Pyrrhic victory - Bentleigh Greens 1 South Melbourne 2

What an amazing night. I finished work just after midday (the Queenslanders who run the company call it an "early mark"), so I was able to get home, get changed, and not have to lug my bag of fruit and the rest of my stuff to Kingston Heath later that day. Thanks to Melbourne's magnificent public transport system, I got to Cheltenham station much earlier than I expected, so I had dinner at the Indian joint with pretty much only five star and one star online reviews (I'd give it 3.5) across the street from the station, before eventually heading to the ground.

Now while I was at the bus stop across from the station, I got notifications from at least two different people that rather than the game not being televised, it was actually being televised! Live-streamed to the dozens of people watching for reasons of so-called entertainment, and also a few thousand watching for reasons of loving the odds, not the game. Quite how Football Victoria came up with the idea to stream this match a couple of hours before kickoff, I do not know. Would it have changed my plans, but which I mean, would I have stayed home instead of making the long journey to and from Cheltenham from Sunshine? Maybe. Maybe not. But it would have been nice to have the choice, I suppose.

I did offer to that night's designated match commentator to help out on special comments, which some people may remember I did for a couple of games back in 2019 (to rave reviews, albeit mostly by people who knew me), but it turned out it was much more important to don a supporters' marshal vest, and be part of what looked like a knockoff Croatian I&D crew. Fair enough.

In the context of this particular season - where we are running the very real risk of relegation - this was perhaps the worst possible result. We won the game, which means that we have to play at least one more match that will make preparation for the relegation avoidance battle more difficult. We also won this game in extra time, which means we had to play an extra half hour in a midweek fixture, when we have a very tough game on the Sunday. We also lost two more experienced players to injury, which will make the task associated with league survival that much more difficult.

The loss of Jake Marshall (calf), our most solid defensive player, is going to be brutal at both ends of the field. Apart from his service at the defensive end, he's one of the few remaining aerial threats we have up front from corners. Worse, losing Andy Brennan (hamstring) - regardless of whether you think he's too old, or hasn't had a good season - means the loss of one of the few line breaking players at our disposal. So no Marshall, no Brennan, no Bonada, no Archibald, no Moller (for the sake of thoroughness) - it's not looking good, by which I mean, it's looking worse than before. 

And Max Mikkola's even abandoned the long throws, I'm not sure whether due to instruction, spite, or injury. Our one now only semi-dependant, near-obsolete weapon, and that's been tossed aside for... reasons. Maybe good ones, I don't know. But it was wild to see that on a narrow field - quite strange to see such a thing, considering every team has been widening their pitch where possible to nullify the long throw - Bentleigh's gone the other way. Well, I'm sure George Katsakis has his reasons.

And the loss was right there for the taking, too. We weren't bad, all things considered - we've been much worse this season - but everything in the final third was absolute rubbish. When they were ascendant in this see-sawing match, Bentleigh looked much more likely to score than we did in our ascendant phases. Eventually a cheap midfield turnover saw the Greens take the lead late, and blessed defeat was in sight. Then we had to go ruin it by scoring an equaliser. After all that, you might as well go win the game, right? Andriko Mesourouni's tap in from the one time we actually put in a proper low ball across the box, so there's that lesson to be taken out of this game. Play a striker, win the match? Madness, in its own way. 

Next game
Tomorrow (Sunday) at home against Oakleigh to round out the first half of the season. In a strange turn of events, the under 23s will actually be the curtain raiser.

Dockerty Cup draw
The draw for rounds six and seven was held on Wednesday night, where it was revealed that in the next round we will be hosting Pascoe Vale. It's the first time since 2019 - so, before the pandemic - where  we've been drawn against a side lower than the Victorian second tier. Back then it was Doveton, of course, after which we ended up signing their goalkeeper Josh Dorron. Maybe we'll get a striker out of this match? Who knows.

There were so many worse match-ups that could have happened. Knights again, of course. One of the many NPL sides still remaining. Another Greek club, for another chance at local community humiliation. North Sunshine, where I assume the People's Champ is still playing. But no, we got lucky, because we've got Pascoe Vale, currently bottom of the VPL2. Of course considering our own form and personnel issues, there's no guarantee that this will turn out well anyway, but we could have got a lot worse.

If we do get past Paco, we'll be away to the winner of Dandenong City or Brunswick City. so we're cooked anyway. And what if we did get into the national round of 32 of the Australia Cup? What would we do? Where we would we find useful non-cup tied players to bring into the squad? OK, calm down, one week at a time, we've got more immediate problems to deal with.

Someone should do something about all the problems
Normally I'm partial to the work of Neos Kosmos contributor Dean Kalimniou, who writes interesting articles about all things Hellenic, from the ancient to the now. One area, however, where I refuse to even bother reading him is when he starts talking about soccer, especially Australian soccer - not least because, as one reader of this blog commented, what does it mean for Dean to call himself a South Melbourne supporter, if Dean is never seen at any of our games?

Now I bring that up only to set up the scenario here - Kalimniou wrote an article about Preston Lions trying to trademark the name "Preston Makedonia", and the obvious consternation that would cause members of the Greek community. I'm not going to comment on that, but rather the reaction by some readers on Facebook to the article, as seen to the right. 

Sitting here as a South Melbourne Hellas fan, watching what appears to be an earnest discussion about forming and/or supporting a singular large Greek-backed club in Melbourne, for the sake of Hellenism... and I don't quite know what year I'm in. Is it 1959 all over again? Are we going to see Neos Kosmos articles arguing for the end to the squabbling and petty fiefdoms of Yarra Park and Hellenic, and pleading for unity for the sake of the glory of Hellenism? 

I can't see it happening myself, but I am a pessimist by nature.

Final thought
So our man at Football Australia is gone, and they just announced an $8 million loss. I'm sure this won't impact the National Second Division at all.

Whatever - Bentleigh Greens 0 South Melbourne 2

The team having secured a home final of some sort several weeks ago now, and then seemingly having put the cue in the rack until such time as the finals series begins, it befits your correspondent to also not give too much of a toss either. With five games left, as long as no-one does something wildly stupid getting themselves an inconvenient suspension, and as long as none of our opponents decide leg-breaking time is just around the corner, I'm content to not get too worked up about anything that happens between now and week 1 (or potentially week 2) of the finals.

Nothing that I saw on the live stream at a mate's place last Saturday gave me any reason to think we were likely to re-find our one patch of annoyingly watchable good form from midway through the season any time soon. Even Jake Marshall's wonderful goal was only possible because of two horrible attempts to get it into the box in first place; first, the corner which barely reached shoulder height of the first defender inside the box, then Jack Painter-Andrews' wayward ball off the side of his boot which just so happened to land on the chest of Big Jake, who channelled his inner Big Luke for 1-0.

The starting line-up was weird again - Ajak Riak on the bench? - but whatever. I'll grant that the team showed more pressing intent, and that it didn't look quite as poor as it did against the same team that made it look second rate back in our first meeting in 2023; but that's also down to Bentleigh also not being quite as dynamic on Saturday as they were back then. Still, the Greens had enough chances to scrounge a point at least. Quite how they stuffed up some of those chances has got me beat. I don't even really feel like looking back on the final stats to find out how many shots we had on goal.

Time to pivot

So now that the rest of the home and away season doesn't mean much to me anymore, we still have to find something to care about until the finals start. Turns out the perfect thing has been sitting under our noses the entire season. Brad Norton, who started the season on 280 competitive fixtures for this sometimes great club, is now up to 294. So the maths is pretty clear. Brad needs six games to get to 300. There are a minimum of six matches left for us this season, being five regular season, and one finals match. Brad has to play in every game to reach the mark, because we assume he wont' be back next year. (I wonder how the testimonial plans are coming along...)

Our record keeping being sketchy as fuck, reliably I can only come up with two players who have definitely reached the 300 mark for us, they being Trimmers and Steve Blair. Horsey may have got there, but some of the data from cup matches early in his time with us is not quite complete, so for now he's nominally stranded on 296.

So that's what's going to keep me occupied South-wise over the next few weeks.

Next game
Port Melbourne away on Saturday evening. Another chance to see if the school camp the Port Melbourne Plebs went on a few years back in 2018 has finally finished.

Is there a curtain raiser this week?

No. The under 21s match is scheduled for after the senior match.

