Half-arsed - South Melbourne 4 St Albans 0

There's not enough data to make it a thoroughly resilient trend, but let's go with it anyway. When we play St Albans during one of their often fleeting Victorian top tier stints, it usually goes like this: the first game, usually away, usually early in the season, is a bit of a grind, but we get the job done. They're still enthusiastic, have earned a few points, and maybe put in enough credible performances that people think they won't suck as much as they're prone to doing. Then we turn up, get our win, and it starts going south for them (no pun intended). By the time they rock up to Lakeside for the return fixture, they're disheartened, weakened by defections, and either in or just above the relegation zone. Then it all comes down to whether we give enough of a toss to go full on and completely humiliate them.

Well, humiliation it was for the first half on Tuesday. Performance wise, it was nothing remarkable. It wasn't built around super build up play, neat passing, flashes of individual brilliance. It was just a case of a team with some talent grinding an opponent with a talent deficit into the dirt. There wasn't much pretty about it. The penalty shot for the opening goal was struck a solid arm trying to save it, and still went in. Two of the goals were bundled over the goal line after scrambles in the six-yard box. Only Jake Painter-Andrew's shot into the roof of the net was worthy of highlight reels, though I suppose there's also people who get a kick out of unicorn goals like Lirim Elmazi scoring from a short corner.

So 4-0 up the break, and even the ground announcer makes the call that South has won the game 4-0. Too bad there was a whole second half still to play, as seems to be the custom nowadays. And what a pointless second half it was, as we failed to add to the scoreboard. Still, good to get some run into a few fringe players, including youth team player Cooper Halfpenny, and wing recruit Kosta Emmanuel, who has spent most of the year injured. But overall, the whole vibe, especially in the second 45, was of a glorified pre-season friendly.

Finals secured for 2023
The win against St Albans means that the senior men have managed to secure a finals berth with eight games to spare. The highest points tally that seventh placed Dandenong Thunder can achieve is 47 - which could only happen if they won every remaining game of theirs. Since we've already reached a tally of 49 points, all that's left to decide is where within the top six we'll finish.

Barring any changes due to external administrative cock-ups, we are also pretty close to securing a home final of some sort. Port Melbourne, the team currently in fifth place, would need six wins, a draw, and a calamitous collapse from us just to reach our current tally. 

As for securing a spot in the top two and the near negligible benefits that brings, it's a still little bit early to get into that. Better trying to do those sums after our next match.

Next game
Oakleigh on Sunday, July 2nd, at our latest home away from home, McIvor Reserve. 

For those who have not had the pleasure of visiting this venue, prepare to be underwhelmed. There should be ample parking for the expected crowds for this game, as well as the match the following week against Hume. Public transport options for this ground are inconvenient at the best of times, and will be worse considering the school holiday scheduled shutdowns of all train lines heading west from the city. Luckily this is one of those venues that's within my driving range.

There is some shelter, but very little seating. The social club/pavilion, where all the shelter is, faces east. If you want to stand on the opposite side of the ground, where the benches are, bring your sunnies and a hat, because you will be staring directly into the sun. Away from the pavilion, there is very little elevation. For those watching the games at home, well, here's hoping that someone bothers to hire a cherry picker, because otherwise you, too, will be watching the game from a sideline view, possibly directly into the sun, as was the case with the match that our senior women played there earlier this year.

As for the food... look, I'm willing to be surprised, but from my experience the souv at Yarraville is pretty ordinary.

Is there a curtain raiser?
No. But also yes.

So there's nothing before the senior men's match at 3:00PM, but the under 21s are playing after the seniors, kicking off at 6:30PM. Reminds of what Weird Al Yankovic noted when his band toured with the Monkees, "We didn't open for them; they closed for us."

As was rumoured
Danny Kim, the wrong player for the wrong club at the wrong time, has transferred to Green Gully.

