Another sunny day - Eastern Lions 0 South Melbourne 3

Turning up to Gardiners Creek Reserve for the first time since I went to watch Eastern Lions vs Mornington eleven years ago (also a Football Chaos match!), I was expecting not quite the worst, but rather, who knows what. It'd been a hell of a week. It'd been a hell of an eight weeks. Reports from both sides of the ledger last Saturday was that Eastern Lions had three or four of their better players out. Goodness knows why. When we were drawn against each other, they were winless. After a coaching change, they'd picked up a couple of wins. For us, there was no Nahuel Bonada nor Max Mikkola, apparently due to injuries, though I did spot the latter among the onlookers.

You don't often see the club's official Facebook
 account reply directly to our supporters.

Also among the onlookers was Oakleigh Cannons general manager and occasional unlicenced doctor, Aki Ionnas. There was also one George Katsakis, which given the rumours going around about him being a possible candidate for our vacant senior men's coaching job, got tongues wagging. Nevertheless, Occam's Razor suggests that his primary reason for being there was in his capacity as Bentleigh Greens coach, as the Greens were due to play the winner of Saturday's match after having beaten George Cross 3-2 earlier in the week. The secondary reason would have been that Katsakis gets to a lot of games anyway, albeit probably not so many outside the Greek community club scene.

Still, people like to talk, and there's much to talk about. For what it's worth, all that I was able to glean from the more vaguely reputable people I spoke to was that no decision had been made at the time; and, as it turns out, no decision has been made publicly by the time I posted this blog up. I'd also heard from someone else that Goran Lozanovski had been asked to indicate his interest, but he had declined. Harder to verify that in any way, but it's probably legit. 

As for the match itself, there really isn't much that can be said. We did not look utterly transformed, in the sense that we had rediscovered some old mojo. We were, nevertheless, the better team throughout the game, and at least looked up for the battle from the start. George Mells, Esteban Quintas' chief whipping boy this season, got a start and made his mark. An early goal settled whatever nerves there might have been, for me for no other reason than it looked like a normal goal - a turnover, a couple of nice passes, and a finish from the six yard box. Hardly revelatory stuff, unless you've been South Melbourne in 2025, where even by our set piece dependant standards of the past few seasons, we'd barely scored any goals from alternative outlets this year. 

Then the second goal, a square ball across the backline to no one, not centre back nor goalkeeper, and Rob Harding bagged his second after the goalkeeper's initial save of an earlier shot. Lions had put some balls into our box, but there was nothing particularly threatening about most of them. The second half was messier. harder to watch all round. An Andy Brennan shot hit the crossbar, came down, was cleared away and was then called a goal by the linesman. I'm not sure said linesman was in the best position to make that call, and neither the Eastern Lions bench, who were in even worse position, let alone the South fans behind that goal, seemed convinced that it had crossed the line. So it goes. Subs were made, and I assume we came through largely unscathed injury wise. Pleasant day out, but nothing to get too excited about, even if the ball was on the ground a lot more than we've become accustomed to.

Next game
Away to Green Gully on Friday night. It's going to be wet, Leigh and Tyson are still going to be coaching, and there's going to be fifteen million other games on at the same time. I just hope that Gully still do match programs.

How the other half live / If you know your history
While we're on the subject. I don't normally take much of an interest in matters A-League, but I do occasionally take a perverse interest in some of the off-field stuff that goes on there when it intrudes on my social media feeds. Recently there's been some stuff about Football Australia and Melbourne Victory banning certain individuals from the Melbourne Victory's North Terrace supporter group, which of course elicited another infamous supporter group press release missive. So far, no normal.

But while rubbernecking through the responses to a recent missive on the subject on the NT's Facebook page, I did come across this curious response

After initial situation of getting my hackles all ruffled had fizzled out, the comments struck me as missing the point. Northern Terrace, the biggest organised supporter group in Australian soccer history, being compared to the remnants (with the recent exception of Preston) of suburban soccer supporter groups on life support, is just wild. And Thunder and its fans not being punished? Thunder was mauled by Football Federation Victoria following the 2012 grand final which included the infamous rocket flare.

