Kids, you noticing all this plight? Avondale 1 South Melbourne 0

Even if one acknowledges the limitations of the competition, one doesn't necessarily see the sense in just kicking it for the sake of it. When required, one tries to find the good and defend the competition from those who try to classify it as merely park football. After all, we (mostly and/or usually) don't play in parks anymore!

There are good teams in this league, who can play good football, and in general the style has improved from the dark days of 2011 when Ian Dobson's brutish Green Gully side were the benchmark; when two thirds of the grounds were minefields, sand-pits or mud-heaps by round three instead of round fourteen.

In this game, played on a decent surface, with a non-bothersome breeze, we had two worthy combatants. One team was the reigning champion. The other team was the only one left with a chance of having a perfect record after three games. And yet what they dished up was utter, irredeemable garbage.

Now I know that South Melbourne has problems, and we'll get to those. But first things first - that was putrid. The first half especially was so unwatchable you couldn't even enjoy it on an ironic 'so bad it was good' level. It was just bad. 

During the game I pitied those who had to pay to get in, until I remembered that the reason I didn't pay to get in was because I've invested so much into this project. One could almost pity the players, were they not getting paid very, very well to be very, very bad. Some had been A-League players. Many had spent a good decade in this league. Some had aspirations of breaking out and upwards.

Almost all of them utterly, utterly hopeless.

[I could've throw some more 'utterlys' in there for emphasis, but I need to save those up to torment Ian Syson in a future thesis chapter draft. That's a little poisoned in-joke you don't need to concern yourselves with.]

To refer to some of the abysmal sequences of play as pinball would be an insult to those who have mastered the realm of the silver ball. To note that, at times, the fact that 20 players were bunched together chasing the ball like it was an under 10s game, would be an insult to children everywhere - the kids would at least have better touch.

It was a half in which Avondale, not for lack of talented players, could barely muster any meaningful possession in their attacking half. Meanwhile, South's rare moments of attacking half competence were undone if not by poor passing, then by players in their prime not understanding the basics of the offside rule.

In the second half, things were a bit better, but like last week our domination of possession amounted to nothing. Another maddening goal conceded, which brings to mind, apropos of nothing, some interesting questions, such as:

If we can't take proper set pieces, how do our defenders learn to defend set pieces at training?

and

If we can't defend set pieces, how do we know those attacking set pieces we try out in training are working?

Even when Leigh Minopoulos came off the bench, his best chance to do something was scuppered by Milos Lujic passing inside instead of out. There were some bad offside calls, too, but were they the difference between us winning and losing? Not in any meaningful sense.

After Avondale scored, the game opened up as we committed numbers forward and the nominal home side had another couple of chances to seal the deal. In the end, they didn't need those - they only needed goalkeeper Chris Oldfield to pluck out our one (very late) effort on target from almost underneath the crossbar and tip it over the bar for a corner.

There are those who say that all this - our one dimensionality, our inability to mount meaningful attacks from set pieces, our inability to properly deal with set-pieces - was all there last year, and that when push came to shove in 2016, we managed to hit form, ride our luck and change things enough to get by and win what is still called a championship in these confusing times.

If that's the case, how have we gone about strengthening and improving over the off-season? So far, it has been, with the exception of Luke McCormack, to only use our new players out of necessity, and not it seems out of desire - maybe they're not ready yet? If that's the case, that's a concern for a pre-season that started sometime in November.

Defensive issues aside, set piece issues aside, one man up front issue aside, tactics and matters of personnel issues aside, we don't even look like scoring from every mediocre team's best friend - the counterattack. The only positives that people seem to be clinging onto from this game was Jesse Daley, who came on as a sub, managed to hit two decent corners late in the game. You've got to start from somewhere I suppose.

From the 'what was that all about?' files
There was an unusual post-script to this game. After the match finished, Avondale goalkeeper Chris Oldfield decided to get smart with those South fans situated behind his goal - albeit from a considerable distance away.