South women through to semis of the cup
As messy as the league season has been in terms of trying to find any sort of consistency or clear front-runner, we also have the cup which, not quite as nuts. Three of the semi-finalists are fairly obvious. First placed Bulleen, third placed South, fifth placed Calder; but there's also mid-table Victorian Premier League side Casey Comets, and that's probably who you'd want to get drawn against in the next round if you were one of the other remaining teams. To get to this round, South had to overcome fellow NPLW side Preston, who after a promising start to the season, seemed to have slipped a bit. I watched this from the couch, and again, these South girls make hard work of winning. They pulled their finger out in the nick of time to get out of jail this time, like they did against FV Emerging in the league the game before this one, but it's frustrating to watch.

A better division 2, eventually coming for you
What does this even mean? So we got the news of the progression from the 32 odd expressions of interest getting cut down to 26 well over a month ago (bonus floodlight content in there for those who want to revisit it), and it's only now that the remaining bids actually getting the paperwork for making their bids? This is even shoddier than the organisation within Vic Uni's research department, which allowed me to skate through with extensions I probably shouldn't have gotten.

Anyway, final bids are due sometime in early August, and successful bids - and whatever the format will be that we'll be proceeding with - will be announced around Octoberish, maybe. And then the whole thing will be starting in March 2024, if you believe that. 

Around the grounds
For old time's sake
Last Saturday, for probably the first time since the chaos unleashed by the pandemic, I managed to get to a non-South match. I blame the pandemic a little bit for this, but I also blame changing home responsibilities, and I especially blame that season where South and seemingly most other NPL teams changed their schedules to be playing mostly on Saturdays. But also, even I managed to get suckered into streaming games instead of attending them. Well, now that South's back to not playing games on Saturdays, and every other planet aligned, I managed to stroll down to Ralph Reserve for Western Suburbs vs Altona East, a near-enough to top of the table clash. Remembering old days, an with only large notes in my wallet, I had my mum break a fifty for me. Turned out there was no gate charge. Turns out also that Suburbs are accepting card payments in the canteen. The souv was OK; not great, not awful. Perfectly acceptable, really. Served quickly, too. Seemed like an easy enough process, which one specific club could possibly learn from. Quite a large crowd, actually, maybe about 200 people, about two or even three times what I expected, and what I'd experienced before at this ground and between these two teams. Crowd included the brother of an ex-South and current Altona East player, who seemed somewhat incredulous that I hadn't realised he'd been in Greece the past four years. My answer could only be, how am I supposed to keep track of everyone that's stopped attending South games over the past 18 years? Anyway, the wind made the game itself a grind to watch. Playing with its benefit in the first half, Suburbs went into the break 2-0 up, scored a goal against the wind to make it 3-0, and then coasted home to win 3-1.

Final thought
Everyone's looking a bit jaundiced, but apparently that's just a trick of lights.

Turn on the bright lights - South Melbourne 3 Dandenong Thunder 2

Let us begin by noting the following, without any sense of hyperbole: since the renovation of Lakeside Stadium into a combined soccer and athletics venue, and the transfer of management of the venue out of our control and into that of the government, we have suffered many indignities at the hands of the State Sport Centres Trust, the current managers of the venue.

This encompasses everything from the extremely petty (an attempted ban on the use of the trumpet), to the tone deaf (trying to clamp down on newspaper confetti thrown by a supporter with a mental disability), to the childishly fascistic (surveillance camera placed right in front of Clarendon Corner), to the bureaucratically incompetent (the whole Western United saga), and now this - firstly not knowing how to turn the light towers on from their little operations booth, and then when finding out that each tower could be started manually, showing absolutely no urgency in trying to get that done.

Something was clearly wrong when towards the back end of the first half, as the sun began to set and heavy cloud rolled through, the field of play began to get very dark, and there was no sign of the lights being turned on. One could speculate that there was a local electrical outage - it's happened before - but since the scoreboard was working, and the stadium PA was working, and the lights next door in the VIS pool were working, something was wrong with either the towers, or the button which makes the towers light up.

