my second South Melbourne Hellas life, the one where I have been able to be the kind of supporter that I was not able to be during the NSL years. In this second Hellas life, I have spent those 16 years largely among the same faces. Some people have left, some new people have come in, and others come in and out. But the core of the group I became attached to - based mostly around the people active on the defunct smfcboard.com, and its still extant replacement smfcfans.com - are still there.

Many of them are now married, with kids who they are bringing to games. Some of them had kids so long ago, that the kids are now the age I was when I started coming back to South. Everyone's a little older, a little tireder, a little more jaded, but also a bit more relaxed. The club's been to hell and not quite back on multiple occasions, the football remains quasi-watchable at the best of times, and the persistent promise of a brighter tomorrow is a running joke that's so old and well-worn that no one even bothers to complain about it anymore; at least not that much. And why should we? Cynicism at the idea that things might get better for us is as much a part of the club as the supporters who have to listen to the promises, as well as the people who have to try and make a better tomorrow happen.

At the bottom of the stairs outside the office entrance, I realised I didn't even have the QR code for Lakeside saved as a favourite in my Services Victoria app. Then picking up my membership, and while wearing a jersey from a few years ago now, I am told by a volunteer that it's time to update to a new jersey. My response to that is that I don't wear Kappa, so that could take awhile. The food was much the same, except for the food trucks outside which included an ice-cream truck, which along with the warm weather made it seem like an NSL revival.

Having only attended one pre-season game in the lead-up to the season opener - not that there were that many games to choose from - I had no idea about form, tactics, or expectations. All I wanted is for the team to try and score goals, which would be something to hang on to after last year's dire setup. It's easy to say you've defended well when you have six or seven players sitting so deep that you have no midfield. But that's not meant to be the South way, and it comes across as even sillier when people are falling over themselves to claim Ange Postecoglou and the pretty attacking football his teams play.

Look, I get that we're a world away from the personnel and training environments that could come close to emulating what Ange is doing, but there's also this: attacking football is more fun, for fans and for players. Conceding the initiative almost from the get-go, and preferring to try and absorb pressure from deep in your own half, is bloody draining. OK, so what was served up on Thursday wasn't necessarily pretty. in part because both teams were still underdone, especially the Bergers.

But my goodness it was exciting to watch us take the game on. Was it ball playing finesse work? No. Was is it an approach which could reliably produce more than a couple of chances a game? Yes. With the exception of a couple of teams which try and play a short passing game, NPL Victoria is still very much a turnover and counter-attack based affair. That's fine. I don't mind. As long as we consistently win the ball from midfield and not so deep that the opponent's goal looks like a mirage on the horizon, good things are more likely to happen.

Instead of bombing it to Harrison Sawyer with no support and no hope, we might this year be able to play both to and away from Sawyer. Andy Brennan put in a couple of decent corners. Max Mikkola can throw the ball a long way. Players being given the licence and setup to have a go means creating more chances, and more chance of luck going your way. Who knows how it will look when we fall behind, or playing against more capable and fitter teams. Who knows where Lirim Elmazi and Josh Wallen will fit into the team. 

But the most important thing was that the first half was enjoyable. We cruised home in the second half to the point where people could later focus on arguing about how large or small the crowd was, and how many people the Tardis space in the corporate areas can fit. We could focus on gimmick chants for winning "six points", and trying to get kids to lead certain chants.

Next game

Away to Bentleigh on Friday night.

2021 AGM date set

A date has been set - finally - for the dual 2021 annual general meetings. On Sunday March 6th at 11:00AM, the South Melbourne Hellas AGM will take place, followed by the South Melbourne FC AGM at 12:00. Both AGMs will of course be in the social club.

What happens if the season is cancelled again

Unfortunately buried deep within Joey Lynch's season preview on the Football Victoria site - I would have have preferred that it be posted in massive letters at the start of the piece - lies the answer to what happens if the season is cancelled again.