It was unusual in that, apart from one or two misplaced smart-arse comments about Oldfield's short lived tenure in the A-League - misplaced because, duh, it's not like South's actually made it to the A-League - there seemed to be much less hostility directed towards him than one might have expected.

Much more hostility was being directed towards the team and the officials. I'm not sure what set him off.

The time spent marveling at the genius of how humankind launched hundreds of tons of steel and fibreglass into the air, and what's more, did it with some measure of grace
On a lighter note, it has been reasonably enjoyable watching the under 20s so far this season. They played their game on the weekend on the outside pitch at Somers Street. Because of this, no fewer than five different people asked me upon their own arrival whether we were playing on that ground, confusion added to the fact that Avondale were running the gate the car park entrance rather than the usual stadium entrance. The South 20s butchered a lot of chances during the time I was there, but managed to get a deserved 2-1 win. Of note was the relatively close proximity of Avondale parents to South parents, and the impassioned support for both teams - most notably from a couple of women still dressed in their work clothes, which happened to be air stewardess costumes. People did momentarily wonder whether there was some sort of sponsor gimmick going on, but the banal reality is that they had parachuted down to Knights Stadium which makes sense because, as far as public transport goes, incoming flights to Tullamarine are probably your best option when traveling to Somers Street.

Next game

Saturday night away to the Bergers. Oh joy.

People's Champ in trouble?
That melee after we pulled a goal back in the Community Shield loss at Kingston Heath a few weeks ago? There had been allegations made that Nick Epifano had spat at someone, and it looks like the matter is coming to a head at the tribunal this week. One suspects that if he's found guilty, he'll be out for a while.

Social club update
Always nice to get an update without twisting someone's arm.

We're entering the final phase of construction of our exclusive areas at Lakeside Stadium. Check out the progress so far. pic.twitter.com/l8fEXWbiBK

— South Melbourne FC (@smfc) February 21, 2017

There were some (though not many) more photos on the club's Facebook page.

Don't look at it children!
Meanwhile, at the Festival Formerly Known as Antipodes, South Melbourne has been circulating an A-League advocacy t-shirt, which for reasons of social propriety, we at South of the Border will not reproduce here. Suffice to say, for some of us still actually attending South matches 13 years after our last national league stint, this kind of nonsense is slightly irksome to the senses. Even more reassuring are reports that South's A-League bid team leader Bill Papastergiadis told the audience at the Festival Formerly Known as Antipodes that the FFA Cup is the only thing that really matters for us at this time (not that any of that matters).

Around the grounds
No canaries
Hours after seeing this game, or maybe even the next day, I remembered that I had wanted to see this fixture two years ago, and was foiled by the weather. Oh, how times have changed. Having never seen The Cult edition of Nunawading City play before, this was all sorts of the wrong time to do it for the first time. For starters, they have (out of necessity) deviated from the Master Plan, because relegation is now a very real possibility. Thus they have put in big cash for hired guns, flights and accommodation - though one of those hired guns, Jason Trifiro, was not in attendance on Friday night, possibly due to injury, maybe due to not being able to get a flight of Sydney on time, who knows? Papa Ange was there, or at least some bloke who looked a lot like him. Probably looking for the next Socceroo bolter. While Nuna's team looked young, their opponents and hosts, Richmond, didn't look much older. Mind you, there was a kid out there during wearing number 10 who myself, Mark Boric, and two former Richmond presidents all assumed was the Nunawading child mascot for the day. Turned it was Nuna's captain. Nuna raced out to a two goal lead, but Richmond pulled it back to 2-2, and looked the likelier to go on to win. Not so, however! Nuna's heavily front-loaded team scorched Richmond's brittle defense, and showed that, whatever other weakness they have - and they have plenty down back - that against defensively suspect weak opposition like Richmond they have the firepower to put teams away. Those hoping that Nuna will go down this season may be in for year of disappointment, 

Final thought
A good thing this wasn't streamed to the multitudes at Lonsdale Street like some people wanted to.

