Interstate soccer came back... but did anyone notice? (yes, sorta)

So last Saturday Victoria played its first interstate match since 2009. Back then, Victoria's men's team defeated Northern New South Wales 3-2 up in Newcastle. Joseph Youssef, Ramazan Tavsancioglu, and Steven O'Dor were part of the men's squad, and Laura Spiranovic was in the women's team. Records of the whole event, played as part of shared 125th anniversaries of the two federations, are sketchy though, which is a funny thing to say about a game played not even 15 years ago. 

Yes, interstate football is not what it was back in the 1950s, when state pride was something serious, or the 1960s and 70s when playing for the state against touring teams also had a degree of cachet. The introduction of national league soccer, the declining quality of touring teams, the women's feds merging into the men's sphere, and even some A-League teams adopting state colours as their own has made the whole thing near redundant. All that, and there's just so many better ways nowadays to assess talent for national team squads, which was one of the primary functions of interstate competition.

But someone out there still thinks there's a place for state matches, and so a couple of years ago we had Queensland host New South Wales in men's and women's matches, and last weekend we had Queensland visit us for a double-header. I decided to go all the way out to the Home of the Matildas, so I could sit in the grandstand this time, and at the very least check out the South boys and girls who were selected. I wouldn't have gone if the Pies had lost the night before in the prelim - I'd have been in too foul of a mood - but they'd won, so it was something to do, even if neither of the two persons I'd asked to come with me were able to join me.

It's a fair hike by public transport from Sunshine out to this new soccer venue, but not altogether too bad - the worst bit is the rideshare drivers parking in the bus lanes in the city, and the walk across from the La Trobe Uni bus stop to the complex. Apparently there's a tram stop that's closer, but since the complex surrounds are not quite finished yet, it's hard to know which paths are open and which aren't. Unfortunately I missed the first half hour of the women's match, where Victoria was already 2-0 up, in part thanks to a goal from South's Danielle Wise. In that part of the second half that I did see, they should have gone 3-0 up, except for the kind of hesitant finishing from close up which was a feature of the South men in the recent grand final.

Queensland were the better team in the second half, and observers who'd watched the entire match said they were the better team through most of the game, but they could only pull the one goal back, and thus Victoria won the first match of the double-header. I think South co-captain Akeisha Sandhu won the player of match. Quite a good quality match and reasonable attendance (though I think the grand final had a much better turnout), which would ordinarily make me curious enough to check out the standard of the A-League Women's comp, but you know...

Then it was time for the men. Victoria was missing Melbourne Knights players, because the Knights had an Australia Cup game the next day, and so the squad seemed to be mostly Avondale, Oakleigh, and South players. Can't say for certain how many of them were ex-Queenslanders. All four South selections - Javi Diaz Lopez, Brad Norton, Marco Jankovic, and Pat Langlois  - started the match for Victoria. 

It was a pretty flat atmosphere, until (I think) Xander Guy came off and his Yusef Ahmed was subbed on in the first half. Then the Yusef Ahmed fan club (some South fans may remember them from the grand final) lifted the mood with cheering for their man who, to his credit, also helped restore the balance of the game, as Queensland had had the better of the opening twenty minutes by some way. A cracking finish to open the scoring didn't do any harm either.

It was not a balls to the wall kind of game. There weren't any stupid tackles or aggro, and the players had licence to play a bit fancy, with quite a few nice dribbling moves you don't normally see. It was enjoyable for what it was - something a bit more serious and meaningful than a friendly, and a good chance for players to have a bit of fun as well. It was very high tempo at times though; you'd like to think it was a taste of what a second division could look like from a talent point of view.

Played on the hybrid turf-synthetic pitch, the aesthetics of the game felt a bit like a NSW NPL match - quite a bit more futsal-like, and not much of the hard-man stuff you get in Victoria. Having said that, I don't know much of what typical Queensland soccer looks like, so it's hard to make sweeping statements. Players from both sides at times had difficulty keeping their footing on the surface.

Jankovic got subbed out at half time I think, and Langlois was OK, Lopez was solid apart from one bad pass which almost cost Victoria a goal. Norton, who was captain of Victoria, coughed up the ball which lead to Queensland's equaliser, and looked by far the least comfortable defender on the field from either side in playing the ball out from the back. At times it looked like his teammates didn't really want to pass it to him, but part of that was because of a team tactic of aggressively trying to play through the middle. There was a clear instruction also not to play any long balls out of defence, which must have disoriented the South players at least a little.

