Drama Queens - South Melbourne 2 Altona Magic 0

The scene was set for an all-time classic snooze-fest. Two teams winding down into the close of the season, nothing to aim for either up or down. It was raining, and no-one had bothered to put up the sponsor boards, which would have annoyed the sponsors if we had any that weren't board members. And the crowd was muted in interest, given the whole thing had a bit of a pre-season feeling, albeit with a bit less passion.

During this game (or after it) you may have seen an overly dramatic tweet describing the utter destitution of Clarendon Corner on Sunday afternoon:

@PaulMavroudis The sole person in Row H today #FightTillTheEnd #HooliganBlood #SMFCvAMFC pic.twitter.com/5BC8Mtv70j

— Foti Stavrakis (@FotiStavrakis) August 18, 2019

Let me assure everyone that it was not all quite like that. There were other Clarendon Corner people within the general vicinity of that photo - they were just sitting a few rows further back, in the dry areas covered by the roof.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

When it stopped raining, a few people gradually moved down towards the famous Row H, which for those not in the know, is the row claimed by those of us in Clarendon Corner who do not wish to associate with the nonce brigade which tends to gather in the rows immediately in front of Row H.

And while it's not like no-one turned up, the low turnout overall, and especially in the areas quasi-traditionally inhabited (since 2012) by Clarendon Corner, created the perfect opportunity for me to enact a performance of despondent human misery.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

But don't be concerned for me - it wasn't raining that hard, when it was raining. And don't be sad for those that were there and treated this game like the dead rubber it most surely was - there was nothing to play for, and nothing to get particularly excited about, even though the game did produce a number of chances for both teams. And don't even blame those that didn't turn up, because people do have other and/or better things to do; and besides which, didn't I tell people not to come to games if it no longer made them happy, and especially if attending games actually made them seriously unhappy?

Performative, self-preservationist, and self-conscious proto-martyr creating misery works for me, but it's not for everyone. And it's not like there's still not plenty of other naturally miserable looking people at South if you're into that kind of thing.

Some of the players didn't even bother turning up. Peter Skapetis was not present, as he's apparently in Greece. Who knows how long he'd had that planned, but it's a good thing we're not in a relegation scrap.

Having said that, some of our injured players did make appearances in and around the ground. Luke Adams was on the South bench, not on the team sheet, but still present to offer support. Brad Norton was apparently seen trying to calm down the very upset Pep Marafioti in the tunnel outside the change rooms. And injured keeper Josh Dorron was seen tucking into a burger in the grandstand, helping put some coin back into the club and advertising the food on offer in the social club.

And can I just say, the quality of the burgers has been steadily improving week by week, even if last week's patty was almost too big to comfortably fit within the bun provided. Now let's have a round of applause for the players that did turn up, and in general put in a solid shift.

Sadly there was also a moment of too much pride and passion, which has likely seen the end of one player's time at South. Having created several good opportunities early in the game and not taken them, the team won a penalty, its second of those in two games. Hey, when it rains, it pours. Credit to Perry "the Pez Dispenser" Lambropoulos for winning the spot kick with some nifty play; I have been one of the people who was less than enthused about his being signed at all, and after that unimpressed with what he offered in the first half of the season; but I am willing to admit that I was perhaps hasty to judge his capabilities, as in general he has been one of our better players in the second half of the season (even getting forward on occasion), and I would not be completely averse to him being at the club next season.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

Now back to the penalty. One would have assumed that some people's probably nonsense generic superstitious bias against left footers taking penalties aside, having the person who scored our only penalty for the season just a couple of weeks ago take this one as well would just be (and I am loathe to use this term) common sense. Pep Marafioti however, for who knows what reason, did not see it that way, and attempted to take the ball off acting-skipper Marcus Schroen, which almost saw the two come to blows right there in front of everyone.

(and when I say "everyone" here, I mean the small crowd in attendance, as well as the audience watching either from home or from some decrepit gambling den in the Caucasus, Indochina, or Arabian Peninsula.)