(There's a hilarious Brian Regan bit on Dr Katz about flipping a switch, which my brothers and I still quote to this day, because we are sad people obsessed with obscure even in its own time 1990s television.)

As the staff emerged from their bunker in the grandstand, they merely strolled to each light tower, to the point where it took so long to turn on the lights, that the game was called off. Unfortunately the reason announced over the PA system was that the lights were not bright enough to continue, which was obviously absurd; the lights, even before they had properly warmed up, were already brighter than the lighting currently available at several NPL Victoria venues. So South of the Border will infer that the delay after halftime had dragged on too long, and not that it was not bright enough.

To be honest, I'm not even sure why they also didn't turn on the lights in the grandstand. It was all very amateurish, which made our club look amateurish. While we're good enough at making ourselves look like colossal idiots without any outside help, it did suck that what's left of our reputation got dragged through the social media mud because of the incompetence of the Trust and its employees, even if it was worth it (to a certain degree, because I don't have to moderate the club's social media pages) to watch the outrage from the (mostly) overseas gambling community.

To which I say: fuck you. My club is irrelevant except for your interest in it? Then please just piss off and gamble on some other pissant team more worth your time. 

There was also sooking from the Dandy Thunder fans once the decision had been made to resume the game on Tuesday night, from the point at which it had been abandoned. "It should have been restarted", "Corrupt Greeks!", etc. This from the club that gained infamy for the lights going out at their ground once they fell behind in important matches.

Officially, there are a wide range of regulatory options for how to resume, restart, or simply declare a match over in the case of an abandonment. Clearly many of the people commenting on this issue had no idea about that, as evidence not only by their referring to outdated rules, but also their inability to agree on what the minimum amount of time played required for a result to stand. To be fair, the fact that all these regulatory options are at the sole and final discretion of Football Victoria - an organisation renowned for the high degree of esteem it is held in by its constituents - means that consistency in such matters may not actually exist, which can be frustrating. 

However, if ever you were going to resume a game from a specific point in time, surely halftime in a game where no subs had been made seems like exactly the best time to do so? Schedule wise, I'd have preferred the next day - preferably finishing in time so I could then head to the footy - but I can understand the issue of Monday being too short notice. I was also unconvinced by some of our fans worrying about a short turnaround from the Tuesday to the (since postponed) Friday night game against the Bergers. The previous week the Bergers had to back up on a three day break after playing 120 minutes of cup football - surely us playing 45 minutes on a Tuesday shouldn't have been that much of a big deal?

It was a real pity that the game got called off when it did, because it was actually quite entertaining. We were looking a bit suspect from Thunder players running at out defence, but I still thought we'd had the better of it. Ali Sulemani was having his best game in a South shirt by some margin, though his great finish from out wide will have a permanent question mark over whether it was offside - permanent, because the cameraperson filming the game fell asleep for just long enough to miss the build up play before Sulemani received the ball. 

Anyway, as nice as that goal was, I liked Marcus Schroen's more, because it was bread and butter stuff. A turnover won high up the field in a very good position, a shot parried back into play, and someone being johnny-on-the-spot to tuck it away. Then we got complacent, conceded a goal before the break, and then had to wait until Tuesday to finish the whole thing off.

Competing family commitments meant that I couldn't attend the Tuesday resumption, but your correspondent could still manage to watch the game through the magic of internet streaming. Which sucks from the point of view of digital latency issues that one couldn't share the experience on social media, but what else we can do? The discombobulation of the resumption soon faded, as the commentators tried to figure out who'd been subbed out during the extended break, and then we went 3-1 up, and all looked good as we then began to try an shut up shop, preserve energy, and coast to victory.

