Never get high on your own supply - South Melbourne 2 Altona Magic 0

Just a short one this week because I'm back in what by my standards would be considered gainful employment, and time is no longer my friend. Well, that's my excuse this week, and there's always an excuse.

Welcome back to the blog for South fans who love to metaphorically slash wrists. Welcome back to normal diabolical crowds, but still continuing on with the same results, with much the same method, with one frustrating exception. What was it with all the short corners? It's not just having Harry Sawyer, Marco Jankovic, and Jake Marshall to aim at, but also little Pat Langlois - remember him that scored those headers from corners early in the season? But also, apart from having all those perfectly cromulent targets to aim at, we also have Andy Brennan who has mostly been providing rather excellent service from corners.

Let's put it down to feeling so comfortable with our position and our opponent, that we decided to use this situation as an opportunity not to showboat - because we would never, ever do something like that - but rather to attempt some in game variations which may become useful in the finals. Now I don't believe that for a second, what with my pathological hatred of short corners (at this level), but it might help other people rationalise what they were watching, assuming anyone else loses sleep about these the way I do. It felt like a targeted hate-crime against me, and in this fishbowl that is South Melbourne Hellas post-NSL, every time we take a short corner attention is brought to me.

Well, I painted that target on myself I suppose, and it's not like one can un-paint that now. Speaking of paint and other brilliant chemicals, how good was the smell of paints, sealants, and whatever other alchemic concoctions are being piled into, under, and on top of our grandstand? It was like being in the back of the old Capricorn Floors van - there's an inside joke for like, three people, tops. I suppose since we're not not allowed to take booze outside the social club (except for trace amounts of alcohol in a lemon, lime & bitters), and the outside beer tent went back into hibernation, why not substitute liquor for fumes? What could possibly go wrong?

Apart from the awful second half, where we lost all shape, the only really bad thing to happen was Ben Djiba's red card, which felt contentious live, and much less contentious once we saw the replay of someone with way too much adrenaline after dribbling past three or four opponents, like your correspondent back in a CC White vs Blue match many, many moons ago. At least I had the good sense to finish my poor run with a mere crappy pass, and not trying to knee-cap someone. 

Anyway, Djiba will be out this week and probably for at one game after, but what a great chance for someone else to do something. I give Esteban credit for this - pretty much everyone gets a go of some sort, sometimes more than I think they should, and sometimes less, and sometimes not in a role I think they're suited to; but it's not like you die wondering most weeks over whether we'll make a sub. It is easier to do now that we can make five a subs a game, but that doesn't mean that the sub will always get made. Look at Chris Taylor for example - still stuck to his more rigid method of well, it's 1984, we've got a squad of 14 players, and you have to fight tooth and nail to somehowbreak your way into the starting XI.

Whatever works for you I suppose, and like I always maintain, there's more than one way to get to your destination in this game. There's pretty and ugly, there's big spenders and slightly less big spenders, and there's even apparently playing with no meaningful sense of a central midfield and not even bothering to make a mid-season transfer to at least pretend to fix this. If we win this title - and I hope that we do - it just may be the first time South (or any club) has won a title mostly through sheer spite. The throw-ins, the set pieces, the playing 15-20 minutes of comparatively good football a game - all while knowing (or some of us fans believing) that we could be doing even better. 

Now you may ask what's better than being three games clear at the top with three matches to go, but that's what the easily placated like to say. I just hope we're not getting complacent. I saw Max Mikkola sit on the main subs bench instead of by himself after he got subbed off last week, and I'm worried we're going soft.

Next game

Port Melbourne away this Saturday. Thanks to Oakleigh's loss on Monday, we are now just one win from claiming the minor premiership and the chance to play in the NPL national playoffs... wait, I'm being passed a note which says that no one seems to know whether the NPL national playoffs will actually take place this year. It seems like there's no mention of them on either the Football Australia or Football Victoria competition calendars. Well, I'm sure everything will turn out fine. 

I hope that if it's not going ahead that the thing was cancelled due to COVID or a failure to attract a sponsor for it, and not because people were planning to fill in the space with a National Second Division. 

Final thought

Whatever stupid thing happens in the rest of this season, let us all bask in the quiet relief that Avondale did not win its stupid 2021 Bespoke Cup. They might still win the 2022 title - and good luck to them if they do - but their failure to take out the title they felt they so deserved, and which they spent so much money on lawyers on, and which they thought was a right laugh until their seven point lead got chipped away to nothing, and then they stopped posting about it on their socials, and then started blocking people on their socials who brought it up... where was I going with this? Oh yes: the Bespoke Cup is over. Let's never speak of it again.