Norton and Langlois both scored in the penalty shootout, and Lopez made the winning save. I'd like to think that regular post-season interstate soccer could become a thing again, even if the high costs and struggle for interest work against it. Twenty bucks seemed steeped for entry, but I'm not sure that making it cheaper would have increased the appeal to the fickle general soccer public. Not many South people there, apart from friends and family of the players - I think the only person I saw was senior men's team manager Kris Peladarinos. Anyway, fun time had by all, which was it's all about.

A feeling of hollowness - Avondale 4 South Melbourne 0

- Oh, come on. You complain about them more than anyone.
- Maybe! But I still love them. And I don't think you understand that...

Spent a lot of time this past week and a bit not thinking about this match. 

Started writing something yesterday or the day before. Scrubbed parts of it. Or rather, moved those few parts to an offsite location, where they will fester away until this laptop dies, which seeing as it's a Linux setup, could be forever. 

The question is, of course, where do we go from here? The answer remains unclear. It's all very much complicated by what may happen with the National Second Division. If that gets up and if we're a part of it, we probably saw 90% of the senior men's squad play its last game in this most recent grand final disaster. Up to you to ponder who'd warrant keeping, and who wouldn't be. I had my say on that at Olympic Village late on Sunday evening, long after the game had been won, the medals and trophy had been awarded, and most people had gone home. I think I sacked a lot of people, banished others, and regretfully kept a few because you can't get rid of everyone all at once, at least in theory. And that's just assuming there is no NSD, and we're back in this backwater of a backwater.

But it's not up to me and my reactions based on very sudden post-season blues. I'm just a guy who cares, but not one with any say or influence, and caring without influence is a feeble kind of impotence. Pitiable, really, and the only person more pitiable would be someone with influence and day-to-day involvement who put too much stock into what I thought.

And as for the coach... again, it's not my call. I didn't like the style and have never done so, even if it was more watchable this year on the whole, and even if results were good. But he managed to get us this far two seasons in a row, and was undone, in part, by having his leading striker absent for a second year in a row on the biggest day of the year. What a mess. I knew that the grand final would clash with the final round of this part of African Cup of Nations qualifying, and yet somehow I didn't think Ajak Riak would get the call up this time, if only because South Sudan were out of the running for the next stage, and surely he could be excused for this one club match.

But then while speaking to some knowledgeable non-South people after the women's grand final, they alerted me to the fact that Riak had indeed pulled a 90 minute shift for South Sudan against Mali that morning our time. Blame the club if you must (though some of you don't need prodding on that front) for putting Harrison Sawyer's professional career prospects ahead of the club's immediate goals during last year's finals series. But this time they were stuck - international football takes precedence over club football, and had the club kicked up a stink, South Sudan could have easily barred Riak from playing for us anyway. Who knows if Ajak even asked South Sudan if he could sit this game out to play in the final. Others are suggesting he didn't even inform the club that he was leaving to play in that game against Mali.

At any rate, much as I had us pegged as the underdogs anyway, I thought we were in deep trouble once I learned that news. Say what you will about Ajak as a forward, but he caused Avondale some problems this year, especially in the game at Lakeside. Without him we would have to put in Luka Ninkovic; not quite fit enough, and not quite up to Riak's standard, but at least he was a striker. Last year we had no back-up strikers at all, and resorted to playing an unfit and disinterested Jai Ingham. This year we did have a striker, also unfit, but surely better than the alternatives? But we put together a makeshift forward line made up of midfielders instead. And yet despite this could have had a couple of goals within the first twenty minutes. And then things started falling apart, and once more having the best goalkeeper in the league only meant keeping the score to single digits, rather than getting close.

Copping the first goal didn't help, and neither did copping the second, You're all of a sudden chasing the game, and we are not a good chasing the game team. But the signs were there of a pending defeat, if you looked closely enough. Even before the talent and personnel differences became clear, you could see that we were being outdone tactically. We had no overlapping fullback play. We had no answer and seemingly made no adjustment to Yusef Ahmed dropping from his striker's role into the gap between the midfield and forward lines. The hit and hope tactic which worked well against a shaky Oakleigh defence the week before was not so good this time around without anyone to make a nuisance of themselves the way that Riak did.