Well, Morgan Evans decided to let out his inner 2022 Ben Djiba and lunge in for a two-footed tackle, and got his marching orders. OK, ten men, ten minutes, two up, should be fine. Then Marcus Schroen, who got a yellow card in the push and shove nonsense after Evans' lunge, got sent off for petty time wasting nonsense a few minutes later, and then it was 3-1 up with nine men, with five minutes or regulation and whatever the ref decided to chuck on at the end, which just so happened to be five minutes more. 

Aside from both reds being entirely avoidable, and the issues it would cause in future matches (Evans has been suspended for three matches), it did bring unnecessary pressure to the rest of the team, which conceded a goal, and then had to hang on for dear life for the win. But they hung on, and that was that, eventually. One of three Ajak Riak-less fixtures survived, and then they end up postponing one of those three anyway. 

Next game
St Albans at home on Tuesday night. This will be our last home game at Lakeside before the finals, as the Women's World Cup will be commandeering the stadium for some time after that.

Is there a curtain raiser?
No.

When three halves don't make a whole
Watched the senior women take on FV Emerging. Half of that was watched on public transport, which took its sweet time getting me to Lakeside, and the other half in the ground proper. Got the win, in part thanks to a long-throw, but crikey it's a frustrating team to watch. 

The Continuing International Adventures of Ajak Riak
During the week South Sudan copped a 96th minute goal to lose 3-2 to Gambia. They are now out of the running for African Cup of Nations qualifying, with one game left to play in September I think, hopefully after the conclusion of our season. Riak played about an hour, and is credited with an assist. South Sudan have a friendly with Egypt coming up this week, so I don't think we'll be seeing him against St Albans.

New signing alert
The club has signed striker Luka Ninkovic from Bentleigh Greens in the mid-season transfer window. Stats and reputation don't suggest that he's some kind of world beater at this level, but he looks like a capable enough depth player option; at the very least, it should mean that we're done with chucking Andy Brennan or Marcus Schroen up front when Ajak Riak isn't available. Ninkovic doesn't seem to have got much of a go at Bentleigh this season, and during his time at Heidelberg, he seemed to come off the bench a lot, or start and then get taken off.

The food
The range, pricing, and quality of the food available in our social club is not to everyone's liking. That's fair, and I don't judge anyone for not partaking. But does it also have to be served that slowly, too? Sunday was astonishingly bad on the speed of service front. You order your food, and then you stand there like a mug for ten minutes while you wait for it to be prepared. While you're waiting, you're joined by other people waiting. You also see the preparation for the post-match meal for the participants in the curtain raiser, and you wonder why you can't have food that approximates that? I get that the pasta and salads, which require plates and cutlery, might be a no-go for the plebs, but some of those grilled or roasted marinaded chicken strips looked OK. Stick that in a roll with some salad, I'll pay for that. I don't know. I've lost pretty much all hope that the social club kitchen will ever run properly, regardless of who they bring in to operate it.

Final thought
Noticed a decline in the quality of my vision the past week and a bit, about three months after updating my prescription. Went to the optometrist, whose admittedly knowledgeable diagnosis was that I'm getting older.

Friday match against Heidelberg POSTPONED

Tomorrow's (16/6) match against Heidelberg has been postponed until August, due to the Olympic Village field undergoing works for the Women's World Cup. 

And yes, I will be doing a match report for the Thunder game eventually.

Abandoned match update

Quite a quick resolution to this matter - Sunday's match against Dandenong Thunder will resume on Tuesday, June 13th, at Lakeside, at 8:00 PM. Very doubtful that I will be able to attend, so here's hoping for those like myself who are unable to make it, that NPL TV will be streaming it.

Right place, right time - Melbourne Knights 1 South Melbourne 2

Another week, another thoroughly enjoyable contest, provided you watched it through the filter of the netting behind the goals. Well, that's a little harsh. It was actually a pretty good game to watch, better for us having won it, but let us not forget that for a good chunk of the first half, we were on the back foot, and probably should have been behind. 

