Prior to kickoff on Friday night, an adolescent Preston supporter, who found himself by some clerical error in the part of BT Connor Reserve allocated to South Melbourne fans, complained as he made his way around to the area designated for Preston supporters, "why was I directed to go to the South end, do I look like a Turk?".
The National Soccer League is dead. Long live the National Soccer League. Long live dubious crowd numbers. Long live cigarette smoke. Long live ethnic bullshit. I'll leave out my usual take on flares, because at least unlike last year's Dockerty Cup match between the two sides, the flares lit on Friday night didn't end up being thrown at anyone. Call it progress of a sort, at least on this occasion.
Anyway, for all that Preston has managed to achieve during its unlikely resurrection - and it has been some feat to buck the trend suffered by pretty much every ethnic soccer club in this country - some habits die hard. If that "Ellas, Ellas, Turkiye" chant happened once or twice early on, and was then stopped by their marshals, I'd understand - it's just a bunch of hotheads getting carried away, but someone from their side took responsibility for it. But it was non-stop throughout the game, and everyone's just ignoring it because it was part of "a cracking atmosphere".
It's not about being offended (because it's a chant that's too stupid to be offended by), or being humourless (I was dead inside long before this), or being unable to handle banter (there's no cleverness here). It's acknowledging that this stuff did drag down what came before, and that people ignoring it, or not acknowledging that it's happening and burying it under the guise of "atmosphere", do a disservice to the game in the here and now, as did those who excused this stuff before.
It's also not about ignoring the past, or pretending that we're all friends now, because we aren't. Some people are willing to buy into that part of the current story, because they think there's some greater good to be achieved by that. Some people in the ground are choosing not to pretend, not to hide what's in their hearts. That's their prerogative, of course. But then maybe in the return fixture, some people from our side will choose not to pretend, and what should or could be pantomime rivalry, hostile, but within the bounds of good taste and decency, instead becomes... well, you know the history. It's in print, it's on video, and it's in folklore.
I don't really care much for either pretending we're all mates, or in getting carried away by thinking that when I attend a South Melbourne Hellas match in Australia, that I'm responsible for bringing with me the badly framed and badly taught history lessons I received at Greek school 30 years ago, excised of all complexity and nuance. I want to go to a game, have a laugh, and hopefully see my team win. But I get that that approach isn't enough for some people.
It's the age old problem of big time soccer in this country, ethnic or otherwise, that people are drawn to these games because they can get close enough to the possibility of something going wrong, potentially spectacularly so. Now most don't necessarily want something to actually go wrong, but some clearly yearn for it to at least be a possibility - if something couldn't go wrong at a fixture like this, then the kayfabe spell is broken. If all that hate isn't actually real, then it becomes just another game, like all the other games.
But for the sake of a feel good story, and especially for the sake of the Australian Championship, and for some, sticking it up the A-League, the narrative will be "passionate fans, great crowd". And yes, the fans were passionate, and the crowd was good, but that 9,000 figure... I'm not the only one querying that one. And this is where the suspect crowd figures of the past come back to cast doubts on the reliability of today's numbers.
BT Connor Reserve has a smallish stand (nowhere near the capacity of Lakeside's southern stand, let alone that of Knights Stadium's much larger one). It also has no terraces, and on Friday night a western wing almost completely out of bounds. And the ground has no history of getting a crowd that size during the heady days of the early 1990s summer NSL years. And yet we are expected to believe that, were all parts of the ground available to spectators, that this venue could accommodate up to 13,000 - just under what the old pre-athletics Lakeside could squish in.
Goodness knows that South has an appalling reputation for rubbery crowd figures, and that's long before some people made it a social media sport. So why begrudge other clubs from getting in on the act? Why assume the worst of others, just because you assume the worst of yourself? I suppose that's the overall point for me - that whatever hope I have that things could be better, and could actually get better for us, I ultimately have no belief that they will - and especially not if I don't feel like I can trust even a fundamental element of soccer story telling, like "for better or worse, this is how many people were actually there that day".