But more to the point - when was the last time a flare was actually lit at a South game by South fans? Not that I've been keeping a tally of such things on a spreadsheet anywhere (I only recently made a spreadsheet to keep tabs on my work from days and expenses for tax purposes), but the last flare lit by someone who was nominally a South fan that I can remember would have been ten years ago, when we played Heidelberg at Lakeside. That night also included an attempt by persons affiliated with the flare lighters (or possibly even just the same person) attempting to steal a Heidelberg banner. The result of those shenanigans? That person, and perhaps a few others, were banned by South Melbourne, A year later, the main person banned from that 2015 game turned up at Lakeside supporting Victory's NPL team against us, and being subsequently banned by Football Victoria for his part in the violence perpetrated by that group of Victory fans that attacked South supporters. On December 17th, 2022, said fan became Bucket Man. 

I suppose the main point of the condensed history above here is that, well, actually, South Melbourne has banned people for pyro and related shenanigans. Does banning people from attending your games stop them from doing stupid shit? There's never any guarantees on that. But can a club, by enforcement of said bans, at least make it so that when those people are moved on, they are at least no longer your problem? Definitely, at least to some degree. Naturally it's much easier to do this at a club which has not many fans to begin with than it is for one with over ten thousand most weeks. But if you're going to turn this into an old soccer/new football comparison (yawn), we should at least get the details right.

But again, to be clear - people like this have been a problem in Australian soccer for decades. They've been at turns banned and appeased, castigated and then used in promotional campaigns. They can spring up  anywhere, any time (good chance someone will pop up at South vs Preston that we don't and will never see again after that), and it's usually a matter of one of two outcomes - either they quickly get bored quickly of whatever club or scene they've attached themselves to, or they hang around long enough to eventually force someone's hand because one of them has cross some critical line of the law or good taste. Then it's up to not just governing bodies, or the clubs to deal with the issue, but also the fans nearest to them. It really has to be all three, and from the latter, that means a wholesale form of social ostracism. Unfortunately, history suggests that last aspect is the hardest to achieve, because there's usually enough of a rump within the relevant supporter base which tolerates or sympathises enough with the transgressive supporters, that the combined efforts of everyone else to get rid of these people just can't take hold.

Final thought
Being driven home from the game last week, and I've got my glasses off and just doomscrolling on my phone, when my driver, who has stopped at the lights at some intersection just outside the southern part of the CBD says "what the fuck", and I look up and there's some chick in hot pants on the pedestrian crossing juggling three balls. It takes all kinds, I guess.

Now what? - South Melbourne 0 Heidelberg United 3

Well, that was one of the more dispiriting things that I've seen as a South fan. Apart from a 15 minute period in the first half where we at least got the ball up field and won a few set pieces, last Sunday was disastrous. For the vast majority of the match, we could not get the ball; in the second half, we could barely get over the half way line. Heidelberg were able to zip from one end of the field to the other with ease. Quite how it was 0-0 at halftime is anyone's guess. We were clapping the team just for winning a corner; meanwhile the Berger fans were disappointed that they weren't putting away clear one-on-one chances. That's where it's at now - looking like a team one or two divisions below where we actually are.

Once the first goal went in - via a deflection, but that piece of luck for the Bergers only made up for the lack of it earlier on - the team capitulated. Most worryingly, it capitulated psychologically. Those players on the field lost all hope and desire, becoming training cones, mere cannon fodder. Those who were benched were furious - at themselves, at the coach, at the entire situation. The star recruit was brought on, but he must be living hell on earth. The only real striker we have left was brought on, but he's hurt, and what's he supposed to do in a one against five situation anyway?