Eight days a week
So not too far back, looking ahead to the rescheduled Heidelberg game set for a Wednesday, I wondered if we'd ever actually had a season where we'd played on every day of week. My instinct said that surely we hadn't, but a spare Sunday afternoon waiting for pirated sumo highlights to be uploaded afforded me the chance to go over the files and demonstrate that instinct sucks. 

I found five seasons where we'd played on each day of the week, including two within the last decade. Well, they do say that if you remember the Chris Taylor years, then you weren't really there. 

There were also several seasons with games on five days of the week, and a few with six. Usually the days not played on were Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are a certain set of conditions you need for this phenomenon to occur. You need lots of games, so a cup tournament or two helps. You also usually need to go on deep runs in those cups. Postponed and rescheduled matches are also good to have. You especially need floodlights; no floodlights means less chance for midweek games. And the big one you might not think of, public holidays. Anzac Day, Boxing Day, New Year's or Australia Day falling midweek can help you get across the line.

For the record, the five seasons are 1989, 1992/93, 1996/97, 2016, and 2017. Soon to be joined by 2023.

Final thought
Success! Random security-guy at a job-site I was at this week recognised that it was a South beanie, not a North one. Turns out he's an up and coming ref, relatively new to the local scene. Trying to explain even just the nonsense that happened last year with the grand final venue means recalling a lot of niche cultural detritus that makes one question one's life choices.

Spoiled Brats - South Melbourne 1 Bentleigh Greens 0

Sitting in second place, and still complaining. Good. 

Finding new ways towards self-loathing for a team continuing to eke out wins, despite a few injuries. Also good.

Hearing news of an old foe copping eight goals, and being unable to take much joy from that either, because the style of play of your own team is utterly joyless. You better believe that's good.

The thing is, our style of play is what it is. You can raise the problem of injuries and outs, but would it really be that much different even with everyone back in? Not really. We cop stick from non-South people for complaining about winning, but they don't watch whatever this is, week in, week out. It's hard to watch and hard to cheer for. Wins feel more like getting something where we shouldn't have, which is OK once in a while; but make it routine, and it feels like a guy always winning the lottery. 

Since I stopped really trying to do anything of note with this blog, the already limited readership has tanked. I bring that up only to make this observation: that the things I say here really have such minimal impact nowadays. And I only bring that up as a preemptive defensive stance against any accusation that my misery guts point of view here has any sort of profound influence on others in the South Melbourne community. At best it seeps out, but it's easy enough to ignore.

What's a little harder to ignore is that others feel much the same way. They're not just wondering where the goals are - currently at just 1.2 per game despite our high ladder position. They're also wondering about where the Hellas mentality is? And where is the desire to create joy? Some people can wring joy merely from good results, and that's great. But what if you want something more? I suppose if the results are enough - and cup shambles aside, they've been good - why would you actually go to a South game? No one's going to South for the food. Some people might go for the social aspect. But for the football? That's debatable. 

Why not stay home, and flick across this and whatever other game is on NPL TV? Why not just check score updates on Futbol24? Why not just come across the result by accident while scrolling through social media? If the result is all that matters to such an extreme, there's no reason to watch the game. Just send the team out there, in front of no one (not as far-fetched a concept as you'd like it to be), and play the game out for the benefit of insomniac overseas gamblers.

I'm reminded, for the first time in many, many years, of the online football manager game Hattrick, which a few South people used to play. It was a random-number generated game if ever there was one. You'd set up your team lineup, conditional subs, tactics, and then the team would play twice a week in real-time matches. There was no action to watch - you'd get intermittent textual updates about important or interesting events during a game. Sometimes, a game might be so dull, that there'd be very little t report.

Then the game would finish, you'd train players, make limited business decisions, and do the whole thing all over again. The main point of the basic game was to set up your team in such a way that the random-number generator that ran the game engine would more likely favour you over your opponent. There were other goals you could set yourself - collect flags in international friendlies, develop players for the national team - but the basic game remained the same. Crunch the numbers, figure out what the percentages were, and go.

Since I suck at maths, and refused to do my homework, I was never very good at the game. But sometimes it was obvious what your only hope was. Sometimes you would clearly be the inferior side, and all you could do was set up your team for a smash and grab. So basically the most all-round defensive set-up your training regimen would allow, and hope that the random-number generator would make you a winner.

And on those rare occasions when it happened, it was marvelous. You'd try and expend the least amount of attacking effort to get the best possible result. Almost inevitably, such wins would contain a ton of luck, and your goal(s) would often come from what were called "special events". Back then Hattrick would allocate about ten chances in each game, which the two teams would fight over. Apart from that pool of about ten chances, each team had access to a limited number of "special event" goals - based on player specialties (speed, power, heading, technique).

During a live match, the match engine would fire up a text update. Maybe one of your "quick" players had burst through the offside trap. Or just as likely, your team took a corner... one of your players with the "head" specialty rose up, and connected with the ball... oh, what a save! But the ball is still live, and it's tucked away by one of the other players fulfilling the need for the text update to come up with some scorer! 1-0 to Juniper Hill, or whatever your team was called!

If it was the league you'd take the points and take pride in potentially ruining someone's promotion run, or if it was the cup, the extra money, and roll on to next week. You'd show some good grace for your win on the forum, while your opponent might take their frustration out on the same forums, slamming "too much random" being in the game.

Anyway, such were matches between the strong and the weak, and no really cared about style, because what could you read into a clutch of prepared text updates? But here we are in the real world, playing against an absolute no-name Bentleigh side - I knew just one player of theirs, goalkeeper Bon Scott -  who'd won one game all year. And they torched us, as much as a clearly battling side could do so. We gave them the ball, and territory, and let them come at us, as they intended to do.

Meanwhile it took about 12 minutes for us to get a meaningful touch in the opposition half. Thank goodness for set piece special events to get us out of jail, again. I counted about five minutes of play by us in the first half that showed initiative; others counted about seven. The second half was not much better. Marcus Schroen was a little wasteful, but that's about all you could say. We are fortunate in that our league opponents so far have been more than wasteful. Surely it can't last?

Next game
Anzac Day eve at home against Port Melbourne, kickoff at the non-overwhelming public interest time of 7:30pm.

Is there a curtain-raiser?
No. The women play tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) at McIvor Reserve in Yarraville.

AGM coming up
They tried to keep this very quiet. Goodness knows why, it's not like anything stupid is going to happen. Do they not want a quorum? Ah, memories. Anyway, mark down Wednesday April 26th in your calendar;  the SMH AGM is at 7pm, and the SMFC AGM is at 8pm. 

On the streams
A little bit more like it
Flicked across to Oakleigh vs Port for a bit. Not the best standard of game - and if you think we score a high proportion of goals from set pieces, Oakleigh's not far behind - but what stuck out was the intent from from teams to play, and play quickly. And play quickly didn't play panicky. It meant see an option, and go for it, don't let the defence get set. Pass and move. 

Final thought
This seems to come up every year now, if not twice a year. Sometimes it's our fault, more often than not it's theirs. Saturday was particularly farcical; at least at Kingston Heath we have the excuse of the painted grass fiasco from a few years back. But you'd think Bentleigh would be bursting at the seams to get some sort of mileage out of their away kit, whatever it is. Instead we had the farce of ourselves in a dark royal blue, and the visitors in a dark green that was even darker on the front, on a gloomy day. The cherry on top was the refs, who you think might have something to say about this, being in all black.

Look, if you're some two-bit club near the bottom of the pyramid, you can say that these things happen, and people would understand, albeit begrudgingly. But this is meant to be the de facto national second tier. Against better judgment, it's broadcast all over the internet. People bust their arses to make it look and feel presentable, and then Bentleigh just decide to make it look more amateurish than it really is. AT least the Lakeside lights are a bit more than passable, even if they don't all fire up. Bentleigh did the same to away to Oakleigh - who wear navy blue, and who's ground is not so well lit - earlier in the season, so clearly no one cares, and nothing is going to change.

At least we'll be out of this league soon enough, and hopefully joining something with a bit more professionalism, and a tad more aesthetic sense.

Long throws to the rescue again - South Melbourne 3 Bentleigh Greens 2

At least for the past few weeks I've been able to palm off waning motivation for writing this stuff each week onto the fact that I have actual work. Previously that was election work that was kind of varied and interesting, and now it's an extension of election work that is repetitive and monotonous as all fuck. I get up at 5:30 in the morning, get home around 4:30 in the afternoon, and somewhere in the middle of that I work seven and half hours, six days a week, shoving senate ballot papers through a scanner and a creaser, which sometimes work well. After that, there's home business, after which there isn't much time to do anything else. My goodness, it's almost like I'm a normal person. I miss being a career student, and its attendant life of leisure. 