But we weren't. And then Jack Painter-Andrews, waiting on the edge of the 18 yard box and taking advantage of a poor clearance from a not very good corner, hit it low and hard through the sea of legs for the opening goal. There is nothing better than being behind the goals, even with a big black net in the way, when a player takes one of those low shots from a half-clearance, and you can see the ball going n even before it's crossed the line, with the goalkeeper and his friends on the line helpless to do anything about it; and even better for it being right on half time.

Second half, copped the equaliser, but didn't stop coming and stepping up. And for all of Knights' commendable new found commitment to a short passing game, there was evidence that they are vulnerable when trying to play out of the back. It was evident against Oakleigh the week before, and when the moment presented itself last Friday, we managed to take it. The game of risk vs reward fell in our favour this time.

Leaving the game, I had two thoughts first how nice it was to watch a win in a meaningful league game between these two sides, a game of decent quality, with an ever improving stadium experience, and that we might well meet again in the finals, maybe even in the final; the other thought was how few people had watched the game. It wasn't a poor crowd, but it deserved more than it got. But that's where we are now.

Next game
Dandenong Thunder at home on Sunday.

Is there a curtain raiser?
Yes. Our senior women take on FV Emerging, kickoff at 1:30

Fixture news
Our round 19 fixture against St Albans, originally scheduled for Friday June 23rd, has now been brought forward to Tuesday June 20th. I guess the Women's World Cup must be really keen to get into the stadium.

Congratulations to Ange Postecoglou
What's left to be said that hasn't already been said? Ange's profile is so high now, that every man and his dog have had their say on his latest move. Just as importantly, for many years now Ange has been in the position of when he talks, people listen, and he has significant say on how the narrative around his career now gets played out. It's a long way from Panachaki and Whittlesea Zebras, and this blog being among the few English language places even taking a cursory interest in his years in the wilderness. That's not intended to sound like backslapping for this outlet, only remembering what it was like at the time. Now, even Ange's stint in Patra is being raked over for insights into what came after, as is his time at Zebras.

(both stories, through no fault of the respective writers, lacking input from the man himself)

That Whittlesea stint keeps getting brought up by a lot more people than were actually there, like that White Stripes gig in Melbourne that reputedly only had 13 people show up. I think of that second match at Lakeside between ourselves and the Zebras in 2009. There were many lows in that season for Zebras, but for Ange personally that one might have stung an little bit more, coning back to the scene of your then greatest accomplishments, and copping four (and should have been more) with one of said four being scored by a 37 year old who you were coaching a decade earlier.

But that puts it all a bit too simply, even neatly. I see some Spurs fans, as did their Celtic counterparts a couple of years ago, bring up Ange's background (not from European football) and age (now 57), and ask what's he done and why has it taken so long? And it's like, can you even comprehend the footballing distances and barriers - the mental, the psychological, of reputation - that any Australian coach has to overcome to get even close to being taken seriously in Europe? The fact that Ange even got close, considering those obstacles - and the prejudices of those who make decisions at that level - should be right up there with whatever other qualities he has as a manager.

I mean, at his first peak in 2000, coaching in the World Club Championships, the team he was in charge of was fobbed off (by people from the home of the "romance of the cup" no less) for containing tax advisors and petrol pump attendants. Never mind that the petrol pump attendant had a solid decade at a leading Greek club behind him. A decade later, he's coaching against ex-opponents, ex-teammates, and even players like the petrol pump attendant whom he coached, in no man's land. Now he's in the same league as Manchester United. My disinterest in anything above this mess we're in right now aside, I can at least admire the accomplishment of even getting close.

Vale Rale Rasic
Of the three men who have coached both South Melbourne and the Socceroos (Rasic, Arok, and Postecoglou), Rasic had by far the shortest South stint. Brought to South in late 1982, Rasic lasted just 13 matches of the 1983 NSL season, with a muddling record of four wins, three draws, and six losses. Others who were there at the time can perhaps shed some light on what went wrong, because it seems like the pieces were there for the side to finally win a league title; indeed, the team went on to finish in fourth place, just a game and a half behind champions St George. Unfortunately, Rasic's biography doesn't give away much on that period of his career, preferring to let sleeping dogs lie. The club would have to wait one more year to finally break its national league drought under Rasic's replacement Len McKendy, while Rale would win the 1987 NSL title with a dominant APIA team.