Can the Hellenic Cup be saved from itself?

Normally, once the Hellenic Cup is over, there aren't too many recriminations from this blog, outside of our own progress at least.

One also doesn't want to knock the efforts of a group of volunteers just for the sake of it. In the past, I have been prone to defending the Hellenic Cup committee, especially in their efforts in rejuvenating what could have become a moribund competition.

Certainly, their inclusion of women's, youth and veterans comps has added another dimension, and increased the participation base of the competition. Considering that this is where this sport is headed at this level, that was a good idea.

And the prizemoney is still good, let's not forget that. $10,000 for the winner of a pre-season competition, when the top prize for winning the VPL or the state cup is worth not much more than double that, is fantastic.

And yet, the organisation of this year's tournament has been shambolic. Constant fixture changes and confusion; grounds destroyed by weather and overuse; the lack of any website updates; and now the prospect of high profile teams not even bothering to enter.

And yet this should have been the best tournament yet in terms of competitiveness. The provisional league teams were whittled down before the state league and VPL teams entered. The state league teams, courtesy of the FFV pushing back the VPL season to late March, now had a pre-season alongside the VPL sides, meaning fatigue woild be less of a factor.

And yet somehow the competition was still a shambles, and Western Suburbs' surprise victory overshadowed by the calamitous organisation.

There were constant fixture changes, even before the tournament started. The tournament programme booklet was rendered all but useless. The decision to change a South fixture twice due to the Antipodes Festival was ridiculous.

The confusion about who would play where, especially in the north/west portion of the tournament, was even more confusing, after the Ralph Reserve field succumbed to the twin perils of overuse and the weather.

The effect of all this would have been lessened if they had made use of their website even in a rudimentary fashion. But since they could not even manage to update results, what hope of informing the public about the other changes.

Last year, Hellenic Cup committee chairmain Jim Massis told me that the reason the website hadn't been updated was because the person responsible was in Greece. I had made an effort, for the general public, to keep track of results as best as I could, using a google document and updating scores as I learnt of them.

It wasn't a perfect solution - at one stage I was copying notes by hand from Massis' notes - but it seemed to be reasonably popular among people wanting to get that information. No single topic/entry has even been half as popular on this blog as this post.

Massis' reassurance that the website would be running for this year's tournament was enough for me to not offer any assistance. Of course, once again, there were no updates on their site. Information could only really be gleaned by looking on soccer-forum.net, which is blocked again; the socceraust.co.uk site, which only had senior men's results, and not all of them; and the south-east results as provided on the Kingston City website by the soccer-forum user known as 'Psycho'.

The lack of reliable information was not the only issue. Despite managing to get it down to four senior groups of four teams each, the tournament still managed to force them to play matches on consecutive days. When Altona East chose to forfeit their quarter final, due to a lack of available players after what was apparently a tough encounter the day before, rather than acknowldege that there perhaps was a problem with the fixturing, the Hellenic Cup committee tried to get Brunswick City to play the match agaonst South - fortunately, they had the good sense, or the necessity of also declining the offer, and South eventually went through to the semi-finals on a forfeit, as they should have in the first place.

Massis was later apparently waiting to unleash on Altona East's refusal to play on Greek radio - fortunately for all concerned, 3XY's phone hook up wasn't working for anyone, and thus further embarassment was avoided, for the time being at least. But then came the semi-finals. Played at different venues, at different times, with different rules. While both semi-finals finished level after regular time, the match at Ralph Reserve, owing to a lack of match lights, went straight to penalties, while the game at The Grange went to extra time.

And while it's easy to point out all the things that went wrong, one is obligated perhaps to provide some possible solutions. And  while that's not usually my strong point, I should give it a stab.

Firstly, do not charge such a high entry fee. $8 for an adult ticket to watch 70 minute matches of a pre-season quality is not value for money.

