The happy little rut

What is life without risk? Secure. Safe. Routine. There have been many ups and downs over the past 20 odd years at South Melbourne, but one thing has more or less remained the same: that you'll see the same 200-300 people at most home games, making the same jokes and the same complaints about the futility of the enterprise, and while the results matter to us, they don't matter much to anyone else. It's an insular story of a comfortable, quiet despair. But days like today change that. Sure, we've had little moments like this before: a couple of Australia Cup semi finals, the Championship final last year, and even on occasion an NPL grand final, which not only break the monotony of the routine, but remind people outside the club that we exist, and that we have ambitions that many consider beyond our station. Days like this also remind ourselves of what the club was, and what we hope it may be again, but today's match, today's event, is on another level. Today is not necessarily about the football, though of course we want to win, and it's the footballers who have got us to this stage. Today is about affirming to ourselves as a club that we should be operating at a higher level, and convincing others of the same. When Sydney United made its Australia Cup final, unsavoury crowd actions aside, no one was talking about their ambitions beyond the NPL. Heidelberg took the lead last year in the final, and yet even then, no one was seriously discussing Heidelberg as a top-tier aspirant. There's something in our image and bluster, and yes, our history, that has people inside the club and outside of it, that maybe we could be more. The scale of the event, the particular opponent, all have created a sense of magnifying the arguments. And thus if we were to fail in an exceptional manner on the field or off it, we are open to a level of ridicule that we have not felt for decades. But that's the point, isn't? No risk, no reward. Today, we get out of our comfort zone.

A glimpse of heaven

It's only now, three or so days out from the game, that it all seems less like one sort of fantasy and more like another. Three days out from a match with tens of thousands in attendance, in a proper stadium, on the national stage, on national television. We've played at that stadium twice, once in front of almost nobody (not our fault), and another time in a derby against the Bergers in front of a few thousand that should have been more, but wasn't. Now mainstream TV is showcasing our presidents. Our players are being interviewed by the print media and on the radio. Even I'm being a media tart, with three appearances in various formats, my reputation lingering on despite being more than semi-retired from blogging. All this attention, and none of it yet for causing a scene. I think back to then president George Donikian's livelihood being threatened because of the shambles of the 2005 riot against Preston. I think of one of his successors, Leo Athanasakis, doing a doorstop TV news appearance to deny any connection of the club to the violent incidents at the water polo in 2007. I think of all our presidents having to suck up to the small-time and small-minded members of the local Greek press. You can justifiably cringe as hard as you want at the antics of current presidents Andrew Mesourouni and Bill Papastergiadis, but at least we only have to cringe, and not worry about anything worse, at least not yet. It feels like after over twenty years on the outside, that we've been given a chance to taste the good life, of where me might have been, and where we still might end up. Of course, come Sunday morning, we'll be where we have been since mid-2004, and the big show will roll on without us, as it has for the past twenty odd years. But win or lose, we will have had that moment in the spotlight again, where others will have seen us differently to what we've been painted as, and we get to see ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be, so different from the reality we have to live, as our self-delusion and self-aggrandisement coincide with a brief window of undisputed relevance.

When the facts change, opinions must change. Maybe.

It's possible that I was wrong about the Australia Cup. When it began, the framing of "reunification" rubbed me up the wrong way; the new dawn had, after all, won the popularity battle by some margin, especially in Melbourne and Sydney. I hated the patronising focus on "ethnic food", as if that was all our clubs had to offer. And the tournament's original scheduling of the tournament favoured the in-season professional A-League outfits over the out-of-season semi-pro teams - the guaranteed semi-final place for non-A-League teams felt tokenistic at best. Looking at things more closely though, it's less that I was wrong about the Australia Cup, and more that both it and Australian soccer have changed to where the original framing of the Cup is not what it was. The A-League's popularity post-COVID has plateaued, while clubs like South and Preston have, on occasion, been able to rustle up crowds well above what one expects of them these days, and in some cases more than what some expansion teams have been able to do. The food truck fetish is now mostly the preserve of chancer influencers, who are easy enough to ignore if you don't live on their favoured social media outlets. But the big change has been in the revised scheduling, which now sees the A-League sides more likely to field youthful and less match-fit lineups in the early rounds than they did in the Cup's early days. When these relatively underprepared squads come up against experienced, battled-hardened, in-season NPL sides - at least the better ones - the expectation is no longer that the semi-pro side will get swept aside. And so it has come to pass, that what are dubbed "cupsets" - an A-League side being eliminated by a state league side - have become increasingly common. Of course by the time the final rolls around, the A-League team remaining (assuming that there is an A-League team remaining) should be too strong, but the gap is not what it was. It also helps that there's been another change which is less talked about than it should be - that state league talent is becoming more and more concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. Of course, Sydney has always had the depth of its own superior playing numbers. But Melbourne has done well in overcoming its demographic deficiencies by bringing in ambitious players from Queensland, useful journeyman Brits, and the occasional Tasmanian or Japanese player. Money talks, but so does the latent support in Victoria for these old clubs, which in general seems to have held up better than in other places; it was an observation made ten years ago to me by Joe Gorman, and while anything that old has surely dated, something about it still resonates. Is that why Victorian sides have done so much better than their counterparts from other states? A chip on their shoulder, a point to prove, and the motivation to outdo each other in all formats? And always at the centre of this ambition, and this week the height of such festivities, there is our club. No club with a bigger chip on its shoulder in this country, no club trying harder to prove a point, no club more motivated to get away from clubs that it seldom considers its peers.

