Spoiled Brats - South Melbourne 1 Bentleigh Greens 0

Sitting in second place, and still complaining. Good. 

Finding new ways towards self-loathing for a team continuing to eke out wins, despite a few injuries. Also good.

Hearing news of an old foe copping eight goals, and being unable to take much joy from that either, because the style of play of your own team is utterly joyless. You better believe that's good.

The thing is, our style of play is what it is. You can raise the problem of injuries and outs, but would it really be that much different even with everyone back in? Not really. We cop stick from non-South people for complaining about winning, but they don't watch whatever this is, week in, week out. It's hard to watch and hard to cheer for. Wins feel more like getting something where we shouldn't have, which is OK once in a while; but make it routine, and it feels like a guy always winning the lottery. 

Since I stopped really trying to do anything of note with this blog, the already limited readership has tanked. I bring that up only to make this observation: that the things I say here really have such minimal impact nowadays. And I only bring that up as a preemptive defensive stance against any accusation that my misery guts point of view here has any sort of profound influence on others in the South Melbourne community. At best it seeps out, but it's easy enough to ignore.

What's a little harder to ignore is that others feel much the same way. They're not just wondering where the goals are - currently at just 1.2 per game despite our high ladder position. They're also wondering about where the Hellas mentality is? And where is the desire to create joy? Some people can wring joy merely from good results, and that's great. But what if you want something more? I suppose if the results are enough - and cup shambles aside, they've been good - why would you actually go to a South game? No one's going to South for the food. Some people might go for the social aspect. But for the football? That's debatable. 

Why not stay home, and flick across this and whatever other game is on NPL TV? Why not just check score updates on Futbol24? Why not just come across the result by accident while scrolling through social media? If the result is all that matters to such an extreme, there's no reason to watch the game. Just send the team out there, in front of no one (not as far-fetched a concept as you'd like it to be), and play the game out for the benefit of insomniac overseas gamblers.

I'm reminded, for the first time in many, many years, of the online football manager game Hattrick, which a few South people used to play. It was a random-number generated game if ever there was one. You'd set up your team lineup, conditional subs, tactics, and then the team would play twice a week in real-time matches. There was no action to watch - you'd get intermittent textual updates about important or interesting events during a game. Sometimes, a game might be so dull, that there'd be very little t report.

Then the game would finish, you'd train players, make limited business decisions, and do the whole thing all over again. The main point of the basic game was to set up your team in such a way that the random-number generator that ran the game engine would more likely favour you over your opponent. There were other goals you could set yourself - collect flags in international friendlies, develop players for the national team - but the basic game remained the same. Crunch the numbers, figure out what the percentages were, and go.

Since I suck at maths, and refused to do my homework, I was never very good at the game. But sometimes it was obvious what your only hope was. Sometimes you would clearly be the inferior side, and all you could do was set up your team for a smash and grab. So basically the most all-round defensive set-up your training regimen would allow, and hope that the random-number generator would make you a winner.

And on those rare occasions when it happened, it was marvelous. You'd try and expend the least amount of attacking effort to get the best possible result. Almost inevitably, such wins would contain a ton of luck, and your goal(s) would often come from what were called "special events". Back then Hattrick would allocate about ten chances in each game, which the two teams would fight over. Apart from that pool of about ten chances, each team had access to a limited number of "special event" goals - based on player specialties (speed, power, heading, technique).

During a live match, the match engine would fire up a text update. Maybe one of your "quick" players had burst through the offside trap. Or just as likely, your team took a corner... one of your players with the "head" specialty rose up, and connected with the ball... oh, what a save! But the ball is still live, and it's tucked away by one of the other players fulfilling the need for the text update to come up with some scorer! 1-0 to Juniper Hill, or whatever your team was called!

If it was the league you'd take the points and take pride in potentially ruining someone's promotion run, or if it was the cup, the extra money, and roll on to next week. You'd show some good grace for your win on the forum, while your opponent might take their frustration out on the same forums, slamming "too much random" being in the game.

Anyway, such were matches between the strong and the weak, and no really cared about style, because what could you read into a clutch of prepared text updates? But here we are in the real world, playing against an absolute no-name Bentleigh side - I knew just one player of theirs, goalkeeper Bon Scott -  who'd won one game all year. And they torched us, as much as a clearly battling side could do so. We gave them the ball, and territory, and let them come at us, as they intended to do.

Meanwhile it took about 12 minutes for us to get a meaningful touch in the opposition half. Thank goodness for set piece special events to get us out of jail, again. I counted about five minutes of play by us in the first half that showed initiative; others counted about seven. The second half was not much better. Marcus Schroen was a little wasteful, but that's about all you could say. We are fortunate in that our league opponents so far have been more than wasteful. Surely it can't last?

Next game
Anzac Day eve at home against Port Melbourne, kickoff at the non-overwhelming public interest time of 7:30pm.

Is there a curtain-raiser?
No. The women play tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) at McIvor Reserve in Yarraville.

AGM coming up
They tried to keep this very quiet. Goodness knows why, it's not like anything stupid is going to happen. Do they not want a quorum? Ah, memories. Anyway, mark down Wednesday April 26th in your calendar;  the SMH AGM is at 7pm, and the SMFC AGM is at 8pm. 

On the streams
A little bit more like it
Flicked across to Oakleigh vs Port for a bit. Not the best standard of game - and if you think we score a high proportion of goals from set pieces, Oakleigh's not far behind - but what stuck out was the intent from from teams to play, and play quickly. And play quickly didn't play panicky. It meant see an option, and go for it, don't let the defence get set. Pass and move. 

Final thought
This seems to come up every year now, if not twice a year. Sometimes it's our fault, more often than not it's theirs. Saturday was particularly farcical; at least at Kingston Heath we have the excuse of the painted grass fiasco from a few years back. But you'd think Bentleigh would be bursting at the seams to get some sort of mileage out of their away kit, whatever it is. Instead we had the farce of ourselves in a dark royal blue, and the visitors in a dark green that was even darker on the front, on a gloomy day. The cherry on top was the refs, who you think might have something to say about this, being in all black.

Look, if you're some two-bit club near the bottom of the pyramid, you can say that these things happen, and people would understand, albeit begrudgingly. But this is meant to be the de facto national second tier. Against better judgment, it's broadcast all over the internet. People bust their arses to make it look and feel presentable, and then Bentleigh just decide to make it look more amateurish than it really is. AT least the Lakeside lights are a bit more than passable, even if they don't all fire up. Bentleigh did the same to away to Oakleigh - who wear navy blue, and who's ground is not so well lit - earlier in the season, so clearly no one cares, and nothing is going to change.

At least we'll be out of this league soon enough, and hopefully joining something with a bit more professionalism, and a tad more aesthetic sense.