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?