Forgot to add a title - South Melbourne 3 Port Melbourne 0

All gripes about poor crowds and cruddy scheduling seem to miss a crucial point - and that point is that South Melbourne Hellas has reached its nursing home stage. Our best years are behind us, the food is sometimes iffy, but most importantly, our nearest and dearest only come to visit sporadically. A handful of times a year is probably too much. A celebration (read: grand final) or Christmas (read: opening game), sure, that might get the relatives to come around and visit. 

Most of the time though, there's a million and one excuses about why people don't come anymore, all of which are an attempt to avoid saying the bleeding obvious - you're old, and no-one likes you. The club's children and grandchildren are basically ingrates who occasionally visit out of a latent sense of filial piety, and it doesn't really matter if it's Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, there's almost always something better to do.

Now having said that, and without actually doing anything resembling a count, there were about 100 more people there than I would have expected, even if this game was played on a Sunday. They got to see another ridiculous match in this ridiculous run. Sure, last year's opening 12 or so games were ridiculous, too - remember how we were somehow on top of the table despite genuinely not being very good? - but this year is something else.

2022 has so far been the season where we have been pretty good for about 15-30 minutes each game, pretty ordinary for the rest of it, and where that has somehow managed to be enough to be well clear on top of the league. This includes gradually losing players to various injuries, which now includes the aging Brad Norton, the perennially injured Josh Wallen, the apparently hurt himself why trying to do a scissor at training Andy Brennan, and our favourite utility Perry Lambropoulos. Also Marcus Schroen was out.

You'd think we were ripe for the picking, but Port did it its best to throw this game away in the first ten minutes, and just about succeeded. Harry Sawyer hit the post, then Port tried to Nuna its way out of defence and that was 1-0. 2-0 was two minutes later, when someone from the back line hit the best long diagonal pass they will ever achieve, and Alun Webb ran through the middle of the too high Port defence to score. At some point Max Mikkola threw a huge bomb to Sawyer, who only had to nod the ball down into the back of the net.

The next 60 odd minutes were then pretty much what we've come to expect. South had the lead, and we did our best to invite the opposition to eat into that lead, to no avail. Port had ample opportunity to score, but could not. Sometimes it deadset looked like we were letting them walk through to Javier Diaz Lopez. More of the same included Mikkola not finishing a game, and Jai Ingham not playing a complete either, this time coming on as a sub again.

Still, top of the league, so enjoy it. I am. Even the burger was more than tolerable this week, though they could ease off the ridiculous amount of chips provided. Which might also mean that they wouldn't run out of chips so fast, but goodness knows how they run out of chips anyway. Also, running out of gas for the drinks, also not a good look. 

Party like it's 1969

The best bit about the game - apart from nonsense chants - was that if you weren't at the game, then you missed all the good action. You see, despite having their cameras and commentary in place, someone at Football Victoria or Cluch scheduled the stream for Sunday instead of Saturday, meaning that viewers at home did not see the majority of the game, and certainly not the best part which was the first ten minutes. It was a bit old fashioned, really - even at the ground, you actually had to pay attention, because there was no NPL TV replay function either. Should have handed out complementary flat caps at the entrance.

Other things

You may or may not have seen the Knights vs Oakleigh game abandoned after 20 odd minutes because of unplayable conditions. I went to the Knights FB page to see people lining up into the "they should have/should not have played" debate, and instead could see only tons of posts by irate gamblers, and people trying to sell tickets to the eventual replay.

These people have made reading Facebook NPL comments sections impossible. No amount of moderation and deletions and key word and phrase shadow-banning can keep ahead of this scourge. Why would any normal human being want to engage meaningfully on these pages looking for discussion or information when it's full of this crap?

So our club, and I suppose a few other clubs, are in that nursing home stage, and the only people making an effort to talk with us are grifters and conmen. Fantastic. As Knights president Pave Jusup said, we should get rid of Facebook and go back to forums. At least you knew that the idiots who populated bulletin boards cared about the local scene enough to tailor their vitriol and trolling to local tastes and customs. 

The other thing which happened. Following on from last week's brief discussion about commentators not being up to speed with the rules around certain states of play, I asked the question on Twitter about whether at NPL commentary induction (if there was such a thing), whether there was actually anything about correctly identifying the way rules are actually applied, as opposed to how people think they are or should be applied. I only got the one response, in a private message, basically saying  "what induction, lol" and that, no, there was no coverage about how to deal with that aspect of a match.

So, maybe something for the comms team at Football Victoria to consider. Or not.

Next game

Dandenong City away on Saturday afternoon/evening. I doubt that I will be there, but I will hopefully be catching up with the fixture via a working stream.

Final thought

You see, my wife, she has been most vocal on the subject of the second division."Where is the second division? When are you going to get the second division? Why aren't you getting the second division now?" And so on.