Second to last thought
I haven't paid as much attention to the senior women's team as I should, but if anyone can make sense of this what's going in this NPLW Victoria season as a whole, you're a better person than I am. Seems to be a case of get to the finals however you can, hope you have enough of your good players left, and then just pull a name out of a hat to decide a champion. Chaos league.

Final thought
The Futbol24 app is now for the tip.

Role reversal - South Melbourne 1 Green Gully 0

After coming through the dross months, and experiencing the brief Southelona sojourn after that, we're halfway back to grumbling again. OK, so it wasn't the most polished performance, but it was no fluke. Gully have their method, we have ours, and it just so happens that we're now at opposite sides of the beautiful/practical dichotomy that our two clubs occupied for a good chunk of the Victorian Premier League era. What a time to be alive that was. Sometimes playing well, sometimes not, but almost always getting bullied by a more ruthless opponent. No one watched Gully games for style, but they got the job done. Of course they still had talent, but their guiding principle was winning. 

That kind of thing - utterly remorseless practical football - doesn't always fly well at South. I mean just look at some of the (very) minority grumbling about the Chris Taylor era, and of course, much of the grief directed (including by this reporter) at Esteban Quintas' teams. Thankfully we've moved on (fingers crossed) from the worst excesses of Quintas' defensive methods, and it's not just Javier Diaz Lopez making 15 million saves (give or take) to keep us in the contest. He had to make some interventions last week, and that was fine. He was a difference, but he wasn't the only difference. The weather was a bit shit, we started slowly, and our coach threw enough of a tantrum to be banished from the bench by the officials. And yet, we weren't second best, and we deserved our win. What else can you want? Yes, more goals, more action, more domination.

But entertainment? It's there in spades. The aforementioned tantrum, Gully's Nahuel Bonada apparently throwing a water bottle from the bench into the stand, some really quite beautifully times sliding tackles from both sides, and occasionally some action on goal, too. Oh, and Andy Brennan came on pretty damn early for an injured Alun Webb, and then got subbed off late because it was ridiculous that he was out there for as long as he was; that's not a complaint about technical output, more about the old gas tank. I agree with his comment from the week before, that running doggies sucks. 

Another three points, and another week hoping that Ajak Riak doesn't get abducted by aliens during the finals.

Next game
Away at Melbourne Knights tomorrow night, in possibly the most anticipated league game between the two sides for a decade. Well, it should be the most anticipated, but you know, no one gives a stuff anymore. 

Is there a curtain raiser?
No. 

Transfers
Apparently the transfer window is still some weeks away, owing to a change to align our local transfer calendar with with FIFA's transfer windows.  

Perfunctory report on the women's team (not a report on perfunctory women)
So, look. It's a chaotic league. We were 2-0 up against league leading Boroondara by the time I got to the ground, 3-0 up by the time I got up into the stand, and 3-2 up by the time I was leaving the media operations box at halftime. By the time I was just tucking into my (above passable) lamb "souvlaki" (it isn't a souvlaki, or even gyros, but whatever), we were at 3-3, and all I could assume was that soon enough we'd be down and out. And yet, we won with a late goal. Now the margin to top spot has been cut to two points, but who knows what the second half of the season will look like with all the A-League players coming in.

Final thought
After mentally preparing for rail replacement troubles, I got almost all the way to Lakeside before the no. 12 tram made us disembark at Park Street. Tram replacement! If I'd known that ahead of time, I would've brought a bag with me to go op shopping. Oh well, at least I had some company on the way back - now that's a rare occurrence these days.