It's a good thing Manny's been keeping the Blue and White Views site ticking over, because you wouldn't want to be relying on this site anymore. Though I do miss the paper fanzine, at the very least for having the player roster at easy reference.
Let's call it a day, month, year, forever - South Melbourne 0 Port Melbourne 2
Let's ignore the Dockerty Cup games for a moment. After the write-off of the preceding ten league games - two draws, eight losses, one senior coach gone, no strikers, and a goals per game ratio of about 0.3 - this is where it had to start to get good again. Maybe not "good", but at least "better". We need at least nine points from the next four league games, all against fellow relegation candidates. To be honest, "better" probably wasn't going to be good enough either, since we'd had a taste of "better" against Avondale and Oakleigh, but those are the games where you need to be "good", not just "better" than whatever slop you've been producing for three months. "Better" did show up in this game, eventually, but not before we were 2-0 down after 15 minutes against the bottom side, courtesy of them having an actual striker, as well as a gross misstep in team selection and arrangement by Uncle Buck which allowed said striker to stroll through at will. After that, I mentally started preparing for relegation or the end of the club, whichever came first.
Modern football is rubbish
In between one globally irrelevant match and another, there was this thing that everyone was talking about - the title match for the secondary European club competition. Since it involved Old Mate - you know who I'm talking about - there was indeed heightened local interest, as well as the chance for our club to make hay while the sun still remotely shines. I turned the TV on at about the 55 minute mark I think, saw that the score was favourable to the nominal good guys, and then while wishing Old Mate all the success in the world, proceeded to hate almost every second of this spectacle. Manchester United? Rubbish. Tottenham Hotspur? More rubbish! After all my angst about Angeball vs Esteball, especially during the theatrical run of Ange and the Boss, it turns out while we had ditched Esteball (albeit for negligible benefit at this point in time), Old Mate had adopted it in his hour of need. It was filth. But these things happen, and sometimes all you can do is hope for an arsey goal, a keeper having a blinder, an acrobatic goal line clearance, and an opponent who couldn't score against you if they had another month to do so up their sleeves.
More depressing, from the point of view of someone who pretty much never watches top level football played in proper stadiums, in front of lots of people, and broadcast with all the bells and whistles, was how anodyne the experience was. Is there any personality left at that level of football? Everything has been made so slick, so clean, so neat, that you wonder if any of it leaves any sort of lasting memory? I'm not asking for a return to abject squalor, but where is the grime, where is the hint of individuality, of difference? It's a lot of old man yelling at clouds, and I'm probably a touch too young to be doing that. Well, at least Old Mate managed to do the thing that he said he would. I'm sure it'll play out well for him.
Let's not listen
Somewhere in between the previous South game and the next one, Greg Blake wrote something quite good about the woes of our club (and to a lesser extent, the Knights) that had a solid diagnosis, but also included a completely wrong solution, at least so far as South is concerned. But even if Blakey had been right, it doesn't matter, because no writing on the game matters anymore. No one listens, everyone moves on quickly.
The most underappreciated hero in world history - Melbourne Knights 0 South Melbourne 2
Needing at least nine points from this run of four absolutely crucial league games, we'd already missed out on three, and now here we were, the 1991 NSL grand final re-match, now in the form of 14th (them) and 13th (us), on our knees in the most heinous combined position these two clubs had faced in their 65 years of competing against each other. The attendance was somehow better than I expected, though I'm aware that it did include some neutrals passing through for the sake of... morbid curiosity? Paying respects to the (soon to be) deceased? For further evidence of the host's decline, there was no match program produced by the home side for this game, which means that we're down to only Gully producing match programs on a regular basis. To be a little fair, there was a match program in the Knights' merch stall for their game against Preston, which seems to suggest that we're not worth the bother of a grand occasion anymore. Fair enough. Greg Blake's right, we're not special anymore, haven't been for a long time, but damn it, I still don't want to be like everyone else.
