Whatever - Bentleigh Greens 0 South Melbourne 2

The team having secured a home final of some sort several weeks ago now, and then seemingly having put the cue in the rack until such time as the finals series begins, it befits your correspondent to also not give too much of a toss either. With five games left, as long as no-one does something wildly stupid getting themselves an inconvenient suspension, and as long as none of our opponents decide leg-breaking time is just around the corner, I'm content to not get too worked up about anything that happens between now and week 1 (or potentially week 2) of the finals.

Nothing that I saw on the live stream at a mate's place last Saturday gave me any reason to think we were likely to re-find our one patch of annoyingly watchable good form from midway through the season any time soon. Even Jake Marshall's wonderful goal was only possible because of two horrible attempts to get it into the box in first place; first, the corner which barely reached shoulder height of the first defender inside the box, then Jack Painter-Andrews' wayward ball off the side of his boot which just so happened to land on the chest of Big Jake, who channelled his inner Big Luke for 1-0.

The starting line-up was weird again - Ajak Riak on the bench? - but whatever. I'll grant that the team showed more pressing intent, and that it didn't look quite as poor as it did against the same team that made it look second rate back in our first meeting in 2023; but that's also down to Bentleigh also not being quite as dynamic on Saturday as they were back then. Still, the Greens had enough chances to scrounge a point at least. Quite how they stuffed up some of those chances has got me beat. I don't even really feel like looking back on the final stats to find out how many shots we had on goal.

Time to pivot

So now that the rest of the home and away season doesn't mean much to me anymore, we still have to find something to care about until the finals start. Turns out the perfect thing has been sitting under our noses the entire season. Brad Norton, who started the season on 280 competitive fixtures for this sometimes great club, is now up to 294. So the maths is pretty clear. Brad needs six games to get to 300. There are a minimum of six matches left for us this season, being five regular season, and one finals match. Brad has to play in every game to reach the mark, because we assume he wont' be back next year. (I wonder how the testimonial plans are coming along...)

Our record keeping being sketchy as fuck, reliably I can only come up with two players who have definitely reached the 300 mark for us, they being Trimmers and Steve Blair. Horsey may have got there, but some of the data from cup matches early in his time with us is not quite complete, so for now he's nominally stranded on 296.

So that's what's going to keep me occupied South-wise over the next few weeks.

Next game
Port Melbourne away on Saturday evening. Another chance to see if the school camp the Port Melbourne Plebs went on a few years back in 2018 has finally finished.

Is there a curtain raiser this week?

No. The under 21s match is scheduled for after the senior match.

Eight days a week
So not too far back, looking ahead to the rescheduled Heidelberg game set for a Wednesday, I wondered if we'd ever actually had a season where we'd played on every day of week. My instinct said that surely we hadn't, but a spare Sunday afternoon waiting for pirated sumo highlights to be uploaded afforded me the chance to go over the files and demonstrate that instinct sucks. 

I found five seasons where we'd played on each day of the week, including two within the last decade. Well, they do say that if you remember the Chris Taylor years, then you weren't really there. 

There were also several seasons with games on five days of the week, and a few with six. Usually the days not played on were Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are a certain set of conditions you need for this phenomenon to occur. You need lots of games, so a cup tournament or two helps. You also usually need to go on deep runs in those cups. Postponed and rescheduled matches are also good to have. You especially need floodlights; no floodlights means less chance for midweek games. And the big one you might not think of, public holidays. Anzac Day, Boxing Day, New Year's or Australia Day falling midweek can help you get across the line.

For the record, the five seasons are 1989, 1992/93, 1996/97, 2016, and 2017. Soon to be joined by 2023.

Final thought
Success! Random security-guy at a job-site I was at this week recognised that it was a South beanie, not a North one. Turns out he's an up and coming ref, relatively new to the local scene. Trying to explain even just the nonsense that happened last year with the grand final venue means recalling a lot of niche cultural detritus that makes one question one's life choices.