No respect, and no regard neither - South Melbourne 0 St Albans 3

That's right, Google Maps app, What
 happened on Monday night between
 7:23 and 9:31 is a mystery.

Just a short piece this week.

Well, last Monday was just outright disrespect. Disrespect to South Melbourne Hellas fans. Disrespect to the St Albans Dinamo team. Six or seven changes to the starting eleven coming off a week's rest, just because we have a game on the Friday coming up. Are they so worried about fitness levels by round four? What happens when the cup rounds start? Maybe we'll tank them like we did the Avondale cup match a few seasons ago.

Anyway, the depth on show was shallow. Tactics, all over the place. Javi Lopez went down for real this time, I think. You can call me Nostra-blogger-damus, but it was a simple game of mathematics - it couldn't always be playing possum. At least the flood lights seemed a bit better this week, so we could better see the carnage. Even the security dude wouldn't do us a favour and turf us out as a gesture of mercy. Oh well, at least when we win the title this year, we can look back at this game and laugh. 

Next game
Preston away. For ticket details, visit Preston's socials. There's also going to be shuttle buses and such. Again, check Preston's Facebook page for all relevant details.

- Dad, how can South Melbourne 
afford to play in all these leagues?
- It's simple economics son. I don't
 understand it, but God, I love it.
- 

South Melbourne Hellas, coming to A-League a league near you!
So I'd heard of this OFC Pro-League business last year, but didn't give it much thought then. Didn't need to, really. That's in Oceania, we're in Asia, and we're building towards the National Second Division which has imaginatively been named the Australian Championship. Then news articles came out saying that four Australian clubs had shown an interest in joining the OFC Pro-League. Now, I know what you're thinking folks: yes, South Melbourne has no shame, but surely even South Melbourne would not put its name down for this. Yeah, right. Bang, there's South Melbourne as the most prominent of the four Australian clubs looking to get into this thing. Maybe we want to be a barnstorming team? Maybe we missed the frogs invading the field in Fiji like back in 1999? Maybe we like the vibe of being a decrepit old man desperately trying to get into a nightclub; any nightclub will do. I don't know. I suppose the board will tell us all about it at the next AGM, scheduled for whenever.

More match programs added
I bought a few items towards the end of last year, and I've finally got around to uploading them. They're all from away games, which is a touch disappointing. I know that people have stuff that I'm missing, and I am still on the lookout for more programs. Anyway, here's what I've added most recently:

• 1984, round 3, away to Canberra City (the original fixture that was called off due to inclement weather, not the replay)
• 1985, round 22, away to West Adelaide
• 1988, round 17, away to Marconi
• 1989/90, round 8 away to Marconi
• 1989/90, round 16 away to Adelaide City
• 1990/91, round 25, away to Marconi
• 1991/92, round 22, away to Brisbane United
• 1995/96, round 32, away to Brisbane Strikers
• 2000/01, round 21, away to Brisbane Strikers 
  

Find them all in the usual place. For a much neater list (also with links), as well as notes establishing what programs we have, what programs we don't, and what programs may or may not exist. go to this link.

DIY zine scene hits Lakeside
While leaving the grandstand after the final whistle on Monday night, someone stuck a little zine thing in my hand. Blue and White Views, of which you can see the cover of the first issue to the right, isn't quite yet a revelatory or inflammatory piece of work. Who knows if it can become that, or even if it desires to, not that it has to. Frankly, and this is not being cruel, in case anyone misreads my tone, the most interesting thing to me from this so far - apart from its circa 1987 Hellas match program colour scheme - is its utter mystery. Who's producing this? Why are there no contact details? How can I (or you!) submit something to this project? It's all very myserious. Will it last longer than the genuinely incendiary Maverick from 1997? All they need to do is release one more issue.

Around the grounds
Actually, why am I here?
For the second time in five years (and for the second time in two weeks, but let's not get bogged down in details about why I went to Paisley Park the previous week), I was at an Altona East game. This time it was for a Dockerty Cup (you're welcome) fixture between Altona East and Hampton East Brighton, aka a team with a number of name changes over the past decade or so, and recently about five consecutive promotions under its belt. Mario Barcia was out there for Altona East. You may remember him from such moments as the worst thirty seconds of football you've ever seen, capped off by some nonsense goal from halfway. Nothing quite as interesting (or deplorable) happened in this match, which finished 2-1 to the visiting side. 

Final thought
- Sarge, let's make a break for it while the guards are partying with Jane Fonda.
- Nope. Too dangerous. We're all gonna sit tight and reminisce about candy bars.

Feeling old - Melbourne Victory (NPL) 3 South Melbourne 3

Let us start with the obvious.

The ref made a dreadful call when he ruled that Andy Brennan dived. Just awful. Apart from the fact that it should have been a penalty, Andy getting that bullshit yellow card meant he was handicapped for the rest of the night through no fault of his own.