They tell me that team morale is good, despite everything that has gone on this year, and certainly light years ahead of last year's mess. And yet only Nick Krousoratis bothered or had the good sense to intervene and try and defuse the situation between his teammates which was threatening to get even further out of hand. He's had a rough season has Nick, but that's the kind of level-headed person I'd want on my team. And for whatever it's worth, I still think he's a very talented player who could still do a lot of damage for our club (rather than against, like some others have done) next season.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

As for why Pep thought he ought to have taken the penalty, I do not know. Someone on a thankfully very dusty and forgotten corner of the internet suggested that there was an extant arrangement - possibly originating from preseason - to alternate penalty takers. If this is the case, that is the dumbest thing I've heard for quite some time, especially when for almost the entire season we'd earned just one penalty before last Sunday's. Now since Pep was nowhere near the league golden-boot running, and considering that Marcus had scored the only other penalty we'd earned this season, and considering that Marcus was wearing the captain's armband, I don't know what Pep was trying to achieve.

Marcus probably could have handled the situation better, but I suppose he was caught off-guard not having a taser or can of pepper spray on hand to incapacitate the man trying to accost him. Maybe he was just as shocked and surprised at the rest of us at the playground antics taking place out on the hallowed turf of Lakeside Stadium. Or maybe this is an argument to go to the practice of netball or basketball, and have whoever was fouled in the penalty area take the penalty?

(at some point around here while typing up this post, whose segments were not compiled in order anyway, I got up to go to a local bakery to get some lunch)

The worst thing that could have happened after all that was for Schroen to miss the penalty, so thankfully he did manage to score the goal and put us up 1-0. I shudder to think what would have happened had he missed or had his shot saved.

As awful as that part of Sunday's spectacle was, I suppose it did at least offer the live-stream commentary team something to talk about in this dead rubber, though I'm slightly miffed now that I wasn't on special commentary for the day, the number of my guest commentary appearances having stalled at "two". Slightly more problematic was the task of the South Melbourne highlights editor, who had to try and edit out as much as possible of the nonsense between Schroen and Marafioti, an impossible task to complete to 100% levels of erasure of important moments of South Melbourne history.

It may have been unprofessional to do it the way I'm about to suggest, but I feel like my video editor friend missed an opportunity to augment the experience with the addition of an obvious yet also classic Simpsons gag.

Anyway, as expected Pep was not out on the field for the second half (replaced by Billy Konstantinidis), and I fancy that's the last time we've seen him in a South shirt. It's a pity that it's ended up this way - for all his character and playing foibles, he was one of our better players this year (though some cruel persons might say that was a problem in itself). But two brothers gone in the one season, what are the odds? And both of them ex-South juniors, which will make the board's aim of a title with 60% of our squad being South juniors a bit of a harder task.

Photo: Luke Radziminski.

The game continued being a free-flowing affair, with both sides squandering chances. Magic - who have apparently just had a major backer of theirs announce his resignation from the presidency, though who knows how it will affect them next year - had a goal ruled out for offside. Eventually Konstantinidis tapped home a late goal to finish this game off as a contest.

Next week
Heidelberg at home on Sunday afternoon. This will be the final game of the season for the men's team, and I don't think it could come any sooner. Unfortunately, the game also doubles up as an important fixture for what I'm still calling the minor premiership, which Heidelberg are in best place to secure.

After largely going unnoticed in 2019, apparently the club is going to make the final game a bit of a showcase of sorts for the club's 60th anniversary celebrations, so there's that to look forward to I suppose.

Cripes, it'll be the last time some of us will see each other for months! And it'll be the last time we see some or many of these players in a South shirt. I'm getting all misty-eyed. If only we knew who we were planning to turf now, we could have the Streisand backed montage ready to go.

Women stumbling in quest for finals
I was going to go to the senior women's game against Box Hill at Lakeside last Saturday, but got roped into another game instead - see the "around the grounds" section for that story. Anyway, the women lost 3-1 to Box Hill, and made things more difficult for themselves in terms of trying to secure the final spot in the finals. Again, not that any of the three teams (ourselves, the Bergers, or Box Hill) vying for fourth are likely to do any damage in the finals - especially as they'll have to play Calder first up - but it would be nice to at least make it. So the loss against Box Hill was a pretty important one, but not quite the season-ending game it could've been

That probably came yesterday, with the side playing out a 1-1 draw vs the NTC at Knox. I didn't get out there, of course, but I manage to watch the game (or at least most of it) on the stream. It was not one of our better performances, something I could tell from the stream despite it being filmed at ground level, having no commentary or graphics, and with the placement of portable goals all around the perimeter giving poor depth perception having me even bigger problems than usual trying to figure out what was going on.