But the thing which annoys me most, even now, a week and a bit later, is the difference in method. Avondale moved the ball beautifully, switching play, getting up the field, every chance they created looking like it was planned. For us, though we created chances and squandered so many - unusually so, given our outsized efficiency the past couple of seasons - so much of what we produced still looked dependent on where the ball would fall, and not what we were doing with it. We had a go, but were outplayed by the best team in the league. Sure we were the only team to beat them in the league this year, but when push came to shove, we clearly weren't good enough to hope for anything more than a bit of luck on the day to get a positive result.

Maybe that's a tad pessimistic for a team which finished second, with only four league losses. But the signs were there at different times during the season, and none more so then on the league awards night when our best players (as decided by non-South people) were our keeper and one of our central defenders. We've won titles in this competition with far worse goalkeepers and even worse defences, because we had midfields and attacks that could hold their own, that other teams were wary of. That might just be me being wistful, and forgetting some of the crappier times. 

If the manner of the defeat on the field was fitting and familiar in its own right, so too was its setting - a perfect pitch surrounded by neglect. Rust, cigarette smoke, and more pigeon shit in that grandstand than the stairs leading into Sunshine station - and even Sunshine station has cleaned up some of that bird mess in recent weeks. Unless you happened to be one of those people fortunate enough to be on green grass, Olympic Village was barely fit for human habitation. Oh, it was nice to be allowed into the ground via the gate on Southern Road instead of having to walk all the way around to the Catalina Street entrance, but could people have at least cleaned up the broken glass?

And then, because this is soccer, and because this is soccer in Victoria, multiple people decided to be stupid and/or incompetent. Having doubled their lead, Avondale's players decided to celebrate in front of the stand with all the South fans; they did this despite having considerable support of their own at the ground, including within the vicinity of the goal. Of course a couple of South fans then thought that something should be done about this affront to common decency by confronting those Avondale players, which only made things worse.

At half time, one of our supporter marshals, alert to the possibility of more stupidity, told the hired security that it would not be a good idea to let the Avondale supporters behind the goals walk in front of the grandstand lest more nonsense ensue; so security, instead of telling those guys behind the goal to go around the ground the other way, gave them an escort in front of the stand instead. Cue a small brawl which I still cannot believe did not blow up into something much worse.

By the end of the game, my faith in the club, local soccer, and humanity as a whole was pretty drained. I go to South games to support my team, watch it play some attacking soccer, get some good results, and have a laugh with some people to break up the monotony of my otherwise humdrum existence. What happens when there's no joy on the field or on the terrace? You end up copping it both ways, and start looking forward to the off-season instead of dreading it. It's been nearly twenty years since we were where we were, and even with the NSD being nominally around the corner, it still feels like we're as far away as ever from being in a better place. Deserved or not, probably delusional, but back then it felt like we were halfway to putting some distance between ourselves and the scene we'd grown up in. Now we're stuck in it more than ever.

Next game
Who knows when, where, and perhaps just as importantly, in what competition this will be.

On the other hand
The senior women were very good value for their grand final win. Not perfect, maybe a touch fortunate, but deserved winners nevertheless of their grand final. Most satisfying, is that they did it while playing a pleasing brand of soccer. A bit too counter-attack dependent for my taste, but it was ball on the ground, fluid passing oriented play that made me happy, not just for the result, but also for its method. As successful as our previous championship winning teams were, they also had more than a whiff of brute force about them: an overpowered team, and the get out of jail strength and power of players like Melina Ayers and Lisa De Vanna; from design to implementation, it lacked a certain subtlety.

(to a degree, they were kind of like the senior men's teams of the same time; get the best players, put them in their right spots, and storm over your opposition).

It's a long trek by bus (or tram) to the new Home of the Matildas. I did it by bus from the city, after a brief stop to try and find confirmation of something from early 1990 in the Athletic Echo. I didn't find it. But the Home of the Matildas! It's quite nice, actually. The lighting could be better. They could put more bins out around the place - it's a bit Southern Cross station in that regard. And I didn't go up into the stand to watch the game (because of... reasons), but otherwise what a great little venue. Huge scoreboard, good surface.

Scoring two goals direct from corners helped a lot, even if one of those was a cock-up by the Bulleen goalkeeper. Still, our keeper stuffed up late in the game too, so pretend that it was 3-1 instead of 4-2. Really happy for everyone involved with the women's program, because it's been a rough few years. I didn't watch as many games as I would have liked to this year, and there were times when we were hard to watch. But when it all came together, and when we didn't play against nemesis Calder, it was pleasing to see that an attacking ethos could pay off.

