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.