And at the end of it all, there was the coach making the call that his time was up. All that we could infer watching on from the stand, as Esteban Quintas gathered the players around him for a brief chat, and then acknowledging the crowd on his way out, was that he had made the call himself to step down. Somehow, for those of us who have wanted to see the back of him for some time, it was the final indignity - that Quintas had more sense that his time was up and was willing to fall on his own sword, than those at the club who had decided to keep Quintas on seemingly indefinitely.

It was such a soul-sucking experience that you wonder what the plan was for this year? Go cheap as hell for the NPL, and bank it all on the Australian Championship being a success? I've never been a fan of Esteban Quintas, but how did we end up making our off-season recruiting the equivalent of a high school reunion, and some random nepo-baby Dane who was probably here on holiday anyway? That's something those in charge of the football department might want to cover at the next AGM, assuming that we ever have a next AGM. Maybe that will happen after the new coach is announced, whoever that is. Lots of names being thrown around, but none seemingly of much recent reputation. That's assuming anyone of note actually wants to coach us.

Remarkably, considering the nature of the loss, a lot of people stayed back in the social club after the game. Usually people are desperate to get out of there, regardless of the timeslot and the result, and this was a particularly disastrous result and performance. Yet, people hung back. 

So ends this extended period of strangeness
The hiring of Esteban Quintas as coach of South Melbourne Hellas was the culmination of a series of decisions. First, there was the decision to give Chris Taylor a five year contract, with the addition of job titles and responsibilities that he never really wanted. Then, for whatever reason, he was sacked on the eve of season 2018, after all the players had been signed up for the year. Whatever the merits of that decision to sack Taylor, the way the players were deceived into signing up for 2018 created a black hole of trust in management, which essentially required most of those players to be let go at some point, because they sure as hell wouldn't want to stay. The Sasa Kolman era started with a bang, and then quickly collapsed. Con Tangalakis was brought in, but that didn't work either. And then we hired a coach with almost zero senior football coaching experience, who was connected to the Genova International School of Soccer academy, not my idea of a reputable soccer entity. He was also an outlier in that he was not Greek, nor was he an ex-player of ours. 

Quintas got us to survive 2019, just. 2020 didn't look promising, but COVID soon sorted that out. Apart from a sputtering FFA Cup/Dockerty Cup run, 2021 wasn't great either, but COVID sorted that out, too. 2022, 2023, and 2024 all ended up with grand final appearances, but through a mixture of outrageous misfortune (key strikers missing for 2022 and 2023, as well as injured players), and poor tactics and management (not taking off your one consistent line breaker in Andy Brennan before he got sent off in the 2024 semi), we ended up with no league titles in that three year span, and a for and against tally of 0-10. There were celebratory moments though - finally in 2024, we picked up a trophy under Esteban through a grinding, fortunate penalty shootout win in the Dockerty Cup. We also had a great run in the Australia Cup, albeit once more the final game of our season was marred by not having our main striker up front. Maybe things could have gone differently against Macarthur if Harrison Sawyer was there. Wouldn't that have been something? And Esteban was voted by his peers as coach of the year in 2024.

But overall, despite the high ladder positions of the 2022-2024 span, the experience was an incredibly demoralising one, at least for me. We were defensive on default. We often had no central midfield, at least not an attacking one. As most teams grew out of the physical, second-ball style of play that was a feature of Victorian soccer for so long, we became bogged down in it. Going to matches became tedious, an experience in religious self-flagellation. Instead of going to experience joy, we went to experience the pain of devotion, with little tangible earthly reward. Somehow, for myself and others around me, winning under Quintas often felt like losing. And losing, of course, felt even worse. 

Though I was never a fan, I will give Quintas his dues. He often had to do more with less compared to many of his predecessors. He gave more youth team players meaningful opportunities than pretty much every South coach in the last twenty years, with the exception perhaps of the by necessity early John Anastasiadis years. Some of those young players worked out better than others, but at least they got a chance.

