Long throws to the rescue again - South Melbourne 3 Bentleigh Greens 2

At least for the past few weeks I've been able to palm off waning motivation for writing this stuff each week onto the fact that I have actual work. Previously that was election work that was kind of varied and interesting, and now it's an extension of election work that is repetitive and monotonous as all fuck. I get up at 5:30 in the morning, get home around 4:30 in the afternoon, and somewhere in the middle of that I work seven and half hours, six days a week, shoving senate ballot papers through a scanner and a creaser, which sometimes work well. After that, there's home business, after which there isn't much time to do anything else. My goodness, it's almost like I'm a normal person. I miss being a career student, and its attendant life of leisure. 

Anyway, one thing which has remained constant is consensus that there is a diminishing interest in all things South Melbourne - not from me, mind, but from pretty much everyone else. This isn't new, and we have all moaned and despaired for a good 17 or 18 years or so now. Sure there's an argument to be made that's even worse now, with even former rusted-ons looking for reasons not to turn up. It doesn't help that the club does give them reasons not to attend - inconvenient match times and lack of beer outside the social club cited as two recent examples - but on the whole, it's not a new problem. People have been saying the same or similar for the past nearly 20 years, and those of us still consistently attending will keep saying until we are no longer there to say it ourselves. 

In short, we keep learning the lesson that being loyal is like being pregnant, in that you are until you aren't. Me, I blame streaming more than most other options as being responsible for league-wide declines in attendances, interest, and general banter. Soccer-forum's dead, Twitter is dead, and like our club, everyone at this level has put their effort into standby mode until the National Second Division happens. And yet South supporters still have an old fashioned web forum like it's 2002. It may not be going strong, but it's still going, which basically sums up everything

What's somewhat tragic about all of this is that our support is becoming more diminished even as the team is having its best run of results since 2017. That's not quite the same as saying that the team is plating great football - but it is winning a lot of matches, even if these wins are sometimes/often painful to endure. 

Cue the howls of derision from opposition fans who watch us as we despair over a team clear on top of the table. They have a point, it's true. Results wise, things are better for South then they have been for some time. And it's also true that South fans tend to have a reflex that nothing is ever good enough, even with the allowance that there is an abhorrence (from some, if not all South fans) at the methods we're using in getting these results, and the apparently huge amount of luck also being amassed along the way. But most opposition fans also don't watch our games in full, so they're no more likely to be reliable interpreters of South's 2022 season up until this point than South fans with all their own biases and hangups.

A case in point - how do you make sense of what happened last Saturday night? At times we were comprehensively outplayed. Once again it was revealed that we have a weakness against teams that keep it on the deck, like Bentleigh, Avondale, and Oakleigh do. 

It's not just the keeping it on the deck that causes us issues - it's also that these teams play keepings-off well, not turning it over cheaply. We rely too much on teams giving us the ball back in midfield, so that we can quickly release Mikkola or Webb on the counter attack. Teams who play short passing games to get around our insipid central midfield presence, will keep on having a field day. And if we do win the ball back in defense, we tend to just pass it around the back before launching it to Sawyer. We keep trying to use Schroen as a midfield distributor/link man/play breaker-upper, and it doesn't work because he's almost none of those things, except in very specific circumstances - which is pretty much him facing the goal we're going to, or where he can turn on to his left.

And yet, with the exception of Oakleigh, most of these teams have also managed to repeatedly also concede a barrage of goals against us. Our team has scored in every single match this season, which is astonishing considering how apparently awful we are. Perhaps much as we are deficient in all sorts of ways, we have managed to expose that many opponents are also deficient in one specific area, and that is in defending set pieces. Remarkably, the particular set piece that opposition sides are having difficulty defending against us is long throws. 

I'm not sure if Max Mikkola's throw-in technique is legal, even it's surely more legal than all those dinky little drop at the feet throw-ins that are obviously foul throws. I don't know if his technique - or any long throw-in specialist's for that matter - is teachable. At some point late in the game, a Bentleigh player attempted a long throw, which wasn't too bad for what may have been a first try. But then Ben Djiba chickened out from trying the same after Mikkola was subbed off, and all you could do was laugh. 

As nice as it was to win, even if two and a half of our three goals were a result of the long throws, much time was spent o the terraces trying to figure out why Bentleigh goalkeeper Pierce Clark and the Bentleigh defence were having so much trouble defending the long throw in. Was it the angle? Was it dip, was it the lack of pace on them, compared to a corner kick? At face value, it seems pretty straightforward - a ball is thrown in a straight line, at a relatively flat trajectory. And yet time after time, Bentleigh floundered. The third goal was the was epitome of this failure, because Clark ran more or less underneath Mikkola's long throw, wherein the ball landed on an unmarked Harry Sawyer's head.

At the other end of the ground, Javier Diaz Lopez was making save after save, all of which got turned into a well-meaning though ultimately depressing compilation video, which showed how lucky we were in the greater scheme of things at both ends of the ground. Every week I say it's not a sustainable way to a title. Most weeks it turns out I'm wrong. As long we keep winning, I'm OK with being wrong.

Next game

Tomorrow night at Somers Street against Melbourne Knights. 

Final thought

Time to get some insurance for Max Mikkola's arms.