Anyway, one thing which has remained constant is consensus that there is a diminishing interest in all things South Melbourne - not from me, mind, but from pretty much everyone else. This isn't new, and we have all moaned and despaired for a good 17 or 18 years or so now. Sure there's an argument to be made that's even worse now, with even former rusted-ons looking for reasons not to turn up. It doesn't help that the club does give them reasons not to attend - inconvenient match times and lack of beer outside the social club cited as two recent examples - but on the whole, it's not a new problem. People have been saying the same or similar for the past nearly 20 years, and those of us still consistently attending will keep saying until we are no longer there to say it ourselves. 

In short, we keep learning the lesson that being loyal is like being pregnant, in that you are until you aren't. Me, I blame streaming more than most other options as being responsible for league-wide declines in attendances, interest, and general banter. Soccer-forum's dead, Twitter is dead, and like our club, everyone at this level has put their effort into standby mode until the National Second Division happens. And yet South supporters still have an old fashioned web forum like it's 2002. It may not be going strong, but it's still going, which basically sums up everything

What's somewhat tragic about all of this is that our support is becoming more diminished even as the team is having its best run of results since 2017. That's not quite the same as saying that the team is plating great football - but it is winning a lot of matches, even if these wins are sometimes/often painful to endure. 

Cue the howls of derision from opposition fans who watch us as we despair over a team clear on top of the table. They have a point, it's true. Results wise, things are better for South then they have been for some time. And it's also true that South fans tend to have a reflex that nothing is ever good enough, even with the allowance that there is an abhorrence (from some, if not all South fans) at the methods we're using in getting these results, and the apparently huge amount of luck also being amassed along the way. But most opposition fans also don't watch our games in full, so they're no more likely to be reliable interpreters of South's 2022 season up until this point than South fans with all their own biases and hangups.

A case in point - how do you make sense of what happened last Saturday night? At times we were comprehensively outplayed. Once again it was revealed that we have a weakness against teams that keep it on the deck, like Bentleigh, Avondale, and Oakleigh do. 

It's not just the keeping it on the deck that causes us issues - it's also that these teams play keepings-off well, not turning it over cheaply. We rely too much on teams giving us the ball back in midfield, so that we can quickly release Mikkola or Webb on the counter attack. Teams who play short passing games to get around our insipid central midfield presence, will keep on having a field day. And if we do win the ball back in defense, we tend to just pass it around the back before launching it to Sawyer. We keep trying to use Schroen as a midfield distributor/link man/play breaker-upper, and it doesn't work because he's almost none of those things, except in very specific circumstances - which is pretty much him facing the goal we're going to, or where he can turn on to his left.

And yet, with the exception of Oakleigh, most of these teams have also managed to repeatedly also concede a barrage of goals against us. Our team has scored in every single match this season, which is astonishing considering how apparently awful we are. Perhaps much as we are deficient in all sorts of ways, we have managed to expose that many opponents are also deficient in one specific area, and that is in defending set pieces. Remarkably, the particular set piece that opposition sides are having difficulty defending against us is long throws. 

I'm not sure if Max Mikkola's throw-in technique is legal, even it's surely more legal than all those dinky little drop at the feet throw-ins that are obviously foul throws. I don't know if his technique - or any long throw-in specialist's for that matter - is teachable. At some point late in the game, a Bentleigh player attempted a long throw, which wasn't too bad for what may have been a first try. But then Ben Djiba chickened out from trying the same after Mikkola was subbed off, and all you could do was laugh. 

As nice as it was to win, even if two and a half of our three goals were a result of the long throws, much time was spent o the terraces trying to figure out why Bentleigh goalkeeper Pierce Clark and the Bentleigh defence were having so much trouble defending the long throw in. Was it the angle? Was it dip, was it the lack of pace on them, compared to a corner kick? At face value, it seems pretty straightforward - a ball is thrown in a straight line, at a relatively flat trajectory. And yet time after time, Bentleigh floundered. The third goal was the was epitome of this failure, because Clark ran more or less underneath Mikkola's long throw, wherein the ball landed on an unmarked Harry Sawyer's head.

At the other end of the ground, Javier Diaz Lopez was making save after save, all of which got turned into a well-meaning though ultimately depressing compilation video, which showed how lucky we were in the greater scheme of things at both ends of the ground. Every week I say it's not a sustainable way to a title. Most weeks it turns out I'm wrong. As long we keep winning, I'm OK with being wrong.

Next game

Tomorrow night at Somers Street against Melbourne Knights. 

Final thought

Time to get some insurance for Max Mikkola's arms.

Random number generator - Bentleigh Greens 2 South Melbourne 3

Everyone South Park fan remembers the Russell Crowe episode. Well Friday night for me was a bit like - not the fighting bit, but the other more boring bit, of trying to watch something and having to do it across multiple screens and locations for all sorts of stupid reasons.

I hate missing games. If a game's on interstate and I can't go, I cut my losses and make do. If I have a competing commitment, same deal. But pretty much any other reason just annoys me. I'm not going to blame Bentleigh for everything that saw me not attend Friday night's game, but they did set things in motion. Bentleigh's Friday night home games usually kickoff at 8:15pm. For someone coming from the western suburbs by public transport, it's already a huge slog to get there, but you do it because you love your team, and you have nothing better to do.

On the way back, it's an even bigger slog, and you're very lucky to get home by midnight. Getting back means first catching the last bus from across the road near Moorabbin DFO. That's easy to do with an 8:15pm kickoff. For some reason though, Friday night's match kicked off at 8:30pm, and you know how these things go, delayed kickoffs, extended injury time for all sorts of nonsense like automated sprinklers goings off during the game. And all of a sudden, that long but manageable post-game bus transfer becomes very dicey.

Which again, I'm not here to blame Bentleigh, because they can start games at any time they like within the established rules, and they're not obliged to consider the feelings of the two or three people who may be crazy enough to take public transport out to an NPL Victoria game. But looking at the post-game public transport options on a couple of websites, and I just decided to chuck it in before the game. Never mind that after tweeting about it, several people offered me lifts back to Cheltenham station, which I appreciated, but seriously: I was just like, fuck it. Those 15 minutes crossed some sort of psychological threshold for me, where I'd just stay home and watch it on whatever free screen I could scrounge up.

Rail replacement buses on the Sunbury line also made the decision not to go, just that little bit easier; a decision further justified by an experience the next day with a shambles of a rail replacement service at North Melbourne station.

Anyway, I decided to warm up for festivities by getting a handle on the NPL TV service on my laptop, while also assuming that the YouTube back up option that was available last week would be there in case anything went wrong. Well, the YouTube backup has already been dispensed with, and so by round 2 we are flying by the seat of our Cluch pants. Things did not get off to a good start when watching the Knights-Avondale stream (which started at 7:30pm), with the stream not working. Even better, there appears to be no one manning the NPL TV social media accounts to let people know that there is a problem with the stream, and that someone is working to fix it.

The cameraman at Eastern Lions vs Oakleigh Cannons had a "have you
 ever seen anything fluffier than a cloud" moment during the first half.

Some of the issues with NPL TV are not specific to this service. Poor camerawork is not the fault of the streaming service. Some grounds - I'm looking at you Gardiners Creek Reserve - seem to just have shocking internet connections. But the stuttering, buffering product on offer so far - seldom so bad as to make you switch off, but persistent enough that it feels like an essential part of the product - is unpleasant at best. Alleged poorer picture quality aside, I found the YouTube option from previous seasons much more pleasant to watch.

Well, we could be glad at least that these kinds of issues didn't seem to affect the South game so much. But a new problem... you cannot pause a stream, and then resume from where you paused it. This is just madness. I had to go pick up my brother from his job, which is a good 15-20 minute round trip, and had no way of stopping the game and picking up from where I left off. So I'm watching this game on my computer, I've seen a goal each way - what was our goalkeeper doing by the way? - and around about 8:50 I'm on way to Sunshine Marketplace. 

Ten minutes later, I'm outside the smokers' exit at Sunshine Marketplace waiting from my brother, and I'm catching up with the goal we've scored from a penalty. That part of the app is good, and will be especially useful at halftime breaks at the footy when you just want to catch up on the goals. But despite offering the chance to watch how each and every corner is won, there is no option (yet) to see a penalty decision. Seems like a bit of an oversight.