Quintas was a hard worker. He studied opponents in depth, thought deeply about the game, and created complex plans for the players. A recently departed player, who played under both Taylor and Quintas, has related the difference between the two. Taylor would give minimal instruction during the week, and got by on generally putting the right players in the right position and let them go for it. On the other hand, Quintas would fill his whiteboards with ink, and would provide endless instruction. 

Yet somehow on game day, the game plan always looked the same. For the last half decade, everyone in Victorian soccer knew what to expect when playing against South Melbourne. For all the preparation and planning, somehow it always came back to long balls, and goals from set pieces, including the now infamous long throws. Despite playing on one of the best fields in Melbourne, South's style more resembled the territorial rugby union play of a mid-2000s George Cross team playing on the ankle rolling minefield that was Chaplin Reserve.

Quintas put a priority on defence. If the team didn't concede, then at the very least, the team couldn't lose. But the defensive strength of the side looked much better on the raw data of the "for and against" column of the competition table, than it did when you actually looked at the deeper numbers, let alone when watching the games themselves. For those of us who have watched our club since Quintas became head coach in 2019, we have seen the following. 

First, an overreliance on overwhelming numbers in defence to crowd out the opposition, so that even while being on top of the table, players like Jake Marshall were leading the league in blocked shots. This year, with a more forward stance than usual, the players have become exposed all over the backline. Second, there was the outrageously good fortune of having certainly one of the greatest goalkeepers to ever grace Victorian state league soccer, in the form of Javi Diaz Lopez, who was pulling out incredible save after incredible save for years on end. South has had some good goalkeepers during the 20 years post-NSL, but to get to the stage where your goalkeeper is the face of the club, winning league awards because of how many saves he makes when he should be making far fewer saves than most of his league contemporaries, is emblematic of what we have been about for the past five years.

Quintas loved South Melbourne Hellas. He was genuinely passionate about the club. Yet he never understood some of the core principles underpinning the club. That the club's supporters have, in the main, always wanted attacking football. Not necessarily pretty, possession football, but certainly attacking, front-foot football. It's an entertainment thing - we work during the week, we pay our money, we want to be entertained. Match day should be an occasion. We want to enjoy ourselves. Yet so much of what his teams provided was tedious, watching us bludgeon and grind our way to wins. Opposition supporters, and those missing fans of ours who only paid attention to the results and ladders, also didn't understand. "You're on top of the ladder, and you're still complaining?". It makes you sound ungrateful for being successful, but so many of us who actually watched the side were always wondering how we kept getting away with it, and how long it would be until it fell apart.

It's also an ego thing - no matter how much the fantasy deviates from reality, we still like to believe that we're a big club, one which expects to win every game that it plays, and one where a good number of teams whether coming to Lakeside or hosting us in their own ground, will gladly take a draw playing against us. Quintas repeatedly referred to South being a big club, yet his tactics and approach to the game often made us look and feel small. The greatest irony of all this came towards the end. While Ange Postecoglou was winning hearts and minds overseas for his rhetoric and monomania on playing a style of football centred on bringing joy to the fans watching, and then the Ferenc Puskas in Australia documentary Ange and the Boss making the argument that what made that South Melbourne Hellas team special was the devotion to joy, and letting players express themselves, and that there was an expectation among South fans that you would see the team attack; that attacking was its natural state.

How hard must it have been for people at the club to try and market the current team under those conditions? Already hamstrung by our irrelevance, our being in a backwater competition, of having no way out, and then when your most famous name, and all the video evidence of the past shows a desire to take the game on, to be forward on approach whenever possible, to be assertive; and all you could possibly cobble together in a highlights package showcasing the now, was goals from corners and long throws. The match day experience of the past five years, insofar as what was presented on the field, only reinforced in the mind of the people no longer going to our games that the current South Melbourne bears little resemblance to the former one. Whatever misfortune we've had under Quintas, and it has been there, and whatever winning record we had, and we did have a good one overall, the loss of the assertive, front-footed South Melbourne was a heavy price to pay.