After that, it became all about survival for us. They botched a few chances, especially just before halftime, and eventually ran out of time completely. Whatever sympathy or empathy I might have had for their club's plight was negated by the fact that their supporters are still directing violent, racist, and violently racist chants towards anyone they consider subhuman. Then after the game their whole board resigned, which it'd be nice to take some credit for, but I reckon that was something that was brewing for awhile, at least going by the press release the departing board put out.
Kup Komedy Kapers Kontinued - South Melbourne 2 Pascoe Vale 1
Following our Pyrrhic cup victory against Bentleigh a few weeks before, and coming off a solid enough league win against the Knights on a Friday, our most favourable cup draw since 2019 continued on the following Tuesday, against the team sitting either rock-bottom or near enough to it in the division two below our own. Remember when we needed an extra time goal to beat these guys in a semi final in 2015, and they brought enough fans to be loud and rip flares? That's the beauty and terror of promotion and relegation though - yesterday's glories belong to yesterday, and (contextually) torpid irrelevance is always just around the corner. But the Cup is the great even-upperer. So we had not the strongest team we could put out there, but they had their under 23s. So, you think we should have been OK. Wrong. The visitors' reserves team ran rings around us, and took a 1-0 lead into the break. Maybe if they kept the foot on the pedal in the second half, I wouldn't be so offhand about the whole experience. I suppose having gone through something not too dissimilar against Preston in 2013, which caused a lot more angst for me, this wasn't quite as bad? I mean it was bad, but I guess our expectations were so low by this point that... look, maybe I'm trying to rationalise too much post-script about something that was a lot worse in the moment. But anyway, Paco sat back, and we worked our way into the game, chucked on a few older heads, and pulled off the comeback with the last kick of the game. Like the win over Bentleigh, considering our relegation predicament, I'm still not sure winning this game was a good idea.
Meet the Parents - South Melbourne 4 Melbourne Victory (NPL) 2
Because of that unpleasantness from just under a decade ago, and assorted less public and meaningful incidents since then (not only with us) - and I suppose 20 years of social media and off-field hostility - here was the completely overboard security arrangement of having all the Victory supporters on the other side of the ground, and sales to Victory fans cut off an hour before kickoff. Maybe twenty to thirty people were in the northern stand, a long way from the bigger crowd that was there for the infamous 2016 match. And yet it didn't stop the nonsense between our fans and theirs! And yet it wasn't the usual suspects getting involved, that is Clarendon Corner and Victory hools. Except, also, it kinda was the usual suspects! Let's me explain. Outside of the notorious troublemakers who attach themselves to Victory's cause, the only people watching Victory's NPL team are the parents of the players. And what could be worse than having to deal with opposition fans in the stands when they are almost entirely made up of parents? They are so often insufferable at the best of times, taking any criticism of their progeny as a personal attack, when the truth is if you or I or someone supporting South is having a go at an opposition player, we do it because we know very well who they are - in which case, you can tell from the commentary - or because we have no idea who they are; ditto.
Tons of boys and young men go through Victory's academy/NPL programs. Most of them, once they are discarded by the program, will either drop down to lower leagues permanently, or give up the game and do something else with their lives. They are nobodies, just like I am a nobody. We are, both of us, there, but mostly inconsequential. Not yesterday's heroes, not tomorrow's legends. But try telling that to the parents. So while Victory's kids are tearing us apart in the first half, some of our people from the middle of the stand - so, not CC! - are getting a bit chippy, and some of the Victory parents start getting lippy, and it's threatening to boil over. For some reason the parents of the visiting team cannot comprehend that our people don't much care for Melbourne Victory as an entity, including any of its representatives, even transitory ones like those playing for Victory's NPL team. The situation gets settled down soon enough - apparently ex-South player Melvin Becket is in the thick of it, which just adds something to absurdity of the situation - and the Victory parents get shuffled off to the northern stand, which bolsters the numbers by about 200%, and makes the farcical security arrangements a tad more worthwhile.