Secondly, do not charge any entry, let alone $8 for the pre-tournament qualifiers. How much money do you think was going to be made from these games?

It might not be under your direct control, but do try and lean on the host clubs to stop them from price gouging on food and drink. Apparently the cost of a souvlaki at Kingston went from $8 to $10 for the final, and other food drink went up in price also. Way to piss people off.

Think about getting rid of the under 21s competition. The reserves teams below state league one play in an all ages competition, making it very difficult for them to field competitive teams made up only of players under 21. It might also ease your scheduling issues, even if it forces reserves teams to seek other games outside the tournament.

Either use your site properly, or dump it. I'm happy to offer my limited talents in running a site for you, provided I can be provided with accurate fixtures and results in a timely manner.

And lastly, don't piss off any more teams. While not necessarily your fault, it was disappointing not to see the big spending Clifton Hill in the tournament, and even the struggling AEK Waverley. Getting in non-Greek teams to fill in the gaps is counter intuitive to what this tournament is about.

Confession time, sigh, again, sigh

Despite my lambasting of the Antipodes Festival, I must admit that for the first time in ten years or so, I did attend. This was on Saturday, mind. But it was only to help hand out free passes and such. Now, with a student union politics stint behind me - for the mighty Activate/Pride/Left that wasn't Socialist rich kids or drunk ALP Left kids that worked in Lindsay Tanner's office - I knew how to hand out pieces of paper to people who did not know, nor care, what it was stuck in their hand eight tenths of the time until they'd already wandered.

If you want to read a self-aggrandising pro-Antipodes rant about how to fix up the festival, you should head here. But me, I hate the sea and everything in it, if you catch my drift. Here are some of my highlights, in my just over two hour shift.

• Les Papasavas, son of the legendary Sam Papasavas, dropped in for a chat. Him not knowing who the hell I am, let alone that I have a half-arsed South blog (and me being supposedly on a short leash owing to the chaos I can cause - even though it's all fucken justified, farken), it's probably not fair for me to relay the conversation. But apparently we're irrelevant, and we should give up. Or something. I don't know, that's what I got out of the conversation. In my brief 'Form and Content' class last Thursday, someone reacted sarcastically when I said self-deprecatingly that perhaps I'm a bit more cynical about such things (in reference to global trends in television programming - Canadian Ice Hockey Thugs in a pairs figure skating talent show of some sort, used as part of an analogy about in the same way more roads doesn't lead to less traffic - despite everyone's best hopes - more channels and more programming time doesn't lead to better television shows - but I guess you just had to be there).
• People looking at the DVD footage on the television screen, looking at the stall title which was above the small tent, and then asking what it was all about. Even after they'd read their freebie double pass.
• One person took a pass, walked, had a look, then came back and gave back her pass. Well, it's a form of recycling I guess.
• There weren't too many young Greeks, as far as I could tell. Mind you, this was around 2pm to just after 4pm. Maybe they were all sleeping, or styling their hair or something. There were plenty of people of Subcontinental and East Asian appearance, wandering through mostly after having done their shopping.
• I like Thin Lizzy's 'Boys Are Back In Town' as much as the next person, but it's hardly Greek. Even if it is played by a Greek band, or band made up of Greeks or their descendants, and therefore I didn't heed the call from the announcer to be proud of them. 
• Rhodri Payne came past with a housemate carrying a relatively tasteful amount of booze. 
• One random loon came up and had some sort of rant about the game being the most corrupt in the world, and big business and something. While he was glad to have got it off his chest, I'm not sure what difference it makes to the broader argument about whatever he was rabbiting on about.
• Antipodes volunteers - who I assume were Greek, or knew something about local Greek culture - being given free passes and asking where Bob Jane Stadium was. 
• Something about Greeks and fickleness and shit. 

I was apparently quite lucky I didn't spend any time out there on the Sunday. A lot of naff comments, including a variation of one that I hadn't heard for years, about us being Melbourne Victory now. If you were out there at all over the weekend, please feel free to vent your spleens in the comments section.