Back home, and my brother having bought another Google doohickey with his JB Hifi employee discount, for the first time ever I was chrome-casting. I can't remember how much of the game I missed because of driving, logging in to NPL TV on the lounge room PC, casting, etc, but it worked well enough until the end of the game. Which we won! Well, we should be happy about that, and yet...

A word from the γκρινιάρη faction 

Anyway, some thoughts on the game itself. Going off the grand sample of two matches - one whose profitable analysis was broken by singing, jokes, and reconnecting with lost souls, and the other by living the streaming life - it looks like 2022 has brought the pleasant change of the team having more than one mode of play. 

Most of the time under this current regime, it has been one mode - defend really, really deep, stack the defense, and hope to pinch a result off a couple of chances. This ultra risk averse style of play gave the impression that despite being impotent going forward, that we were at least steady and hard to break down going the other way. Well, duh. If you play six or seven people in a defensive set-up, you should be harder to score against than if you tried to take the game on. That's not tactics, that's just sheer weight of numbers obscuring one's lack of tactical nous or ambition.

This year it appears that we've added an attacking mode, one where we press higher up the field, try to create turnovers in more meaningful areas, and generally look more keen on scoring than we've been accustomed to over the past few years. That's nice. It's even nicer that it appears to be Plan A. It's a tactic that works well in NPL Victoria. This is a league full of players who hit the panic button as a reflex, just knocking the ball forwards at first instinct because they (possibly correctly) do not trust their own collective first touch. 

(to be a little bit fair, the reluctance of players in this comp to take a touch and take control is partly due to everyone watching the games - club administrators, coaches, and fans - who will collectively turn on any player who tries to does not adhere to rugby tactics in "dangerous" areas and who stuffs it up)

Passages of broken play are so frequent, that if you have a talented enough personnel to take advantage of such circumstances, you can roll the dice on your random number generator making such an environment, and generally come up trumps. What happens when you come up against a team that not only has talent, but also even a moderate of tactical awareness and capability, well I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. But while it's not a style that will likely you see win the minor premiership (which still means nothing), if you do well enough to stumble into the finals, playing the random number generator game in a higher intensity finals match, with more adrenaline and more mistakes, just might see your team win a championship.

Heaven help us and Australian soccer in general if that happens, but that possibility is still a whole 25 games away. We haven't even played 25 league games in the past two seasons.

Besides which, the other mode, the super annoying stack the defence mode, is still with us. Which is not such a problem when it's the last ten minutes or so of a game you're leading and you're trying to play the prcentages. Two week in a row we've gone super defensive way too early. So far we've been fortunate that the Bergers were underdone and ripe for the picking, and that Jai Ingham was able to pull a rabbit out of the hat to give us the win with only our a third shot on target for the night. That's right, three shots (the header from our only corner for the game, the penalty, and Nugget Ingham's missile), three goals, ruthless and unsustainable efficiency. 

If the defensive retreat - which lasted for a good 25 consecutive minutes in the second half - was coach's direction, that's alarming. Even if it wasn't his choice, just as alarming is that no one on the field was able to show the necessary leadership to retain possession and push up the field, so that maybe Bentleigh would have to work harder for both territory and possession. To this ignoramus it wasn't like watching ice hockey, where you've sent out our your first line to do its attacking work, and then a defensive line to kill the game for a bit before the attacking line rejoins the fray.

That works well in ice-hockey, because there's unlimited interchange, but soccer is limited to making three changes. I suppose we're fortunate that one of our subs eventually made a difference.

Next game 

Melbourne Knights at home on Friday night. 

Looking ahead to 2023 already

Along with the Reggio Calabria Club and Port Melbourne's SS Anderson Reserve, Lakeside has been designated as an official training site for the Women's World Cup next year. Don't know if that will mean improved player amenities at Lakeside, but I assume it will probably mean we'll end up playing elsewhere during that time - and not AAMI Park either. Well, that's for the people of the future to figure out.

AGMs this Sunday

A reminder for those eligible to attend, the SMH and SMFC AGMs are on Sunday in the social club, with the SMH AGM kicking off proceedings at 11am.

Final thought

Another six points for Hellas!

You win some, you lose some, you draw lots - South Melbourne 1 Bentleigh Greens 1

There is an important issue facing South at the moment, and I don't think it is getting the coverage that it warrants. No, it is not the lack of a striker in the squad, as we struggle to score any goals from situations that are not penalty related. Neither it it the impending doom facing South as our fanbase becomes ever more blasé about their connection to the club, and even the hardest of the hardcore begin drifting away from the club.

(And here's a newsflash from early 2006 - rather than come up with reasons why they no longer want to support the club and then leave, most people leave and then come up with reasons for why they no longer come. Good luck trying to reason with people who take that approach.)

No, the most important question facing South Melbourne right now is whether we should get the Trust to fix one of the defective PA speakers in grandstand. On the one hand, it's a matter of professionalism and service - if something in the arena part of Lakeside Stadium is defective, then it's the Trust's responsibility to fix it. On the other hand, it's made the generally terrible pre-match and half-time music played in the grandstand that bit more tolerable. Tina Turner's version of "The Best" sees her voice disappear into the aether, turning the song into a karaoke tune; B2K's lascivious "Bump, Bump, Bump" has almost all its singing obliterated, leaving only "Yeah!" and "Bump, Bump, Bump". It's like a real time episode of Classic Albums, where a version of the mix is being played without the vocals; except you don't have Lindsay Buckingham, Butch Vig, or Brian Eno there to fiddle with knobs to bring up the vocals.

Anyway, the situation is like this. Our only recognised, fully-fledged senior striker (Harry Sawyer) is out for the next six weeks, at least. Our next best senior option, Josh Barresi, isn't a striker. Our best option after that (and this is really a guess as to who that might be), is Marcus Schroen, who'll probably be having surgery in a couple of weeks to fix up the mess his upper body's in after copping that somehow unpunished tackle against Avondale. For whatever reason, Yianni Panakos, starring in the under 21s, is not considered ready to go yet in the seniors. Every other possible option - Gerrie Sylaidos, Henry Hore, Marco Jankovic, Zac Bates - is not even close to being a genuine forward. And yes, there is a difference between players whose job includes getting forward, from those whose job it is to be a forward.

Speaking of which, does anyone have the phone number for 2012 club golden boot winner Shaun Kelly?

But given that no one expected us to be this high up the ladder or even remotely this competitive; and given that we go into pretty much every game thinking a point would be good; and given the fact that this has become a season of draws across the league - why is everyone so disappointed when we come away with a point against opponents who we all think are much better than us? It is that great paradox of 2021 South Melbourne Hellas that we are somehow worse than all the good teams in this league, who are also bad and/or overrated; that being in the top three at the midway point of the season, when few of us had any expectation that we could manage more than scraping into sixth place, is also a terrible place to be. It's classic having your cake and eating it too, which is stupid of course, but also shows that some people still care enough to work themselves into all sorts of crazy knots about this club.

I won't bore you with blow-by-blow details of last week's game. It was entertaining, we were the better team except for our utter impotence up front, and we once again played around with the starting lineup. So what did we learn from this week's experimentation? That we have multiple players that can take players on, that can dribble. Hore, Sylaidos, and Perry Lambropoulos, all moving forward, attacking opponents, putting them on the back foot. It helps that Bentleigh are an attacking team, and comparatively weak at the back, but still - how good was it to see a South team showing no fear, or at least less fear?

It helps in this particular case that without a big forward like Sawyer to lump it forward to, that the tactic of lumping it forward was dead in the water from the start in this match. It forced the team to play the ball on the ground, and to move the ball more methodically up the field without the safety valve of a long-ball option. Would that possibly work with Sawyer in the team? You'd like to think so, but it requires courage to take that chance that your boys can actually play. 

I know that defence is important, and that some people (the coach included) would be happy enough to create a solid enough base, and therefore to grind out results, but what if... we didn't have to be so extremely defensive? And what if the answer to scoring goals lies not exclusively with whoever's unlucky enough to be our one forward, but with several players getting into advanced positions?

(and how do we know that our defence is actually any good, if all we do is stack so many players in it and put them so deep that their sheer weight of numbers makes them hard to break down?)

And Perry Lambropoulos - what a revelation (maybe)! I know it won't be like that every week, but think of how many coaches he's had over the past few seasons across three different clubs. Were they all burying him at a full-back position instead of playing him regularly on a wing? 