However, in the event that COVID does its unwelcome thing and the season is forced to be cancelled for the third-straight year, the premiership and promotion and relegation will all be determined via ladder position on the condition that at least 50% of the league’s fixtures have been played. If all teams have played the same amount of games it’s a pretty easy determination, but in the event that there is an uneven spread then a points per game basis will be used, followed by average goal difference per game, and then average goals for per game. 

So there you go, the protocol that should have existed a year ago and which could have saved us a lot of bother and the need for bespoke solutions, but didn't. 

Show me the money

This bit of news is a little bit out of date now, in that it's from February 1st, but it's worth noting nonetheless. Channel 10 reported back then that Ross Pelligra and the Pelligra Group had made an offer of around $20 million to purchase Adelaide United. 

You may know the Pelligra name from some of the sponsor boards around Lakeside, or the brand's prominent position on the scoreboard during matches. You may even remember the Pelligra name from our most recent A-League bid, even if you'd rather not remember that we made a bid, preferring instead to pretend that you were always in favour of pro-rel and a second division. Me, I always preferred the (hypothetical) drawbridge model; that is, getting in, pulling up the gate, and filling in the moat with crocodiles. But I digress.

Anyway, for that most recent bid of ours, Ross Pelligra and his property development concern were set to be the major financial backers for the entity representing South Melbourne Hellas in the A-League. So, that's one question answered three years down the line - yes, the money was actually there for a South aligned bid. The second question was a bit more current: would the Pelligra purchase of Adelaide United, and the Pelligra Group's wider Adelaide sporting interests, see a diminishing of its sponsorship of South Melbourne? At the moment, that does not appear the case. 

Maybe people can support both the A-League and a former NSL club? Shocking if true. Also kind of icky.

Australia Cup Mk II

No one at South needs to worry about this for a few weeks yet, but just in case you haven't caught up on this little bit of oldish news, the FFA Cup has been renamed to the Australia Cup. This change was likely deemed necessary when Football Federation Australia decided it no longer wanted to be a Federation, and instead wanted to... I don't actually know where I'm going with this, except to say that an unnecessary name change in one department has led to led to a stupid name change in another.

A handful of people reading this are probably aware that there was already once an Australia Cup for soccer, which ran from 1962-1968. It ran on a sort of Champions League format, in that qualification seemed to be offered not only to champions of the various state federations, but also state cup winners, and teams that finished in the upper echelons of the bigger state leagues. The original Australia Cup was ended due to the high cost of travel, and diminishing fan interest in the tournament - which was probably a reflection of the wider cooling off of interest in local soccer as the effects of the ethnic boom started to peter out.

The FFA Cup trophy was modeled on the Australia Cup trophy, which was named the Henry Seamonds Memorial Trophy in 1963, after the then recent passing of the Australian soccer administrator. You may recall that this trophy was found in a skip outside the Hakoah club in Sydney. After a refurbishment, the original trophy now resides with Caroline Springs George Cross, the 1964 winners of the Cup.Modeling the FFA Cup trophy on the Australia Cup trophy was a clever and respectful nod to the past, without claiming direct continuity. 

This name change though comes across as neither clever nor respectful, just slack. They could've named it after Alex Pongrass. They could've named it after Frank Lowy. They could've even named it after the skip they found the old trophy in.

The PR statements around the name change claim that there was consultation with people, and that everyone seemed to be happy with the name change. Well, they didn't consult me, or the other layabouts involved with Australian soccer history. Frankly, it's just an attempt to hitch a ride on the coattails of a defunct competition that was won by several now dead clubs no one cares about, played under a different format. Instead of doing something new or thoughtful, they did something cheap and lazy, which will muddle statistical compilation and historical narrative as people inevtiable conflate the two competitions. And they'll call it respecting history.

Around the streams

The future of NPL streaming is here, and it's called npl.tv, accessed via the "Cluch" app. Horrible name, who knows where the "t" ended up. Anyway, Cluch seems to be a streaming platform which focuses on a lot of minor sports, as well as second and third tier competitions of otherwise major sports. Four state federations have jumped on board with NPL TV, Football Victoria being one of them.