A few people claim that being at least nominal Victory fans, those parents shouldn't have been allowed in our stand in the first place. Maybe those people are right. But I think it's less them being Victory, and more being parents and family that was the main issue. Really, that kind of thing could have happened at against any club with fans of a similar demographic. As for the game itself, at halftime we were down 2-1 and getting played off the park by a bunch of kids. Relegation was right there, and it looked even more real than after the close of play against Port. But more adjustments, some senior players pulling their fingers out, and we romped home. I don't think anyone was getting carried away with the result, or the performance, but out of the minimum nine points we needed to aim for in this four week stretch, we'd got six. It could have been much worse.
This is going to cost us - St Albans 2 South Melbourne 2
It was cold, wet, and er... cold. My driver Johnny and I got into Churchill Reserve for free from one of the entrances nearer the training grounds, not thinking much of it - not that we were geniuses or that we were trying to stooge the hosts out of $40 - until it became clear that everyone got in for free, because there was some dinner-dance thing organised by Dinamo going at the same time as the game. It would have been nice as a South fan to have about this earlier, because then I guess we could have promoted it to our own people, and encouraged one or two more of them to show up. So it goes. The game? Nervy first ten minutes, pretty good up until 50 minutes being 2-0 up, and then, well... a deserved for St Albans, and the goal of getting nine points from twelve from this stretch gave me that sinking feeling again - and worse a week later when Victory crunched Oakleigh 5-2, and Dinamo drew with Avondale.
OK, this is just getting stupid now - Dandenong City 1 South Melbourne 1 (South win 3-1 on penalties)
My provisional driver being all the way in Perth, there was no way to get to this game, but also kinda like, no real regret that I was not making the journey all the way to Endeavour Hills. Especially as we were going to lose. I mean, they have a better team, a much better coach (or so some of us like to tell ourselves), a big forward, and familiarity with the cow paddock that they play on. First twenty minutes, so, so. Then bad. Deserved to be down 1-0. Some bold changes in the second half, and things turned around dramatically. Got the equaliser and then, like in so many games this year, ran out of gas. But we somehow got to penalties, including surviving a goal line scramble that's impossible to tell if it crossed the line from all the way here in Sunshine, peering into the dark Australian bush gothic corners of Frank Holohan Soccer Complex via live stream. The home side seemed convinced, but unlike the linesman who gave Andy Brennan his phantom goal against Eastern Lions, the officials decided here that the benefit of the doubt should go to us. Or maybe it hadn't crossed the line here, and they just made a good call.
This Dockerty Cup run, already being hilarious - stray gift horse in the mouth passes, phantom goals, less than convincing or deserved come from behind wins against at times very mediocre opposition - , reached new heights of comedy in the shoot out. Ex-South men Yagoub Mustafa and Nathaniel Hancock hitting crap penalties, and Javi Lopez not really having to pull out any fancy tricks to save them, or the shot from another bloke that went flying over the bar. Sam Francou with balls of steel to take the second penalty. Three away games out of four to get to the Dockerty Cup semis, and the national stage of the Australia Cup, muddling our way through this otherwise very poor season. It's all been very strange.
Preston at home today. You probably won't be reading this until after the game anyway.
Final thought
Here's to old mate Savvas Jonis doing what I'm far too polite and/or cowardly to do, and reminding latent and lapsed fans of ours on social media that if you want to talk about current day Hellas, you have to earn that right by being here with us now.
But to get back to the main point. Yes, it's sad that we have latent fans who for whatever reason can no longer bring themselves to attend South matches. That's their choice, and if they want to define themselves by reminiscence alone, there's not much we can do. Those of us who are still attending games appreciate what we have, not just what we had. So by all means if you're a latent fan, enjoy your fill of nostalgia - but don't go complaining about contemporary happenings at the club on or off-field, or the media's treatment of the club - because if you're not going to games yourself, you should probably reconsider the merits of your indignation.I mean, I suppose those types can comment all they want, but there is absolutely no obligation for us current supporters to pay them any mind, because realistically they are not coming back, no matter how much the club tries to accommodate them. Change the logo? Change the name? Get more Greeks on the field? As if that would make a difference.
It occurs to me that I may have become a touch more cynical about things over the past eight years.