South at Antipodes again this year

I'm not a fan of the Antipodes Festival, but then, to butcher a line by Devo, I was through being cool - or in this case 'Greek', whatever the fuck that means - years ago. Still, the club will once again be holding a stall, with merchandise, memberships and other stuff. So if you're in the city this Saturday or Sunday, go past there and say hello.

This Song Comes With A Picture

Apparently my little write up for Neos Kosmos English Weekly got a run yesterday... apparently uncredited which is a minor shame, but these things happen, and I didn't really much care for the piece as a whole to be honest. Too optimistic, too much pandering to the 'Hellas is Greek' (no pun intended) demographic and not enough stuff about how awesome I am. Because that's what I do with my spare time: think about great I am. I don't have the links to the two pieces that were supposed to accompany it... they might turn up eventually.


South now and in the future

by Paul Mavroudis

In mid 2004, South Melbourne FC - or South Melbourne Hellas to her fanatical devotees, both Greek and non-Greek - was on the brink of obliteration: financial administrators had been called in, its entire squad had left and most people thought the club was a lost cause. Fast forward to 2009 however, and after overcoming several highs and lows, South Melbourne this year proudly celebrates its 50th anniversary, with a wide range of events remembering the club’s enormous achievements, but also with an eye towards the future.

The club is patiently negotiating with the Victorian Government in regards to Athletics Victoria’s and the Victorian Institute of Sport’s move to Lakeside from its current home at Olympic Park, being careful to avoid the mistakes of previous committees in signing long term contracts which end up costing the club serious money in the long run.

The redevelopment of the club’s home of Lakeside Stadium is crucial to not only the club’s survival, but also its future prosperity on and off the pitch. After many years of failing to make the most of the venue’s commercial potential, South Melbourne has started reaping the benefits of the greatest asset at its disposal.

While the exact details of the proposed $74 million redevelopment remain mostly under wraps at this stage, the details that have emerged point towards South Melbourne entrenching its place in the local area, which it has called home for the past 50 years, and through the various mergers even back to the early days of Victorian soccer.

Beginning with several new pitches, including two with synthetic surfaces – situated near the pit lane buildings near the location of the club’s former home of Middle Park – as well as a new pavilion, the club will be able to bring back a local junior presence for the first time in over a decade, as well as expand and improve the quality of facilities for the club’s women’s division.

Closer to home, while the addition of a running track will lessen the viewing experience of what is still the state’s premier purpose built soccer venue (until the completion of the Swan Street Stadium), the possible addition of a new stand on the outer side and reconfiguring of the social club space will no doubt enhance the overall experience.

South Melbourne FC is one of the Greek-Australian community’s greatest achievements; from a neglected field in Middle Park; to multiple Australian and Victorian titles; and all the way to the Maracana in 50 years. After surviving through the most difficult part of its history, the club appears reborn and reinvigorated, and ready to face the challenges that await it in the next 50 years.

SMFCTV Double Feature!

This week a double feature of SMFCTV, with the first video being the goals from the Preston game, including Goran Zoric's early candidate for goal of the year.



The 2nd part of the double bill is the game against the Melbourne Knights. Didn't believe me that the first half was crud? Well this video includes only a very brief part of it. The 2nd half is soooo much better. The video also includes a bit of Antipodes stall action as well as a post match interview with Vaughan Coveny, who finally got off the mark for this season.

South at the Antipodes Festival this week

For the first time in years South will have a presence at this weekend's Antipodes Festival. From what the official site has said, there'll be some players to meet and greet, merchandise to order and/or purchase, as well as memberships. I haven't been to the Antipodes Festival in many years, basically because it's not my kind of scene; not my kind of music and way too many people having a good time for a start, though I might to have a look at what films they're playing. I think Neos Kosmos is brining out special Antipodes issue, and there's a possibility that if James Belias likes my space filling contribution, that I'll have something there too.