It sucked that we conceded from Bentleigh's first chance after we had so much of the play, but we pushed on and scored from the penalty spot, maybe found a legit free kick taker (Hore), and maybe should have had another penalty. In a just world, where there still is such a thing as accidental handball, that was not a penalty; but in this modern world, where everything is handball, it's kinda surprising that it wasn't given. So it goes.

The last ten minutes was a cavalcade of chances at both ends. Daniel Clark stuffed up a great one on one chance. Kieran Dover smashed the ball against the crossbar from point blank range for Bentleigh. And right on full time, Daniel Clark had a shot from about eight yards out right in front, which he ended up hitting low and hard right at the mess of players on the goal line, instead of into the back of the net. And then it turns out it wasn't Clark, but rather Henry Hore, from whom I expect better.

Some people were reminded of this game from 2012, and that's fair enough, but at this point we're half way through the season, in a better spot on the ladder than I think even the most optimistic of us ever thought we'd be, and we don't have semi-famous somebodies telling us to bring our brand of passionate support to an A-League team. Maybe that's because our passion is not what it was, or there's no longer the veneer of there being enough to bother trying to cajole us into boosting the pathetic or otherwise numbers of our local A-League franchises.

Of more immediate concern is that the bar in the social club needs to sort itself out just a smidge by having an ample selection of essential drinks on hand. That would be good. How do you not know where the dark rum is? Why is there no raspberry cordial on hand for those who want a raspberry lemonade? If the club's going to die from loneliness, they could at least have the drinks the few of us left enjoy.

Next game

It's meant to be Heidelberg at home on Saturday night; yet the latest covid outbreak and its attendant restrictions on public gatherings may scupper or alter those plans, and possibly the FFA Cup fixture against Eastern Lions the week after as well. Check your local guides for details I suppose.

Women's report

So, I'm asking for forgiveness in advance for the comparative spitefulness of this report. I did not watch this game in the flesh, for reasons which will become clear soon enough. I had a late lunch at home, and jumped on the train towards Southern Cross. The train went through the loop instead of direct to Southern Cross, which normally irks me, but here it was a blessing of sorts, because it meant that I could watch more of the South senior women playing against Alamein on the live stream, before having to pause the stream so I could get to the tram stop on Collins Street, because who wants to be one of those pedestrians walking around the city while staring at a screen? 

Now I don't know much about Alamein this year, except to say that I don't think they're one of the contenders for the championship; certainly that's not a term I've seen attached to them as this year. South's women meanwhile, as the senior men were for a little bit until recently, are sitting on top of the table, without having set the world on fire. How that's happened I'm not exactly sure, because I've watched less of them, and paid less attention to their league this year than I would have liked, but it is what it is. What I do know about the South senior women (thanks to social media) is that they keep bringing in new players (some returning, some genuinely new), so that it looks like whatever youth development policy may have been put in train recent times (can we even say that after they didn't play for more than a year?) has fallen by the wayside.

With that much talent and experience and firepower on the books, you'd expect South to comfortably win games against mid-range opponents (no disrespect is meant) like Alamein, and to do so with a style befitting the quality on the park. Well, that first half was awful to watch from us. The team looked slow, sluggish, unfit, sloppy, and one dimensional. We played with a back three, which I assume was done to overload the midfield and overwhelm the opposition with numbers going forward. Instead, very poor passing and the one dimensional game plan of hitting the ball long toward the corners, saw us create almost nothing of value in the first half. We even fell behind, when the plucky visitors scored a penalty, after having already tested Melissa Barbieri from long range.

Then came the one good bit of work from us in the first half, where we played the ball through the middle with some good passing, ending with Reona Omiya levelling the score. By the time the second half was starting, I had reached the ground, but I heard the death cries of a wounded walrus coming from the arena, and so I decided to stay in the social club and watch the second half of the game on the stream in there, while drinking and being briefed on ongoing club matters by the president. From what I could tell, the team looked a little better in the second half, and scored a couple of goals from tidy one on one finishes - but they'd want to be a lot crisper if they want to stay at the top of the ladder.

On the streams

Scrapping together complex narratives based on about five minutes of footage

I care less and less for the rest of this league, but sometimes you're at a loose end in terms of, I don't know, you have this magical e screen at your disposal with limitless (OK, not limitless, limitless for all intents and purposes) entertainment and educational possibilities, and instead of watching Law & Order (original version) clips, you decide to branch out into the wonderful world of NPL livestreams. Some of you may do this without even putting a bet on one of the games, instead just watching it to cease the thoughts racing in your head, wondering if you're one of the likely candidates working at the private security compound who is going to get sacked from your job taking staples out of old documents. (Spoiler alert: you will be). I can't remember exactly what I was doing at the time. Maybe I was parked in a loading bay at Sunshine Marketplace waiting to pick up my brother after he finished work. I switched on to a livestream, checking into see the live scores, hoping for a good finish to a game, and as many favourable results for our ends as possible. 

The good finish at whatever time it was at the time was Knights vs Eastern Lions. The Knights looked mediocre, which is absolutely their right - after all, they can't play us every week, and it's hard to get motivated for games against teams that aren't South. It's hard enough apparently for South fans to care about games involving South, so I suppose we should be glad that someone cares about us. even if it has to be non-South fans. The Lions also looked mediocre, bless their hearts, but they fight and scrap, and they're on a budget likely several order of magnitude lower than pretty much everyone else in the competition, which will make it extra embarrassing for us should they beat us in our cup tie next week, covid permitting. And what a finish out of nowhere for Lions to win the game here away from home.

In another example of trying to make "You Can't Play South Every Week" the league's official slogan, on Sunday evening I was made aware of former South goalkeeper Rory Brian - he, currently of Avondale, and of the one handed penalty save heroics against us the previous week - making an absolute howler which led to Heidelberg equalising, and eventually splitting the points. Go and find it. Find it and try and make sense of it. I saw it, and didn't even laugh; rather I was sickened by it, and in turn sickened by this whole shambles of a league. 

Final thought

Preston - I knew it was them! Even when it was the Knights, I knew it was them! 

Anyway, keep up with the QR code sign-ins, mask up where necessary, and get tested if you have any covid symptoms.

News! Sweet, nourishing news!

Finally some solid sense of when local soccer might come back, as well as in what form. Hold on to that feeling for as long as you can though, because you don't know when it will be taken away from you by irresponsible Essendon players or people attending poorly thought out house parties.

So the date for resumption of NPL Victoria is the weekend of July 25/26th. According to this Joey Lynch article (which is well worth a read), the recent spike in corona virus infections and the associated re-implementation of some pandemic restrictions won't have any effect on the resumption of local soccer, but we'll see. 

The consensus resumption format *seems* to be that in the men's NPL competition there will be eight more rounds played to complete the home and away season, which with the five already completed rounds, will at least set up a situation where everyone has at least played each other once. After that there will be an eight team finals component, of who knows what format.

This proposed return to action has been complicated by the fact that Bentleigh Greens have withdrawn from the rest of the 2020 season, As long as they pay their fiscal dues for this year, they get to keep their spot, and it seems like there won't be any relegation anyway.

As to what happens to Bentleigh's first five results, one assumes they'll be annulled and each team granted a bye from now on, but until such time as Football Victoria clarifies the situation all I can d is speculate. No official word either on what happens to members of Bentleigh's squad now that there's no senior team for them to play for in 2020. The talk is that at least some will try their luck in the state leagues.

No word either from what I can on the status of and/or existence of a mid-season transfer window, or whether the Dockerty Cup will continue - though the persistence of the latter for 2020 does seem to be something that is being mentioned.

As for the NPL women, they're looking at a 14 match home and away season with a top four finals series. Unlike the men, the women's NPL had not yet started before the pandemic lockdown. South is still signing players up for that competition, and in some respects it all looks a bit more straightforward on that front, for the time being at least.

In terms of whether fans will be allowed to attend games, my hunch - and it really is only a hunch - is that it's not bloody likely, especially with the recent spike in corona virus cases. Quite how anyone will enforce a ban on spectators at games in open parks - such as those used by many women's teams, and of course many state league teams - is anyone's guess though.

Football Victoria plans to continue streaming some games, but that doesn't mean there's any guarantee that we'd be a team being covered. Still, I assume the club itself would endeavour to do whatever is possible to provide streams of games.