The service - which you need to register for - is available via a phone app, and also via desktop through the NPL TV website. At the moment it's a free service, and I haven't seen any indication yet of if or when that might change to a paid service. You do have to wonder though at what point someone will actually try and make some money from this. 

The opening weekend hasn't been all smooth sailing for the new service, with reports of crashes, games not even starting, and people struggling to sign up. Having not watched any of the games on a television via Chromecast or some such, I can't vouch for whether the video quality is better (significantly or otherwise) than the YouTube or Facebook streams. I don't know squat about smart TVs and such, so I can't elaborate on how those things will work, except that Apple TV and Android TV applications are in the works

I have a pretty dated Nokia smartphone, with a small screen and not much of a memory cache, but I was surprised at how well the app worked for the most part. There was some minor, occasional buffering, but otherwise I didn't seem to run into some of the problems others were reporting. I was not exactly thrilled however that the phone app seems to redirect to a browser function rather than merely running the stream through the app itself.

The desktop variant is much the same, but here's where I ran into some problems - namely that some streams didn't even seem to be working, as in the case of Avondale vs Bentleigh, including the quite unhelpful message "this video file cannot be played: error code 232011". At least there was a backup YouTube stream for all of this week's games, which I found myself defaulting to in preference to the app and desktop options. In time, once the new app overcomes its teething problems, it is likely that this service will see the end of the Facebook and YouTube streams we have become accustomed to using for the past few season. The Facebook streams are already gone, and the YouTube streams seem to exist mostly as a backup. 

This is a pity, though I do understand the reasoning behind it. No point in making a big song and dance about a new streaming platform, and then having a competing service running against it. Part of NPL TV's reason for existing will be to gather more accurate demographic data about who is watching Australian second tier soccer, likely minus much of the European and Asian gambling fraternity which piggybacked off the more easily accessible Facebook and YouTube streams. It's the kind of data that might prove useful for trying to figure out how to make a possible national second division broadcasting arrangement work.

The NPL TV desktop and app options have a couple of nice features, the best of which is a list of videos of important moments within each game such as goals, shots on goal, corners won, and cards dished out. Of these, the "corners won" feature is clearly the most pointless, but it's nice not to have fling back and forth on a whole match timeline looking for footage of goals. 

Switching to that highlights menu, and especially switching between games, is a pain in the arse. Others have also bemoaned the inability to start watching a game from any given point in time, being forced to watch the game from that moment you log in. After giving both the app and desktop version a run, and despite being pleased with some of the NPL TV add-ons, I still find the YouTube stream easier to use, just because it's so much easier to switch between different simultaneous streams. With so many overlapping matches, I'll likely be sticking to the YouTube option until its no longer available.

Scaffolding news

Viewers may have also noticed that many of the camera angles on the opening round's streams were closer to ground level than is usually the case. I noticed this at first on the stream of the Port Melbourne vs St Albans game yesterday, though I should have also noted that it was the case at some other games I watched, like Dandenong City vs Melbourne Knights.

This is because the kinds of temporary scaffolding many clubs use for camera and commentary positions are no longer covered by Football Victoria's public liability insurance. It's a change in policy which seems to follow in the wake of the tragic death last year of a Queensland man, who was crushed by collapsing media scaffolding while watching his son play.

The only way to change the status of such temporary scaffolding is to convert the relevant temporary structures into permanent ones; or to follow a three step process whereby the third party provider/installer of a temporary structure (which may include a local council) provides a certificate of currency, as well as significant liability insurance of its own.

It makes you wonder about the day in 2014 when South fans put together a temporary gantry out at Werribee. Goodness knows who would have been liable if anything happened to Tim the cameraman on that day.

Final thought

A shame about the minute's silence for Ulysses Kokkinos. Hell of a time for the PA system to go awry. So it goes.