Skip Fulton graciously let us know that at half time we were 1-0 up, thanks to a Nat Martineau goal, scored before confusion about the stream - which was originally tagged as Southern vs Heidelberg - was cleared up. I did see our late-season replacement keeper save a penalty during the first half, adding to her short-term reputation as being something more than a short-term fix.

The second half was just as confusing to me as the first (not least in part because I was switching back and forth between the stream and another project), because I thought we'd scored a goal from a Leia Varley free kick but then a comment online asked why it was disallowed. When NTC scored, I wasn't sure then if it was an equaliser or just a goal clawed back, and the initial social media response from the club at the conclusion of the game was that we'd won the game 2-1.

That was later corrected (with an apology) to 1-1, with Varley's goal being disallowed at it came from an indirect free kick; a result which sees us sit a point behind Heidelberg, who have a game in hand against Southern United. We play the Bergers in the last round, and the Bergers also have a game against Box Hill whee they could drop points, but at this stage it appears that even if we beat Bayside this Saturday afternoon at Lakeside and the Bergers in the last round at home, it's the Bergers with the best shot of making finals. It's been that kind of year.

More videos uploaded
I've uploaded a couple more hour long compilations of South Melbourne highlights from circa 1988-1992. These come from Banger's collection, and you can check them out on my channel here, along with other South videos. I've tagged/timestamped the individual games in the description sections, but there's often little snippets of other stuff which I haven't bothered to tag - consider them bonus material.

Puskas film update
A few months ago, some readers showed some concern about whether this film was actually still being made. I did not have a definitive answer then. I can say now that 'yes', the film is still in production. Work related and other commitments slowed down the process, but it is still going. I don't have much directly to do with the film's production, but I will do what I can to keep the ball rolling. I'd give you an estimated time of completion, but it's really up to the guys making the film to get the film to a stage where it can be finished and shown to the public.

Around the grounds
Please make this season end
Trundled out to Quarries Park or whatever it's called for Clifton Hill vs Yarraville. You want a game that meant nothing? Here it was. Two teams so bad they deserved to be relegated, but thanks to a mass restructure of the league system coming soon, they've been left to spin their wheels for most of the season, like so many clubs in a similar position. It's half the reason I've barely been to an Altona East game this year. Maybe because it meant nothing, there was hardly anybody there. I was there to watch a friend's son make his senior starting debut as goalkeeper for Clifton Hill. He did OK, but his team still lost 2-1.

Operation Italian White Whale
I've started the idiotic process of trying to update the infamous Victorian Italian club merger chart. It will take a very long time, will probably kill me, and end up being heinously incorrect if I ever do finish it. That being said, if you or someone you know actually knows the dates of Italian club mergers hitherto unrepresented in the current flowchart, please get in contact with me.

I've already had several good leads and prompts, with Anstey Roma's 1970 merger with Triestina, the Cobram split and re-merger, and the Mildura split in 1979/80.

Final thought
Το καλό πράγμα αργή να γίνει as my old man likes to say.

P.S.

Forgive the lateness of my reply.

Bobbin' up! - South Melbourne 5 Melbourne Knights 1

Does our fate lie in the hands of our youth? Manny Aguek, Pep Marafioti,
and the back of someone's head celebrate a goal. Photo: Mark Avellino.

The scene was set for another disastrous Sunday afternoon. Northcote had lost. Hume had lost. Kingston had lost. Even those recent form finders Bulleen had lost, thanks in part to a Michael Eagar header, which shows that at least someone out there still likes us. So there we were, another opportunity to get out of the relegation zone, just waiting for us to screw it up.

That's not taking anything away from the Melbourne Knights, who despite their own limitations have been hovering around the fringe finals places for most of the season, as opposed to where we are. But neither are they anything special. The idea among South fans, if not quite the belief, was that by our own low standards this game against the Knights were certainly winnable; and if we didn't win it - so the more extreme verbosity went - we were goners.

And why not? We'd still have Bentleigh, Gully, Avondale and Heidelberg away, and the Bergers at home as well, fixtures about which most assume - with some justification - that we'll probably get nothing from.

So at best we went into this match with a threadbare list - no George Howard (who somehow only got two weeks for his crazy tackle the week before), no Ndumba Makeche (probably out for several weeks with a hammy), no Milos Lujic (sunning it up in the Greek islands), and no Matthew Millar not only for this week but also for every week thereafter. Thus the notion that Knights fielded a depleted line up - probably true - should've been met with the response of, "yeah, and, so, what?". We've been fielding depleted lineups the whole damn year.