And there's also this...
Interesting news emerged over the weekend that along with a reformatted broadcast deal, the A-League will move to a predominantly winter season from next year, for at least the next couple of seasons. Whether this is a temporary move in order to deal with the effects of COVID-19 and the 2022 Qatar World Cup - which will be played in November-December - or a move that the A-League will be in for the long haul, remains to be seen.

I have my doubts about the sensibleness of this change in direction, but that's for those who are more engaged with the A-League - and those who are trying to get promotion and relegation up - to deal with. What hasn't been explained yet - not that I was expecting to have been sorted out so early in the piece - is how this will effect the leagues below the A-League.

From a Victorian perspective, one assumes that there will be little problem in terms of accommodating the match day use of AAMI Park between Victory, Heart City, Storm, and the Rebels. Where Victoria Patriots Western United end up is an ongoing problem, and while I don't think that any of the local A-League teams will end up at Lakeside at times during the winter, it will be interesting to see if any attempt is made by the government to accommodate them on the off-chance that AAMI Park is double-booked by another sporting event or a concert.

Of course there's also the issue of training venues which some local A-League teams are sorted for (City, United), and one which still isn't (Victory). Again, we will wait and see.

Up until now the tail-end of the summer-based A-League seasons have already extended into the start and/or end of the NPL Victoria (and before that, Victorian Premier League) and state league seasons. In the beginning, when the A-League had an August-September start, the competition would finish in early February. In more recent seasons, as the A-League has pushed back its season starting point, the competition has gone all the way into May. That is much like the National Soccer League had done its business during its summer seasons, with both competitions crossing well over into the start of grassroots soccer seasons across the country.

Where this becomes relevant to us is scheduling. Some states - I believe South Australia is one such case - does not allow local competitions to run against Adelaide United fixtures. That's easy enough to do when you have just one A-League team in your city, but also where there isn't a holdover collective of clubs who are not fans of your city's A-League team representatives. The multiple teams issue in particular is going to be very interesting to see play in Victoria in terms of scheduling A-League matches.

On any given week, there could be two A-League games in Melbourne, with limited premium time-slots available. Saturday afternoons are out, because that's already taken up by the vast majority of senior men's soccer teams. Sunday afternoons have a variety of junior and women's competitions in action, though most will be over by early afternoon in the event that our local A-League teams choose to go with a late Sunday afternoon kickoff.

Friday nights, apart from often being the AFL's marquee night (with most of those games being played in Melbourne), will also go up against the majority of NPL senior men's games. These Friday night senior men's games have come about sometimes from long habit, and some from recent attempts to avoid clashing with junior NPL Sunday fixtures.

Will the A-League seek to create rules in cities like Melbourne, which have multiple teams, preventing local soccer from clashing with local A-League fixtures? Or will most teams - including the increasing numbers of state league teams which have gone with Friday nights as their preferred home game timeslot - simply move out of the way when there's a clash? It will be interesting to see how the A-League goes about trying to make this work, considering that some of the accompanying rhetoric around the move to winter is about coming into line with/connecting with grassroots soccer and its participants.

(keep in mind that I don't buy the angle that there is any great hostility toward the A-League from most local soccer people - apart from the usual suspects - just indifference)

The switch to winter doesn't seem to bode well for the future of the perennially embattled Y-League. Will they persist with their too-short, budget summer season? Or will it also move to a full-length winter season winter, where you would then assume the A-League (senior) NPL reps would leave their respective comps? Or will the concept gets dumped entirely - with A-League youth teams (and I assume senior players who miss out on A-League selection) going on about their business in the NPL competitions?

There's also no word on what will happen to the W-League, and whether it will also move to winter. If the W-League moves to winter, it jeopardises its favourable alignment with the American NWSL. If the W-League does move to winter, it will probably see most capable W-League players move overseas to the more lucrative NWSL, as well as then sucking up even more players from local WNPL competitions to fill out the numbers.

All in all, a lot of things to ponder for those of us in the second (and third and fourth) tiers, even though public consideration of our relationship to this change seems to have been negligible at best, except as possible customers for a competition heading into waters left uncharted for 30 years.

Wrong about everything - South Melbourne 3 Bentleigh Greens 2

I can't quite figure it out, but perhaps we've just got to accept that most of us are going to be wrong about this team and most of these players on a weekly basis, and maybe even on a minute-by-minute basis.

Certainly this season is taking its emotional toll on some of our supporters, in ways quite different from 2018. Where in 2018 one (retrospectively) spent the entire season after round 3 gearing up for a relegation battle, halfway through this season we've been through the highs of two wins in the first three games, an erratic stretch of form which saw the loss of a senior coach, still more erratic form which saw us flirt with the bottom three thanks to dropping points to most of our relegation battling compadres, and yet over the past three weeks have knocked over three of the best credentialed teams in the league.

Now to be fair, some of our supporters are more susceptible to violent mood swings than others. But this season has had a knack of overturning the expectations of even the most astute commentators. Every player is wrong, every tactic is wrong, every signing is wrong, every board maneuver in regards to coaching, player management, and selection is wrong, until things just fall into place and it works. That's not to imply imminent ascendancy for this team, because the next two weeks against bottom half teams could see us drop back into old habits and poor results. But if you're hoping for grinding 1-0 wins for the rest of the year and a seventh place finish, this might not be the season for you. You should instead settle down in front of the heater and watch videos of (stereotypical) Chris Taylor coached South sides.

Though it would be nice to keep a clean sheet, something we've only done twice in the league all season.

Losing Brad Norton to injury early on (and here's hoping it's not a serious one, even though Brad had no hesitation in subbing himself off immediately) wouldn't have helped our cause, especially since he was replaced by the Much Maligned Perry Lambropoulos on the left. Having lost his spot at right full-back to Ben Djiba, Perry is basically in the squad now as cover. One person's misfortune (Luke Adams) plus another's (Brad Norton) meant where one might otherwise play Kristian Konstantinidis on the left, Perry gets a go instead.

Perry's inclusion did stymie our ability to make progress on the left, as Lambropoulos is mich less of an attacking threat than Norton or any of the rest of our full-back options. This meant Pep Marafioti had to work a lot harder on the left in the first half, and he wasn't having a great game before that of Norton's going off anyway.

Having shown some positive signs and an ability to match it with Bentleigh in the first 20 minutes or so, we were overwhelmed bu a superior side for the rest of the half. The Greens were getting numbers forward, and their opening the scoring looked inevitable, except for Nikola Roganovic pulling out some superb saves. Unfortunately another routine defensive blunder from Kristian Konstantinidis cost us a goal.

It was his third goal-costing mistake in four matches, and each of the mistakes was easily avoidable. Against the Magic he could've easily hoofed the ball upfield instead of trying to dribble his way on his own byline; against Heidelberg, he gave away a needless and reckless penalty; and here against Bentleigh, as a cross was cleared by our defenders to the edge of the box and the rest of the defensive line moved up the field, KK decided to sit on the goal-line, keeping the Bentleigh attacker onside when the ball was sent into the box again.

And yet somehow we've managed to not lose any of those games. Go figure.

At least someone's happy - for now. Photo: Cindy Nitsos.

We equalised early enough in the second half from a goal so simple in its execution you wonder why teams don't try it more often. The flu-stricken Gerrie Sylaidos got free on the right edge of the box, shot low and hard across at the Bentleigh keeper, and the resultant spill sat up beautifully for Pep Marafioti to belt home from close range.

Now I'm a Negative Nancy at the best of times, so while the crowd lifted from that unexpected goal, I said to the younger lads behind me (and they can vouch for this), "enjoy the five minutes while it lasts". Well, I was wrong about that, because we held on to the 1-1 scoreline for just three minutes, as Matt Thurtell raced through on goal unimpeded and slammed his shot into the back of the net.

Oh well, being level was fun while it lasted. And how nice would it have been if Marafioti or "he of the hamstrings which are always about to snap" Zac Bates could've slotted one of their chances soon after we had equalised. Anyway, at 2-1 down it's not like it was over, but I felt like we always had more goals to concede and not necessarily any way to match that. Well, I was wrong about that too, as Marafioti - who was playing on the right on the second half - decided to take a speculative low shot from the edge of the box, which took a deflection before settling in the back of the net.

All of a sudden it was 2-2, one felt that anything could happen, even if the most likely scenario was still us losing the game somehow. Before the game I would've been happy with a point, and at 2-2 with about twenty minutes to play, I would still have been happy with that point.