Other than that, the game didn't contain that many surprises. That's now six of our seven goals this season from throw ins or corners. There was the obligatory Javi Lopez mid-game faux injury scare (which will one day be a real injury) in order for Esteban Quintas to regroup and reorganise. There was also the familiar sight of looking vulnerable against a proper ball playing team. And so what if the Victory lads train regularly? So do our players. So do Avondale's. So Oakleigh's. So do the players from the team that will get relegated. But it's a matter of emphasis, isn't it? Some teams choose to play a certain way, and some choose another. Victory's kids looked good, albeit they flirted with danger at the back a bit too much. If I still cared about the current or future success any of our national teams, or national team football in general, I'd be hopeful for the future of Australian soccer; but I don't, so I won't.

I saw some angst about the result, as well as attempts to make it seem like another South Melbourne humiliation. "How could we not beat a team of children?". Well, first, a good chunk of Victory's NPL players, while young, are not really children. Remember that saying that "good enough equals old enough"? Later in the season, when the older part of this cohort gets a mandatory rest and/or released from their program, the age profile of their squad will get younger, but for now, it's not like they're a bunch of 16 year olds running around like most NPL under 23 teams are.

Second, this team, or a variation thereof, finished in first place last season in VPL1 in getting promoted, ahead of the big spending Preston. Western United's equivalent team finished third, missing promotion by a point. Melbourne City's youth team finished fifth. Sure, VPL1 is not the NPL, but that still indicates a contemporary degree of strength and competence in Melbourne A-League youth squads. "But Paul, we've made three grand finals in a row, surely we should still be putting a team like this away?" Maybe. But we struggled to put Victory's NPL team away in our first and second meetings in 2016, when we had - with all due respect to the class of 2025 and its Quintas kin - a much better team.

(and what a time capsule this is in so many ways - the comments section certainly took a turn)

And have we forgotten, too, that we have lost matches to the Australian Institute of Sport and the Victorian Training Centre over this extended exile from national league football? That we have lost three times in the Dockerty Cup to teams in a lower division? A draw against a team which has shown itself to be more than competitive so far this season is hardly the disaster it appears to be on the surface. For the misery guts out there, I suppose the worry is that we have what looks like a fairly soft start to the season - Port, Knights, Victory, Dinamo, all sides unlikely to feature in the finals - so maybe a dropped point could be important at the pointy end of the season. 

The one surprise was the continued trajectory of the Danish guy moving from being this blog's designated punching bag for 2025, to somewhere closer to being the white Kevin Nelson. So far it's three appearances, about 45 minutes of game time all up, and two clutch goals. 

Anyway, enough of the on field stuff. Nine years on from this nonsense, and I have probably never felt older as a South fan. That's figuratively speaking, of course, because obviously every day is literally the oldest I've ever been as a South fan. But in terms of feeling it? That comes and goes. Monday night was a watershed though, not for feeling depressed old, but for feeling bemused old. How did we end up here? Why are we still here? What's with all the young people and their wild antics and foul language? And why is the opposition goalkeeper making obscene gestures towards us when we haven't said a word to him all night? Where are his manners? That kid needs a good dose of National Service.

On this school night, out in close enough to the middle of nowhere, a dozen or so people - what's a good old man word for them  - louts, perhaps? - continued to attempt to hold Australian soccer hostage, or at least the Melbourne part thereof. Anyway, it was anticipated by everyone, and nothing particularly shocking happened, just words, but the fact that there was crowd segregation on the night because of twelve or so people is just nuts. And what words were they? Well, I couldn't work out most of what was being said towards our group in the second half, which elicited repeated calls of "what?" from our people; not necessarily as an attempt at goading them (because that would be stupid), but genuinely because we couldn't actually make out most of what they were saying. 

Have the old men of Clarendon Corner aged enough to go deaf, perhaps? Let's not rule that out. Of what little could be made out, there were some insults directed to us in Greek, which of course our non-Greek people could not understand. They also called us Turks, which was amusing in part because their side is sponsored by Turkish Airlines. And they called one of our people an "old man" which, to be fair, wasn't that far off the mark.

Maybe the relevant people view this as an accomplishment, and maybe it is an accomplishment of sorts - after all, their desire for danger and infamy is being catered to - but what's the end game here? It all seems rather nihilistic, and that's me saying that as someone following a club that's been spinning its irrelevant wheels at an exponential rate for twenty years now. I guess it's the difference between getting on adolescent Daria-esque nihilism, as opposed to a nihilism that's more physically and emotionally visceral; kind of like those Knights fans who, as they were walking through the Lakeside car park the other week after our match, were reminiscing about their old days of causing violent chaos.

Next game
St Albans at home on Monday night. Will it be as exciting as last Monday's game? I doubt it, but you never know.

Final thought

- You? You were asked to join the South committee?
- Sure. You never have?