So, I thank Esteban Quintas for his service to the club often under difficult circumstances, I acknowledge the good that he did, and I am well aware that he and I have very different opinions on how the game should be played, at least at this club. But I'm not sorry that he's gone. Now the club has to find someone to help us survive this season, and then someone to at least bring back the mentality of the famous Danny Blanchflower quote:

“The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It’s nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

Next game
Away to Eastern Lions today in the Dockerty Cup. We'll be coached by Leigh Minopoulos, who'll be assisted by Tyson Holmes.

Final thought
They tell me that the 2006 championship team meets up annually for a reunion. That they don't it with  and/or at the club tells me we have a very sorry cultural problem.

But I digress - Altona Magic 0 South Melbourne 0

It's gotten so bad that now we're being overrun by teams nearer to the bottom of the table than even we are, and that's with them being down to ten men. At least we somehow kept a clean sheet for the first time in a couple of months.

Next game

Home against the Bergers tomorrow (Sunday) evening. Curtain raiser is the senior women against Brunswick Juventus. 

Yoink?!

?

So, Gustav Moller is gone, and more than fittingly going by the last twenty years, his exit is actually the most South thing that I can think of - like 99% of our now former fans, rather than stick around Lakeside being miserable, Moller realised he wasn't having any fun, and just walked away. Honestly, I'm a little jealous. Granted, Moller didn't have the same level of emotional attachment that most South fans have (or at least claim to have had) to the club, but the gesture was achingly familiar:

This sucks, why do I have to be here? Wait, I don't? OK, bye.

It was a strange situation from beginning to end. Since our game plan over the past five years was based around two pillars - outrageously over-competent goalkeeping, and a big guy banging in goals up top just by being big, the departure of Harrison Sawyer late last season threatened to bring down the entire Esteban Quintas edifice one and for all, as was the case when Sawyer got injured in 2021 and we were barely able to win a game after that - thank goodness (sort of) that COVID destroyed most of the rest of that season. Enter Gustav Moller from the sixth division of Danish football who, from the scant online evidence available, was basically nobody, had played for no one of note, and was being signed because whoever's in charge of this stuff at the club these days could apparently find not one person better anywhere else.

(There's some talk that he was recommended to us by Thomas Sorenson which, if true, would make a kind of awful sense - what with Gustav Moller being the son of Danish pundit and former international forward Peter Moller. But who wants to think that we signed someone based on someone at the club being starstruck, and that the famous person making the recommendation was just trying to do a mate a favour?) 

Still, whatever Moller's credentials or lack thereof, and whoever recommended him to us, the club did get to see something of him in the pre-season, and ultimately made the decision to sign him either as cover for Nahuel Bonada, or with the intention that Moller would at some point become the main guy. The latter, were it to actually happen, would have taken awhile. Gustav Moller was clearly not match fit. I don't know if he'd been in Carl Piergianni-style holiday mode - and we saw that once big Carl did get fit on returning to England, that he was actually decent - but whatever the case, Moller wasn't able to last more than fifteen minutes without becoming completely gassed. 

And whatever his skillset may have entailed - he was probably OK in the air, and he seemed to at least have some semblance of touch - he was utterly the wrong player, for the wrong system, for the wrong coach, at the wrongest club possible. It was a hopeless situation for all concerned; but while Moller can walk away with perhaps only his ego and dignity bruised, the club is now down to one forward for the next few months until the transfer window opens. 

Neos Kosmos digital archives, free to access
Now, I was aware that Neos Kosmos had digitised its archive going back to 1957, Initially I think they were charging for access to it, but I've been informed that the archive is actually free to access. The user interface is a bit of a pain to use, and nowhere near as good as what you would get with Trove - and I have no idea why Neos Kosmos didn't go with Trove - but it's still good that it's available. Search works a lot better when you have exact phrases at hand, and also in later years where the quality of the scans is better.