Ship of Theseus

South Melbourne Hellas dates its origins to August 1959, but what is left from that time? Everyone who played at the club in the club's inaugural season is almost certainly dead, as would be every committee member. Most of the supporters from that era are gone. The Duke of Kent Hotel on La Trobe Street, where the early 1960 merger of the fledgling Hellas club with South Melbourne United took place, is gone, demolished. Middle Park Stadium, which did not even exist as a stadium at that point, is gone, though the plaque inaugurating the opening of its grandstand in 1960 still exists at Lakeside Stadium, which itself is now not the same Lakeside Stadium was it when it opened in 1996. Almost every team we played against in our debut season in 1960 is gone; more than half the teams we played against in our first State League season in 1961 are gone, or subsequently merged into new entities. Olympic Park is gone. The National Soccer League is gone. Most of our supporters are gone, either temporarily or permanently. To be fair, every institution which lasts longer than a generation or so becomes its own Ship of Theseus; calling itself the same entity, while changing buildings, people, and conduct, while also claiming to be a continuation of a specific moment of creation which occurred at an increasingly remote point in time. There must be just a handful of people left at our club who can remember the 1960s, and seemingly not too many more who can remember the 1970s. Both eras were glorious for the club, and those of us still here, and almost always much, much younger, claim that history for the club as it exists now, even as others claim that South Melbourne today is not the same club as that which attained glory up to a specific point in 2004; today's South Melbourne (which for them is not Hellas) is a facsimile of the real thing, a bad copy, an echo bouncing off a distant mountain and not the original sound. And yet for those of us who were there in the before time and are still here now, we are indeed still here now because we consider it the same club; this is, perhaps strangely, even more so the case for those who have joined the club in its national league exodus years - they recognise something not intangible about the club, but rather something extremely tangible; that the club has a history, a reputation, and a certain spirit that runs in a continuum from 1959 through to the present. The further away we get from that comparatively glorious past, the more it becomes mythologised both by those still here, and by those who have abandoned us; the size of the crowds, the merits of the players, the unsavoury incidents, and the decisions made which saw the club fall by the Australian soccer wayside. Even as the actual living memory of it all fades away, inevitably, the spirit of the club remains perversely robust, and something both the club's supporters and its detractors can agree upon as they respectively dispense love or hate for South Melbourne Hellas.

The Fear

One shouldn't think like this, but it's inevitable. The relevant fear is not about a disastrous result on Saturday, or the mockery that would come from that. That's a different kind of inevitability. No, this fear is the nonsense that could occur off the field, the terrace nonsense, the march to the stadium nonsense. A little bit of nonsense is to be expected; not everyone can be controlled, not everyone can control themselves. And besides which, nonsense is inherent in an exercise where the point is to support an arbitrary group of young men kicking a ball around against an equally arbitrary collective of same. But the fear is about enough people crossing a line, and the cascading effects of that. First, what might happen in the immediate vicinity of the incident; then the immediate impact to the club; then the recriminations among the supporters; and then whatever other consequences flow from that, but in particular, one: the chance for certain people to point at us, and say with a justification made easier by the circumstances, "see, we told you that this is what they're like, and that this would happen"; and then others who were on the fence, or perhaps beginning to come around to our self-proclaimed as well as actual merits, would retreat from acknowledging the worthiness of our cause, our arguments, and ultimately our club as an institution.

Maybe it's time to go back to the beginning...

... and remember the advice of an early interlocutor, to write every day, no matter how badly.