When Jake Marshall (2019's most improved South Melbourne player by a long way) got subbed off, I have to say I was a bit confused and concerned. But looking at the replay - especially of Bentleigh's second goal - and thinking it about it a bit more dispassionately, I think I understand the logic of it; even though Marshall wasn't having a poor game per se, Matt Thurtell was burning past him with pure speed too often.

But then we got the winner thanks to a corner and Kostas Stratomitros being in the right place at the right time. Say what you will about Marcus Schroen's corner taking this season - and it has often been dire - it has also occasionally been good, and when it has we have looked very dangerous from these situations.

Here's the thing - and I may have mentioned it in a previous post about Bentleigh, or I may not have, I can't recall and I'm not going to back and look for it - as good as they are in an attacking sense, they are more suspect defensively this season. Now let's put that in perspective: most NPL defences once you start putting pressure on them look suspect. But Bentleigh have looked particularly vulnerable to me, and the fact that we actually had a go made things happen.

It's a tautology of sorts, I know, but there's no use dying wondering. The corner we scored from? It came because Nick Krousoratis put in a crap ball into the box and the Bentleigh defender freaked out and booted it out behind his own goal line. That's the standard of pretty much every team in this comp once they sense there's any danger, no matter how remote.

Did we ride our luck? Did we look shaky when Bentleigh threw everything at us in the last few minutes? Well yes, of course. Did we get three points? Well actually, yes, we did. I expected at most three points from these past three league games (and really, probably only one) but here we are now with what some might call form or momentum.

We've returned to equilibrium, now can we maintain that?
It was a handy win in other ways as well, because with regards to the relegation battle, the round's other results were a bit of a mixed bag. Oakleigh and Port both won on the road, while Dandy Thunder, Pascoe Vale and Kingston all lost. Probably the most surprising result was Dandy City picking up a point at Avondale, in what may be a chilling sign of things to come.

Still, some of our bottom-half rivals might be looking at the table and wondering - as many of us are - how the hell did we manage to beat three teams on the trot that were sitting in the top six at the time.

That nice run of form has some people already looking up to a possible finals run - after all, we're just three points adrift from the sixth-placed and stuttering Melbourne Knights.

I remain more focused on getting enough points to avoid the drop or a relegation playoff. Though one person is intent on moving the goalposts about what would constitute a points total that would see us safe, I'm keener to stick with the 30 point mark as the initial aim here. At the moment we're three wins and a draw adrift of that target, and if we can't manage at least that in our remaining games, then we deserve to go down.

Next game
Dandenong City away on Friday night. Dandy City have splashed out during the mid-season transfer window, signing Carl Valeri, Adrian Leijer, and Brendon Santalab. Some of you may remember the last two playing for various clubs during the late NSL era, though I'm not sure what they've been doing in the last 15 or so years, as they kinda seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

If you're one of those weirdos who love getting to the grounds by public transport, this might be one to avoid, unless you have a plan for getting back out to civilisation somehow.

The club should demand its $50 back
We made a substitution during the second half, in which the fourth official put up the number 12 on his fancy board as both the player coming off and coming on. These blokes have basically four jobs, all of them very simple.

1. Put up the correct numbers of the subs on their fancy boards.
2. Put up the correct number of minimum amount of injury time minutes to be played.
3. Occasionally tell coaches to get back in their technical areas.
4. Pray like hell that they don't have to actually get called up to do the ref's or the lino's jobs.

That's money well spent across a season, dollars which would could just as easily be spent being put into the pocket of hard working professional NPL players who entertain thousands of people (most of them overseas gamblers, admittedly) on a weekly basis. These fourth officials need to lift their game.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

Bucket of sand
Does anybody remember the last time a flare was lit at Lakeside Stadium? No, that's not a call for you to rip one and break the drought. It's just that someone noticed the flare buckets on standby during Sunday's game, and people were wondering when was the last time they were even needed.

The best that anyone could seem to recall, people affiliated with Pascoe Vale ripped one during the 2015 semi-final they lost against us. There was a flare confiscated and/or found during that Melbourne Victory game in 2016, but I think that's about as close as we've gotten since 2015. I can't remember the last time one of our fans ripped one.

Mumble grumble (social club kitchen)
Much dissatisfaction expressed on the forum this week about the food service in the social club. Mostly based around how slow it is. Now I usually eat in the social club well before the game, so I've dodged most of in the "just before kickoff and during the game" issues with getting food quickly from our social club.

What I will say is that the social club did look understaffed on Sunday, for reasons I'm not aware of. That certainly added to the problems experienced by several of our supporters looking to get food and drink on Sunday. There was one register open, and one guy responsible for taking order, making coffees, and getting people's drinks. That's not usually been the case the season, but you can see how that caused a lot of problems.

There have been three operators of the social club since the social club reopened, and while the quality and the range of food have varied between operators, the problems remain largely the same. Slow service and an ability to decide whether the social club space is going for speedy match day service (if it is even capable of doing this under its current setup) or bistro style cooked-on-request service.

I'm not in hospitality and never have been, but it seems that there are at least some basic solutions which would alleviate some of the current problems. The first would be to open up the canteen on the side of the grandstand (if it's not open already), and let people know that it is open (seeing as how most people enter the venue via the social club), taking some of the heat off the social club kitchen.

(and isn't getting access to that canteen and outside pouring rights on match days part of what we gave up some of our monthly income for?)

Second would be to get a coffee cart working outside of the social club. We're a winter competition, and some people are understandably going to want a warming beverage. Coffee takes longer and more effort to make than pouring a beer or soft drink. Why would you make it harder to access for punters to access and harder for staff to provide this service?

Third - and this is not my suggestion, but rather a popular one from the forum - just provide food that is easy to prepare, cook, and serve on a speed and scale befitting a soccer match instead of a sit-down restaurant. These people (by which I mean all these people who have attempted to operate the social club) have been experienced hospitality people in one form or another. It boggles the mind how this issue still hasn't been sorted out.

Mid-season transfer period news
Though some people on Sunday said there would be a Peter Skapetis related announcement on Monday, as of Tuesday afternoon there was no Peter Skapetis related news other than to say that there was strong word that he was no longer at Dandenong Thunder, which is the very definition of being neither here nor there.

Then on Tuesday evening, the announcement was finally made that the Skapetis signing had come to pass. Skapetis is a former South junior, who claimed with what felt like something with believability that scoring against us earlier in the season for Dandenong Thunder felt very wrong. He's signed until the end of 2020, but the more immediate question is who is going to make way for him? I'm guessing it's going to be Zac Bates' hamstrings, because you wouldn't drop your leading scorer in Pep Marafioti, would you?

There has also been simmering rumour chat that Canadian defensive midfielder Ethan Gage is on his way out of Lakeside, but as of Wednesday morning, he's still with us as far as I'm aware. Having said that, Gage's not being used in either the midweek cup match nor the Bentleigh game says to me that unless he's injured, there's something wrong here. We'll see what comes of it.

The transfer window reportedly closes on June 4th, so there's still time for lots of stuff to happen, or not happen.

On the couch

Momentary abstraction/Eventual clarity
It's the most curious thing - my zeal for watching other games from this league has returned just as South has managed to win a few games. I wonder what the connection might be? I'm sure I'll figure it out one day. Anyway, for whatever reason I was compelled on Monday night to watch Kingston vs Port Melbourne. I was hoping for a Kingston win, or at worst a draw between the two teams. We didn't get that. Sure, Kingston took the lead, but they coughed it up to, well, a team that deserved to win it on the balance of play. To go back to an earlier point in this post - being entertaining is fun, but perhaps not so much when you're on the bottom of the ladder. At some point you've got to control the tempo of a match, disrupt the momentum of your opponent, and grind out results rather than lose honourably.

Cue, meet rack... wait...
That aforementioned return of a zest for life? Yeah, I ended up at Knights Stadium yesterday because of it. A bit cold and some regret on that front, but I emerged emotionally unscathed, and actually also a bit entertained as well. There was an announcement that a white Toyota was blocking something or other and needed to be moved, and I had a momentary flash of panic that it was my Toyota... thankfully the licence plate number was different, and later on we found that the car was also an Aurion and not a 1989 Camry, which was eventually moved once the announcement was made again, this time in both English and Croatian.