The club's official historian John Kyrou sent me an email alerting me to the fact that the archive was free to use, as well as some notes on the 1960 season after he went through the archives, a frustrating season from a historical perspective both for broader coverage as well just plain statistical stuff. At first, Neos Kosmos shows indifference to the club. Indeed, sport is not a big part of the paper in 1960, which accords with my memory of the last time I went through the 1960s papers on microfiche. What sport coverage exist is initially centred on the Greek league and local pro-wrestling, mostly Alex Iakovidis. When Hellas establishes its on-field bona fides, it gets not just more coverage, but also more detailed coverage. Eventually reporter Nikos Kyriakopoulos' column becomes a fixture of the paper, to the point where you begin getting not just full lineups for most games by the end of the season, but also ratings of each player. 

Kyriakopoulos is particularly savage in his criticisms of players he considers lazy, unsporting, or not team-oriented. The senior squad is large and hard to manage. Some players do the right thing, but others have poor attitudes to training, and the team is prone to arguing amongst itself. They're a cut above their league, but arrogant. Kyriakopoulos is effusive in his praise of Terry Budgen, one of the few non-Greeks in the squad, as well as goalkeeper George Karpouzas, but has it in for Antonis Karagiannis (lazy, arrogant), Stefanos Fortomanos (unsporting, greedy on the ball), and captain-coach Chris Georgoussis (listless, heavy).

He also really hammers home the angle of the club's role as representative of the Greek community in Melbourne. That's not just limited to the players, but also the supporters, whose behaviour he's often critical of - except perhaps when it counts most, after the ugly scenes in the Dockerty Cup semi against Hakoah, where he blames the referee for the riot by the Greek fans. Kyriakopoulos also places much emphasis on the Laidlaw Cup - a local mini-world cup tournament, where Team Greece was effectively South Melbourne Hellas rebadged. He also promotes the club's and the Greek community's wider effort to build a stand at Middle Park. Little mention is made of Yarra Park or Hellenic, none of Alexander or South Melbourne United, and nothing of Hakoah in the context of being a co-tenant at Middle Park.

The crowds fluctuate between the very large (10,000 at games at Olympic Park, far and away the best venue in Victorian soccer) and a few hundred at games at Middle Park and elsewhere, where shelter is extremely limited. Indeed, wet weather sees games postponed, and one game at Coburg was played "in an ocean".

One bonus of running through and double-checking the club historian's reading of this material, is apart from confirming several lineups and a few scorers, we can now confirm one previously elusive club record detail, that of most goals in a league game. For ages the provisional club record for most goals in a league game was four, held by ten different players. Hellas racked up some big scores in 1960, but confirmation of the scorer details proved elusive for whatever reason. Thus, Antonis Karagiannis' six goals against Moonee Ponds stands alone.

Final thought

Well, seven years too late for my thesis, and five years after the old man passed away, I finally found it. Silly bugger insisted it was from the 1980s or early 1990s, but it was from February 1995. It's probably not even the complete poem - whatever drafting page that was on is long gone - but it's more complete than the couple of stanzas I had access to for my thesis, and which sent me searching in vain for the published version on several trips to the State Library. 

Like the rest of his poetry, it's doggerel, but that's beside the point. As I wrote in an appendix to my thesis:

My father, Athanasios Mavroudis, despite his limited formal education – only up to grade six in rural 1950s Greece – fancied himself as somewhat of a poet. He wrote  several poems in his scrapbooks, and even had some published in the letter and editorial pages of Neos Kosmos, the Greek-language paper of record in Melbourne. 

His style is plain and straightforward, and if we are being fair, not far removed from doggerel. His themes were broad, and usually related to the issues of the day – the political and cultural concerns as they related to the Greek community of Melbourne, and the Greek diaspora as a whole. This was in keeping with one strand of poetry submitted to Neos Kosmos, the other, more common one being poetry on important dates, festivals, the seasons, the sanctity of mothers, and the pain of living in a foreign land. 

