Lavender Blues - Green Gully 1 South Melbourne 3

Bringing order to chaos, but at what cost?
You know I'd almost forgotten that we didn't go to Green Gully Reserve last year? Rocking up to the game, I was shocked to be welcomed to a paved parking lot. Unfortunately it's one of those hideous concoctions which actively reduced the number of available spots. That'd be more a problem if there were actually any people there. Crowd was ordinary. There was no curtain raiser game to artificially fill out the concourse with parents and reserves players. There was also no Maltese marching band. Instead there was a dated Artie K-like mix playing over the speakers (ugh), and a free match program (very much appreciated), but hardly any sort of vibe from us or them. Can't wait to take this energy into the National Second Division.

What about all the times I didn't wear a tutu?! Nobody ever brings those up! 
You wear a suit to one game, and then that's all you are: suit guy. To get around that, I got home early on Friday, got changed into my South Melbourne Gunners t-shirt, only to find that I'd started an unholy trend. Me, the fashion trend-setter. Θα χαλάσει ο καιρός, as my mum likes to say.

Granny chic
Speaking of fashion, we were thankfully spared by virtue of being the away team, from seeing Green Gully's awful grey away kit. I don't know what it is about teams that think silver and grey are god kit colours, but anyway. Gully's goalkeeper kits this year include a shade of lavender that's pure old lady hand soap. Admittedly, I pine for the days where goalkeepers wore a solid clash colour jersey, and a shorts and socks combo that matched their teammates. 

Apples and Oranges
Unusually (I think? I'm not so sure now) the NSW NPL started earlier than its Victorian counterpart this season, so I've seen a little of their games and highlights. Their synthetic pitches and too many futsal players posing as outfield players gives that comp if not quite an air of effeteness, than certainly at least a postmodern sense of digital, anodyne precision. NPL Victoria, by comparison, though being played on better quality fields than ever, still has a bit more physicality. NSW players may more regularly score top bins goals, but it's always a bit easier when the ball doesn't bobble, and there's no Nikola Jurkovic types waiting to kill you.

One may not have thought it possible based on their 2000-2011 iteration, but Green Gully would nowadays almost fit in better north of the Murray than they do south of it. Remember when coming to Green Gully Reserve as a South fan meant not just an inevitable loss, but also a bruising one? Now we haven't lost there since 2013, and it seems to get that little bit easier each time. The old grinding, ugly Gully is gone, replaced by a ball playing side that could do great things, were it not for the fact that they play in a predominantly counter-attacking league.

And which team is both more conditioned to and adept at playing pure counter-attacking football than South Melbourne? Based on a statistically insignificant (but still instructive) two matches, not much has changed for us, except for the height of the balls going forward. Last year they were very high; this year they're a bit lower. That's all down to having Ajak Riak in the place of Harry Sawyer.

Now I may have gone off half-cocked on the forum a few weeks ago when watching choppy footage of a Greek Community Cup match, claiming Riak would not score a goal this season except by accident, such was his apparent lack of coordination. People at that relevant claim that he looked OK, nothing like what us stay-at-homes were watching, and maybe they've been proven right.

Riak seems to know how play off the shoulder of the last defender, he seems to know where to move, and how to generally make the right or at least better decision when provided with two or more possibilities. His cause (and ours) were helped by being up against a team that's no longer the old thug Gully on a choppy field, (pointless baited into it Zidane headbutts notwithstanding), so there was enough space to do his thing. It might not be so useful when teams play more compactly against us.

Still, his mere presence makes us more watchable (and that's no slight on Sawyer's very productive 2022 season), but overall there's not likely to be much change to the way we play. Maybe the full backs will get a bit further up the field a bit more often. but the entire race to be runner-up hinges on Ajak not getting hurt - the rest of the squad will be rotated in and out on a needs basis. The small bonus is if we transfer to playing a more ground ball attacking game, instead of a high ball one, it will be easier to switch to someone like Alun Webb playing up front when Riak inevitably gets injured.

Next game
Melbourne Knights at home on Monday night. No, it's not the Labour Day public holiday Monday; that's the week after. Athletics has the field over the weekend; fair enough. Also, kickoff has been moved from 7:30pm to 8:15pm to accommodate apparently "overwhelming interest", which is just code for let's make it even harder for Paul to get home after the game, because there's going to be rail replacement buses, and cabs that don't turn up even though they're allegedly one minute away, and then you walk home. And all this just to watch us lose to the second best team in the NPL (after Oakleigh, of course). Should I just go home after work and watch it on the TV? Maybe. 

NSD news
More and more teams have put out their little press releases that they're expressing an interest. We haven't done that yet.

AGM news
None. Might as well just privatise the club.

On the streams
Hip to be square (balls)
It occurred to me, much later than it should have, that this season is another pointless one. Just as pointless as the usual pointless ones, when there was misplaced hope of getting people back to the club by winning stuff. More pointless than the ones where we were all accosted by A-League bid nonsense. More pointless than those seasons where winning the league didn't matter, because it was all about the FFA Cup. More pointless than those aborted COVID seasons, and the pointless (but at least ultimately hilarious) Bespoke Cup season. Oakleigh's going to win the title this season or, at best, be cheated out of it by an Act of God. So could we at least enjoy the relegation battle (24 more points to go...)? Well, no. Thanks to the NSD (which is totally going to happen), there's possibly going to be three or four or five Victorian clubs getting out of this circle of hell, which will shake up the entire local league system. So what then if Port or Avondale score bangers against relegation candidates? So what if Moreland gets an upset win against a now zero and two Bentleigh? So what if Preston drop a point here or there on their way to promotion, to what exactly? Thunder vs Dinamo eight goal banger? Pointless, unless you're a gambler living in that particular moment where you're sweating on + or - 3.5 goals. Yes, I suppose we could just enjoy the games on their own merits, as they veer from one goal from a misplaced pass to another goal from a set piece. 

Final thought
Turns out that one of the court officers I work with is a Perth Glory fan. Just when I thought I'd shed all proximity to Western Australian nonsense, it's right there three metres away.