As for the match, either way this turned out would've been funny, but seeing the cash-splashing Avondale bow out after putting the cue in the rack with a 1-0 lead and about half an hour to play, on the assumption (not entirely unreasonable, but still) that Knights would not pose a serious threat going forward, was pretty funny. This was a game whose excellence built up slowly, revealing itself only in the final minutes. A slow start from both team playing between arcs. Then Avondale having a goal cleared off the line by what Twitter says was a clear handball. Then missing a one on one. Then finally taking the lead early in the second half and deservedly so. Five or so more minutes of trying to put the game away seemed to be enough for the visitors, and that turned out to be their downfall. Knights had been ceded the initiative, they managed to get an equaliser, and we were off to extra time. Then Knights took the lead, and Avondale had to figure out how to get their way back into the game. And it wasn't like Knights were going to be hospitable in that - the ball at one stage went over the fence on the Quarry Hill side, and no one, not even the ball boys, made any effort to retrieve the ball necessitating the Avondale player on that side jumping the fence.

Funny thing was the gate was next to him 😂

— Andrew Golub (@andrewg_90) May 28, 2019

It was a stunt made riskier by the fact that it had started bucketing down in extra time. The chances also flowed from both sides after that, with Knights keeper Cakarun making one final, reaching save to preserve their lead, and Avondale sending a header from the resulting corner over the bar. So Knights progress against the odds, while Avondale bow out to chants of "cigane" coming from the Mark Viduka Stand.

Final thought
Googled myself on Google Scholar this week, and found that Andy Harper had cited my now six-year-old journal article in his own recently released journal article. I mean, it was only part of his literature review, but it's something I suppose.

So this is how it's going to be - Bentleigh Greens 3 South Melbourne 1

Another seasons starts, and another half brilliant (express trains and quick bus connections) and half awful (25 minute bus wait, stop all stations train, missed connection to Sunbury by two minutes) public transport situation. So it goes, we're all used to this by now, me  doing it, and you hearing about it from me.

Got to Kingston Heath early enough to catch the 20s game, a solid come from behind win. Orford, Mesourouni, Djiba, and Aguek all played in that game, with Aguek putting away a nice volley.

I don't think any of us are expecting miracles this season. We expect the side to be a mid-to-lower ranked team. We want them to do better, but we're right in the middle of a rebuild that's partly been done out of necessity, and partly self-inflicted. If we can avoid a relegation scrap, that would be great, but we have to be realistic. There's a lot of new players, a lot of young players, and we're in a league where the spending is out of control.

Going to Bentleigh in round 1 was probably the worst thing that could happen to us - unless we could've somehow pinched a point or three - but it was unlikely that we had any luck left over from last year's heroics. So, I guess most of us were expecting to lose, but I think most of us are pleased with how the team performed in general.

Going forward we looked pretty good - a little too dependent on counter-attacks perhaps, but that's probably where our strength is going to be - the key there being not to fall behind too often, because then conservative opponents - of which Bentleigh is not one - will have the luxury of sitting back.

Keeping Gerrie Sylaidos at attacking mid instead of shifting him to the wing seems the thing to do. Yes, he's probably more likely to get beat up and bruised in the middle, but so much is going to depend on his talent this season. Keep him in the middle and keep opposition defences guessing whether he's going to go left, right, or through the middle. And hopefully our forwards get on to the same page as him.

Nick Krousouratis looks like a great get - here's hoping for consistency on his part. Pep Marafioti looks OK to me, but I'm more sympathetic to him than others might be. George Howard did OK as a makeshift centre forward, but we lacked height and strength in that centre-forward role, and unless Pep gets shifted there, we're going to need Billy Konstantinidis sooner rather than later.

Gio Marafioti didn't have a great game coming off the bench; he looked a little lost, and ran around like a little dog chasing hard, but not smart. He's a better player than that, and hopefully we get a chance to see that. It was disappointing not to see Leigh Minopoulos out there on Friday, but apparently he got a broken nose in Adelaide. Marcus Schroen needs to get his fitness up quickly.

Defensively, I was at the other end of the ground so I can't say with much authority what went wrong or right at that end of the ground, but the second goal we conceded had three players who went to ground. Granted, one of them was the keeper, but even there Roganovic more or less took an air swing with his sliding/diving challenge.

3-1 was probably a fair scoreline. I don't think we did enough right at either end to warrant the win, but a draw would not have an unjust result. But we didn't make the most of our opportunities when we had the ascendancy in the first, and we look likely to cop soft goals this year, if pre-season form is anything to go by.

Seeing as how this game seemed to conform to our pre-season form, and the expectations people had around what the squad's strengths and weaknesses were likely to be, there's one question that remains for me at least. That is, if that it what our mean/median/mode/average performance is going to look like, what are we going to produce for the rest of the season?

One real game is a small sample size from which to extrapolate, but apart from a very few Negative Nancies, I think we all know where this team sits: hopefully just good enough to avoid relegation, and if we somehow made the finals, that would be a huge bonus. We were told that the team would be competitive; again, it's too early to draw much meaning from a single game, but we were competitive on Friday night against a likely title contender.

I don't normally do call to arms nonsense, but I hope that our supporters in general don't get on the backs of the coach or players too quickly. They need our support, and I think if we can get through what will probably a difficult season, then the benefits will repay themselves in the coming seasons.

Of course this team could surprise us all and do extra-well - here's hoping for that.

So what do we need to achieve to survive? (nobody panic)
Let's assume for argument's sake that we're a relegation battler. If that's the case, we need to get at least a certain amount of points to keep us safe. Last season we survived thanks to eking out 28 points and somehow getting a decent goal difference (thanks Dandy Thunder). Now in your typical 26 game season, 28 points is usually enough to get you through, but it almost wasn't enough last season.

30 points however, notwithstanding some catastrophic turn of events, should be enough to get you over the relegation line. Our old mate Psile agrees on this, so the question then becomes, where are we going to get those 30 points? We're probably not going to get ten wins, zero draws, and sixteen losses; so that leaves us either aiming for eight wins and six draws, or seven wins and nine draws.

I'm not going to cast reckless aspersions on the teams I think we should beat - I'll leave that to the comments section - but the sooner we get to 30 points, the better. Judging by the performance on Friday night, I think we can do it, but you'd like to get at least a decent chunk out of the way while we're on the road these first few weeks.

Next game
Dandenong City at home, on Friday night. Dandy City got crunched 4-1 and copped a red card at home against Avondale, and considering that no one is really expecting anything from us this season, it's possible to already see this as a relegation six pointer.

Obviously that's a tad melodramatic, because there'd still be 24 games after this one even if we lose it - or even if we win it - but it does kinda feel like a pretty damn massive game. Billy Konstantinidis, the Australian striker signed from Greece, arrived in Melbourne last week, but who knows how quickly he'll be added to the starting eleven.

Apart from collecting your membership and/or membership pack, Friday is a good chance for those who out of habit boycott away games or who have decided to boycott away games this year, to see the South men's senior team for the only time in the first month and a bit of the season. It'll also be interesting to see how the social club and food services handle a crowd.

2019 squad announced
The other week the club announced its official senior men's squad for 2019. It's pretty damn young.

NPLW or WNPL... one of those two
The senior women start their league campaign this Saturday afternoon, away at Southern United at Monterey Reserve.

One blog... two blogs.. but he... but you can't... oh, my medication!
A new blog has been started by Luke Radziminski, one of the club's media interns. I didn't realise that people were still starting blogs. I mean, I was late on to the blog fad when I started this thing so many years ago. Fans of South of the Border should rest assured that as I have crushed all previously competing South Melbourne Hellas blogs - OK, just the one, which was done by Cliff before I got him to here - I will also crush this one.

But more seriously, if there's genuine longevity in this project, it could be really good. In Luke's own words:

This is a long-term project proposed by a media intern from the club to create a database and archive photos for South Melbourne. The aim is to create a library of photos at every possible game for fans to look back on over the years. I try to capture the environment of the venue and any engagement with the fans and what story has unfolded. There will be photos borrowed and provided from other media personnel who have photographed at the event as well.

I might actually have to have a chat with this bloke.

Contribute to South of the Border
I'm always on the lookout for new contributors, so if you want to do something on a regular or irregular basis, do get in touch, even if it;s just to send me a bit of history for an artefact segment.

Match programs
Just a reminder also that South of the Border is always on the lookout for South Melbourne related match programs. If you've got something that will help fill in one of the gaps here. Hit me up via email or see me at a game.

Final thought
Coming into Sunshine station after a two hour Friday night public transport hike from Cheltenham, a bloke who'd been at the Oakleigh game started chatting with me - because of my South beanie, I assume - and among his observations was that Nick Epifano looked weak. True story.