I have included my father’s two extant and complete soccer poems here for a couple of reasons. First, as a way to preserve them in some fashion on the public record. Second, because whatever their literary merits, they are outstanding examples of what this thesis is about – the search for the most obscure portrayals of a marginal game, written by a member of a marginal community, preserving moments and points of view otherwise destined for utter oblivion. Also, they have a naff charm which appeals to 

me.

Despair - South Melbourne 1 Dandenong City 3

Monday night was pretty bad. Outcoached and outplayed, morale down the toilet. In the relegation zone, no chance to get reinforcements for another three months, and no trust in what depth players we do have, including the one notable off-season signing who's been banished to the bench. The captain chucks a wobbly and gets sent off, we've run out of strikers, and the "get out of jail" long throw plan has stopped working. No wins since round 2, no clean sheets since round 1. So much for being the team built on a solid defence, although we know that stacking players in the eighteen-yard box from minute one was never really good defending, just weight of numbers.

The bigger concern is, as always, the bigger picture. Teams lose games and have bad runs all the time. But it's everything above those losses that amplifies the sense of doom. The cheapskate recruiting, the last minute major sponsor announcement, the lack of any friends anywhere. Who wants to hang out with South Melbourne? Not our fans, who ditched us en masse 20 years ago, and of those who remained, still gradually drift away. Not the media, who have no interest in whatever it is that we do. Not the Trust which operates Lakeside, which gets far more out of a single marquee athletics day than whatever we can muster over several years. Maybe only Preston likes us, and that's only because they need other teams for the Australian Championship to go ahead; but also, Preston doesn't really need the Australian Championship either, not like we do.

And just as an aside, if you can, have a look at the scenes from the athletics last week where Lakeside's stands and terraces are full, and the numbers on the concourses are six deep. That's what a legit crow of 10,000 looks like.

Anyway, we seem to tread water every season in one way or another, but is 2025 the year things finally come to a head? If the Australian Championship fails, if this Oceania business turns out to be the impossible insanity it appears to be to an outsider, does it even matter if we get relegated from the NPL or not? Good results won't bring people back to South Melbourne, and neither will good football. Only the impossibly long and difficult graft of trying to reengage the community that has abandoned us remains as an option, but it seems like a task so massive, that one can't quite conceive.

All this seems like something that could at least be discussed at an AGM, but it appears that we may never get one of those again. Fair enough, it's not like we're a member based club. 

Next game
Altona Magic away tonight.

Manny swears he came up with this one before
I rocked up to a South game in a suit and tie
for the third time this year already.

Blue and White Views
This 100% unofficial fanzine which, for the record, I have no hand in creating, is really winning people over, even at the most basic level of "oh, that's who number 88 is". For those who miss out on the physical copies handed out at games, there is a website you can visit, which includes comic strips which are in the style of former South of the Border contributor Manny. That's probably no accident. Once the season is done, I will be scanning all issues of Blue and White Views and chucking them up somewhere.

Around the grounds
Value for money
Last year it was $7. This year it costs $10 to buy a ticket to a fifth tier Australian soccer match in Melbourne, the same price as for a second tier Australian rules match. I suppose because I'd had a media pass for so long, and then COVID happened, and then my eyesight made it so that going to non-South games was largely pointless, I'd become distanced from the reality of what others had been putting up with for so many years in regards to prices at the gate. But $10 for a fifth tier match? In Melbourne? At least Western Suburbs has some elevated seating and some shelter. No goals on offer last week though against Banyule. Not the worst game I've ever seen though.

Final thought
Man, these crazy online gamblers, accusing us of throwing games, as if the preceding five or six weeks hadn't happened. They should take up knitting, jogging, volunteering for the homeless, anything but sports gambling, not for any moral reasons, but simply for the fact that they clearly aren't any good at even the most basic aspects of sports betting.