In the mean time
State team football returns this Saturday at the Home of the Matildas, with Victoria taking on Queensland in men's and women's matches. Four of our senior men's players Javi Lopez, Marco Jankovic, Brad Norton, and Patrick Langlois have been selected in the Victorian squad. I might go. 

Brad Norton testimonial, when?
There was some talk of this early in the year. Is it going to happen? I know it needs someone to organise it and round up people. Hope we can do something, not just to celebrate Brad, but also to have a gathering at our club that ordinary punters can attend, something that isn't just about the sponsors.

Final thought
Don't expect much action here during the off-season. I'll hand out some awards at some point and comment on news if there is any, but otherwise I'll be working on some side-projects. 

Grand finals galore!

Let's get the important stuff out of the way first.

Next games
Four grand finals this week, in the following order:

Saturday, September 9th, at the Home of the Matildas

• Under 21 men, vs Port Melbourne, 3pm (Pitch 5)
• Under 19 women, vs Heidelberg United, 4pm (Main Pitch)
• Senior women, vs Bulleen Lions, 7:30 pm (Main Pitch)

Sunday, September 10th, at Olympic Village

• Senior men, vs Avondale, 3:00pm

Ticketing
Home of the Matildas matches 

• Free entry
  

Olympic Village match

• Adults, $20
• Concession, $15 
• Kids 14 and under, free
  

Tickets available for pre-purchase at this link.

Back in the big dance - South Melbourne 2 Oakleigh Cannons 1
The size of the crowd will never aain be as big as you'd like it to be. It doesn't matter whether there is or isn't footy on at the same time, or what day it is, or what the weather's like. We have atrophied, and those who are left have aged. But for those atrophied aged there were still nerves and anticipation, and it still mattered.

It's not like we haven't beaten Oakleigh in recent times, but some of those wins have been ugly as sin. Sometimes that's been out of necessity - half a team out earlier this year for the smash and grab, for example. But sometimes it's just a feature of the way we currently play. It is what it is, some like it, some don't, but for the time being I guess we've just got to support the method that has got us this far for the second year running.

Think of everything that has happened to South on the field this season, and this game was it in condensed form. Extended pressure from long throws and corners? Grabbing the lead and then being able to play on the counter? Midfield disappearing for a huge stretch of the game? Our formerly best player (see below) Max Mikkola getting a yellow card and then becoming a potential liability? It was all there.

But again, I refer back to the old maxim: when you do good, I use the green pen; when you do bad, I use the red pen. In this game, I can say that we did most things right, and enough things wrong that the only thing I'm surprised by is that we managed to get the job done in normal time. The good included probably the best round of team selection so far this season, which unfortunately for Morgan Evans meant a third consecutive game out of the match day squad. It also meant Lirim Elmazi on the bench which, considering that Chris Taylor clearly likes his side to attack him, made sense.

I am sometimes critical, more often merely bemused by Esteban Quintas' team selections, but as far as last Friday went, I have no gripes. Neither do I have gripes with the subs that he made, as compared to Chris Taylor who made no subs. It just might have been the thing that got us over the line in the end. That, and not falling behind. It's hard to think that we would have been well equipped to overcome a deficit had we trailed at any point. I'm negative like that, yes. but thank goodness for the early lead.

Prior to this match, we had not score more than one goal in a match against Oakleigh in 15 matches, going all the way back to the 2016 grand final (and we know who scored a double for us in that game). That's a horrendous record, and what's worse, is that in a lot of those matches we struggled to even get that one goal. This time though, we were on the front foot, and we squandered several chances. Layoffs not given, shots going high that should have gone low to exploit an injured keeper's restricted mobility. 

Oh, and Pat Langlois' missed header early in the second half to make it 2-0 from very close in. It was bread and butter stuff for Pat, the kind of goal he specialises in - a free kick sent in, and him running in unmarked, and making good contact. Alas it didn't go in, and that was kind of the turning point for me. Our midfield got tired, and our mentality of sitting back and giving up too much territory made us vulnerable.

The best set piece team in the league scored from a set piece, and things looked bad. But then Marcus Schroen did what I've been waiting eight years for him to do - hit a sweet left volley from distance - and he made everything OK. Marcus continues to be an enigma. Been around a long time, sometimes does very good things in short bursts, and then vanishes for a while. Injuries over the journey haven't helped, but this year... I think he's been better than I've seen him for a long time. Not just with the ball, but also without it, showing a bit more leadership.