One thing we had an advantage in was the Knights personnel or at least some members thereof having probably stayed up or gotten up very early to watch Croatia's World Cup quarter final appearance, but who knows how many players from both sides had been clubbing the night before? At any rate, sleepiness can only excuse some of the nonsense play that Knights dished up. The bad throw from the keeper which led to Marcus Schroen being fouled on the edge of the box? Sleepy. But the appalling wall set up in front of the free kick from which Schroen scored with a grubber shot? Very bad, much as Knights set up a shocking wall last year for Schroen to bypass.

"KK" sounds like a court transcript identity given
 to a crown witness testifying against the mob.

The second goal came from a corner, which I suppose was our tribute to the 2018 World Cup and/or It's Coming Home. I guess since we never really even put in enough decent crosses from corners most of the time, Knights can hardly be blamed for falling asleep and letting Kristian Konstantinids float in unmarked for an easy header from the first flicked on effort.

The third goal, which for most other teams would seal the win, even before halftime, was even crazier for its combination of defensive sleepiness and carelessness. How Schroen was given that much space on the right is anyone's guess, but even better was that abysmal attempt at a clearance which by going backwards set up an otherwise offside Oliver Minatel for his sixth goal of the season, and yet another goal in his novelty tally.

There's probably some mathematical formula for how big a lead this South Melbourne team needs in order to win a game, involving complex formulations based on score, time left, rating of an opponent. While I'm not qualified to create said formula, it's fair to say that the gut feel about the place while happy with the 3-0 lead - how could one not be? - was also not really convinced about its impregnability. That's no false modesty on our part, because it's after halftime in most of our games where things have gotten particularly bad.

And the second half started off in much that vein, as we gave too much space to the Knights. It was a good thing that their end product was not nearly up to the standard of this season's leading sides. Eventually our compact, simplified game plan worked to our advantage in terms of shutting this game out, with Pep Marafioti winning a penalty and converting it to seal the win. The goal we coughed was not good, a mostly unforced defensive error gifting the Knights a goal if not much else.

But then we added a fifth from another counter, debutant Manylauk "Manny" Aguek nodding on a ball to Schroen, whose cross was met well and stylishly by an unmarked Marafioti. It goes to my opinion of Schroen that there's no real middle ground in terms of his performances: they're either brilliant or somewhere at the other, less reputable end of the scale. Marafioti's finish here (despite its lack of pressure) as well as his spectacular finish against Northcote, suggests to me that he should perhaps be the undisputed spearhead for the rest of the season, or at least until Makeche and/or Lujic are genuine options. Leigh Minopoulos slugged it out for 75 odd minutes, but you worry about how much each extra minute beyond a certain amount diminishes his fitness and chronic injury status.

The use of the under 20s players - and further to that, the whole three substitutes available - warmed the hearts of the fans, because they had a go and looked OK. Much as some of the senior players aren't happy to be subbed - Minatel looks especially annoyed when he comes off early - it makes sense in situations like this because we don't want him picking up extra yellow cards which could see our first or second most important player (after Nikola Roganovic) miss a game because of something which had no consequence on a match already won.

I'm not going to go overboard with the praise for Aguek and fellow debutant Will Orford, because the game was won by the time they came on, and the opponent wasn't really switched on. Still, it makes you wonder why some of these boys, or others like them, couldn't have been used earlier in the season even if they weren't considered quite ready yet. After all, sometimes inexperienced but fresher and fitter players are surely better than experienced but hobbled players? But that's one of the recriminations we'll return to at the end of the season, hopefully having secured another season in this tier of the Victorian NPL. Until that time, we make do with what we have - perhaps acknowledging that we have a little more in available playing stocks than we thought we did - and do our best until we can reset properly next year.

Relegation-survival prognostication

No point in including the teams immediately above us, let alone the ones in
finals contention. As you can see (click to enlarge), we still have much to do.

So after all of that, a fifth win for the season and more importantly, jumping out of the relegation zone by a whole two ladder positions.

There's a prognosticating arithmetic game going on among some fans about how many more points we'll need to avoid the drop, but there's still too many games to go before we can forecast those scenarios with any certainty - though when it comes time to doing so, there is an online tool on the NPL results pages that will let you speculate to your heart's content.

Here anyway are some unsolicited data points to keep in mind in terms of the number of points required to stay out of relegation since the onset of the NPL in Victoria in 2014, keeping in mind that 12th is the playoff spot and 13th and 14th are the automatic relegation places.