It'd be easy to accuse someone like me of actually wanting the game to be smaller, and even for South to be small. Small fish, small pond, small problems, small headaches. But that's not the case at all. I want the club to be successful on and off the field. I want more people to come watch our club, and to support it. And somehow I want it done with honesty, and without giving in to crass attempts at public relations. I guess this is just one of the many reasons why I'll never be close to anything resembling a place of responsibility at a club.
As for the game
The high press from the first three matches of the season is gone. Thus against Preston it was more of what we've come to know and love over these past five years or so, except without Javi Lopez and Harry Sawyer (or Ajak Riak) to make it somehow work. It continues to be the case that those who see us play only occasionally and almost exclusively during so-called "big matches" were, and continue to be, surprised by the ugliness of it. The two or three hundred regulars, well, they aren't surprised at all.
Quite what was the point of resting all the players on Monday, we'll never know. The one player who probably should have been rested (Javi Lopez), wasn't. Now, barring some luck at the tribunal, or Javi recovering in time for Saturday's match, we're down to our third choice goalkeeper, and therefore on the bench, our fourth. Nahuel Bonada getting injured means we're down to one striker, that being the Danish guy who, while he isn't fit enough, is also apparently not worth putting on to try and rescue a game at 1-0 down, only at 2-0, even though two of his substitute appearances have yielded goals this year.
The field at BT Connor Reserve is very wide. We knew this from last year, when Max Mikkola's long throws weren't getting close to troubling the keeper. So what did we do on Friday? The same thing as last year, of course. To be fair, it's pretty much the same thing as every other game anyway. If it worked at all in last year's fixture, it's because of the same reason it works in any game - the opposition is ill-equipped to deal with anything coming in from the air, not just throws. That was certainly the case in last year's match, but not so much on Friday.
I'm not sure what the alternative was, because given our general lack of composure on the ball, once we went down, all we could resort to was knocking it forward chaotically, thus creating a series of 50/50 balls to be won, which some basic mathematical principle says will work eventually, while at the same time acknowledging that it will hardly ever work, especially once you're down to ten men. It was not a great experience for player or fan.
Next game
Dandenong Thunder away on Saturday night. Please note that due to the very hot conditions forecast for Saturday, kickoff has been changed from 7:00pm to 8:15pm.
Vale George Karantonis
The club lost of one its staunchest supporters this week, with the death of George Karantonis. A reserves player in the 1960s, a volunteer of many years, and a long time presence in local Greek language media, especially in radio, George was a big personality with strong opinions on all things soccer, and especially all things South Melbourne Hellas. I'm not going to lie and say that I had much to do with George, because I wasn't a listener to his radio programs, nor did I really run in the same circles as him at South. But I always appreciated his forthrightness, especially his contributions at AGMs.
In particular, I'll never forget that AGM around 2008. We'd just had a second lousy season in a row, the club was going nowhere, and George gets up midway through the meeting and heads towards the exit of the old social club, and everyone's just quiet... like, fuck, if Karantoni's giving up, then the club really is fucked... only for him to say in his unforgettable voice of a million cigarettes, "I just go for a smoke". The tension in the room just disappeared. He will be missed.
Those of you who ended up paying to go to Friday's match may have noticed that the ticket price was $20, not the more usual $15. That seems to be your unofficial notice that the price cap for NPL Victoria matches has gone up. It almost makes a certain someone want to put in more effort into this blog, so that they can qualify for a media pass again. For others, it might dissuade them from going to away matches, especially at venues lacking certain amenities like adequate shelter and seating. Some people might decide to go the footy instead. On the other hand, it just made buying a South Melbourne membership that little bit more value for money. Only on a cost per game basis, of course, not in terms of entertainment.
Ange and the Boss national release
After a successful festival run in the back half of 2024, the documentary is now going to have a short national run. Tickets and further details available
via the website.
Final thought
How did learnings become a thing? Whatever happened to lessons? And I don't care that Shakespeare used "learnings", because none of the LinkedIn Lunatics using that word have read any Shakespeare since high school.
