Torn - Oakleigh Cannons 0 South Melbourne 1

Provided with two options, I decided against going to this match, preferring instead to watch it with a friend at their city apartment. A pleasant dinner on Clarendon Street, a nice stroll with only the hint of humming of the Formula 1 cars down the road (the roar of the V8s a different matter), and then a little bit of whiskey along with Altona Magic vs Thunder while we waited for our game to start. 

Here was hoping there wouldn't be the usual kinds of technical snafus when we've tried this before, but what do you know? A big error message saying "forbidden this", and "failed that", and seemingly no way to work around it. And then it started working, and everything was fine again. Well, almost.

One is naturally torn about such wins. In terms of the league season, it's always nice to pick up points. And to win at this ground, where apart from a couple of games against the Bergers, we haven't won against this mob at that place in ten years? I mean, yes, we did "win" here last year in the cup, but this was a tad more legit, in that it was one goal to nil. You know, an actual win, instead of winning nil-nil.

And after last year's grand final humiliation, I suppose we can restore a hint of self-belief about being able to get a result against Oakleigh, including missing several important (to us) players; Schroen, Djiba, Brennan, Norton, and Riak on the bench. And whatever happened to Jack Painter-Andrew Three of the subs being basically kids. In that respect, even with Oakleigh having played midweek, getting the win here was slightly more than nominally impressive. But there's also the other side of it, which is as follows.

Oakleigh had eleven shots on target to two, and eleven corners to one - the one being the passage of play we scored from. Stats of course don't tell the whole story. A shot on target can be a timid long ranger out of desperation, for example. But anyone who watched the game will know that the stats here do tell a story, and that's that this win was pure filth. A 1/10 chance that somehow came good. I don't know how Oakleigh didn't score, how their efforts kept ending up just wide or just high. Who knows how many goal line clearances. Even taking into account our being short-staffed, it was hard to take anything of value from it in the long run.

It was back to the very worst of the bad old days. It looked like we were a team in relegation trouble, not near the top. Kick and rush would have been a dream; kick and hope, something to aim for; a good chunk of last Saturday was pure kick and pray. Poor Danny Kim. Remember Fernando's ill-fated stint at New Zealand Knights, where he watched the ball sail back and forth over his head? Maybe Danny's a good player, maybe he isn't, but we're never going to find out playing like this. But we must be grateful for what we have, and acknowledge that things could be worse - we could be playing dire football and losing, instead of playing dire football and winning.

Next game
Away at Hume on Saturday.

Is there a curtain raiser this week?
Yes, but with a massive caveat - the under 21s curtain raiser kicks off at 3:30, meaning that it will finish over an hour before the scheduled start of main game. Hardly seems worth the bother popping in early.

Vale Jack Dardalis
I should have noted in the last post, but Jack Dardalis passed away last week. I never met Jack, but we all know the legacy - Marathon Foods, major sponsor, forever linked to the club through some of its headiest days, and some of Australian club soccer's greatest moments. What more iconic kit in our history than the solid royal blue Marathon Foods jerseys of the 1991 grand final and the years after that? Another elder statesman of the Greek community passes away, and another element of the past fades away with it.

On the streams
It could be better, it could be worse
Travelling into town on the train, I switched on NPL TV, and saw a snippet of Moreland getting smoked by Hume, and Knights about to have the same done to them by Avondale.

Final thought
Will I get a post up before the cup game on Tuesday?