He seems to have a thing for playing against Oakleigh, a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. Even when it doesn't work out, he seems to put in a little extra effort. Seems to happen against Altona Magic and Avondale, too, so here's hoping he's got something special in store for tomorrow. It's been a long journey - two appearances for us as a 17 year old in 2010, a few years away, then back with us and the 2016 grand final brace, and then the injuries and coaching turmoil. But all I ask from him, and from everyone else out there for us tomorrow, is one more effort, one more upset.

On the streams
Who's next?
Got caught out by the fact that the Avondale vs Knights match started at 2:30 and not at 3:00. Oh, well. I still caught the last hour or so of this meh game. Maybe they did some stuff in that first half hour that was worthwhile, but in the last hour Knights didn't do too much. In the second half Avondale started opening them up like they did to us a few weeks back, but failed to make the most of it. Then the Knights gifted the home side the winning goal, in the way that's become a cliche for them in 2023, playing out the back at all times, regardless of the situation. There's such a thing as picking your battles, and your moments. 

Junior soccer is not real soccer, and yet
On the train on the way to the city, I chucked it on our under 21 boys (men?) against Oakleigh, and found that I'd missed most of the good stuff. 3-3, two injury times goals, a red card. Yet when I tuned in, it was only to see a very tepid, tired extra time period. But our boys (men?) came good in the penalty shoot out, so like their under 19 girls (women?) counterparts, they're through to their grand final on Saturday.

Senior women also into the big one - Boroondara Eagles 1 South Melbourne 2

While we're on the topic of pedestrianism and walkable cities, Saturday was the first time since the pandemic started that I visited the Veneto Club in Bulleen for a soccer match. In the past it was always a bit of a hassle walking from the Sandra St bus stop just off the freeway to the venue because there's no footpath, no safe crossing point near the venue, and no pedestrian access into the car park area itself.

And because I live in the west and rarely visit the north-east, I didn't know about all the roadworks and blocked paths, so I was climbing over and around things and hoping that cars wouldn't veer into the sometimes closed/sometimes not closed bike lane in the dark. Then there's the need to enter the complex via the car park itself to get to the stadium. Made me realise that unless you drive or you're a passenger in a car, you cannot be a member of the Bulleen Lions soccer club, unless there's some kind of riverside access I'm not aware of.

Someone was kind enough to give me a lift to Heidelberg station after that match so that I didn't have to go through all that on the way back to the bus stop on the freeway. Not sure that I'm young and dumb enough anymore to take public transport to the Veneto Club ever again.

Anyway, it was great to see the women play well enough to win, especially as our nemesis Calder was knocked out earlier in the day. That's not to say that minor premier Bulleen will be easy, but I know who I'd rather play against just for the sense of knowing that even if we threw everything we had at Calder, fate would prevent us from winning. 

Well, blow me down with a feather
Having fully embraced the decrepit geriatric stage of my life, I fell asleep on the couch at about 9:00pm on Tuesday, woke up in a daze two hours later, and checked my phone to see whether the world had ended during that time. As it turns out, it almost had! Our very own Jake Marshall had been awarded the Gold Medal for Victoria's player of the year. A defender winning the Gold Medal, and a central defender at that! What is this, the early to mid-2000s? Anyway, Jake's win makes him the third South Melbourne senior men's player to win the award, following in the footsteps of Fernando De Moraes (2010) and Milos Lujic (2014).

Much less surprising was the winner of the competition's goalkeeper of the year prize, which went to Javier Diaz Lopez for the second season in a row. He joins Dean Anastasiadis (2005 and 2006) as a two-time winner of the award while at South. Some might say having the best goalkeeper in the league in the same team as the league's best and fairest in the form of a centre-back says something quite obvious about the aesthetic qualities of your team. I could not possibly comment on that.

Me, I'd rather know who Esteban Quintas voted for in the coach of the year award, which was split between Avondale's Zoran Markovski, and Melbourne Knights' Ben Cahn. I don't need to know, mind you, and what with it likely being a confidential affair, that's fine. Just curious of course.

Final thought

It used to be that you would get the news about a Football Victoria CEO, president, or general manager resigning from soccer-forum.net - the fact that I didn't probably means we should just shut it down, put it out of its misery.