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.