12th place finishers

• 2014 - 28 points - Werribee finished behind 11th placed Port Melbourne on goal difference.
• 2015 - 21 points - North Geelong finished five points behind 11th placed Oakleigh.
• 2016 - 23 points - Richmond finished two points behind 11th placed Bulleen.
• 2017 - 24 points - Melbourne Knights finished three points behind 11th placed Port Melbourne.

As you can see there's great variety in the number of points that the 12th placed teams were able to accrue, and how far behind they finished behind the next best side. There's also notable variance in terms of each season having weaker or stronger teams finishing in the bottom three as a whole, where it might be useful to look at the point tallies of the bottom three sides for each of those seasons.

• 2014 - 65 points
• 2015 - 54 points
• 2016 - 53 points (this doesn't include Victory's six point deduction)
• 2017 - 49 points

The 2018 points tally for the bottom three teams right now, with seven games to go, is already at 47. That tells us that this season's relegation dodgers and even the 12th placed playoff teams are probably going to have pick up more points than usual to achieve safety. Disregarding whatever points the bottom five teams may pick up against opponents higher up the ladder - or whether teams like Dandenong, Knights or Oakleigh could somehow be dragged into the scrap, though I think that's unlikely - there are also five fixtures where the bottom five teams are set to play each other:

• Round 20, Hume vs Bulleen
• Round 21, South vs Hume, Kingston vs Northcote
• Round 24, Northcote vs Bulleen, South vs Kingston

Each current bottom five side gets two shots at beating at a fellow relegation rival, which says that as important as picking up points against everyone else will be, there are likely five season defining matches whose importance cannot be overstated - and the fact that we haven't managed to pick up wins against Northcote and Bulleen this year could well come back to bite us.

But let's not forget goal difference, and the game in hand we that we have. Though we hope that it doesn't come to that, at the moment we have significantly better goal difference than every team in the relegation battle; but a couple of heavy losses coupled with a couple of big wins to a relegation rival could also negate that.

So yeah, beating the Knights and getting out of the relegation zone? Great! Getting complacent about our chances of survival? Not on your life.

Next game
Bentleigh Greens at Kingston Heath on Friday night. We weren't winning there against the Greens when we were good, now that we're not very good I anticipate even greater struggles. But Bentleigh play the Bergers in the Dockerty Cup final tonight, so maybe they'll destroy each other by accumulating a ton of straight reds, injuries, and taking the game all the way to a penalty shoot out which keeps going into the following morning. Even then, I'm not expecting any miracles.

Farewell Matthew Millar
It's official: after a three week trial in Gosford, Matthew Millar has signed a one year deal with the Central Coast Mariners. While I will continue to be mystified about why it took the Mariners three whole weeks to figure out what Millar's all about as a player, I guess this is good news for him. While (probably) far too many players get immediate second chances in the A-League, there are not so many that can bounce back after getting dumped back to the state leagues for a season or two.

It's less than good news for us though, as whatever we South fans may think of Millar's deficiencies as a player, he was more than serviceable for us during his time with us, and it's one less experienced - and as importantly, fit - senior player available to us for the rest of the year. All that we get from it is some bonus points in the player points system that no one monitors anyway, maybe some minimal compensation (who knows?), and no chance (I assume) to replace him with any current free agents.

At least it's certain now that those damn inflatable apples will never see the light of day again at a South Melbourne match.

Around the grounds
That's it, back to Winnipeg Geelong!
My first time attending an Altona East home game this season. Blame scheduling conflicts? There's a bit of that, though hanging out at a couple of Kensington City games wasn't the sharpest idea in the shed. Blame the standard? I've watched a fair few other state league two games this year, and a couple of state five games. Blame the distance from Sunshine to Altona North? A very lame excuse. Blame the footy? Yeah, maybe. At any rate, it took long enough for me to get out to Paisley Park this year that I didn't even bother using my media pass to get in, just chucked the gate attendant a fiver and headed straight for the canteen,. PAOK's opponent on the day was Geelong Rangers, a team performing very much like PAOK this season: not good enough to be pushing for promotion, far too good to be in the relegation zone. I spent most of this game chatting to a South fan I met for the first time that day, not a bad conversation about many different things and people, which was a pleasant distraction from the not terribly inspiring match. Rangers took the lead in the first half, deservedly so, and it wasn't clear how an Altona East side that's hardly free scoring was going to work their way into the game. Well, 25 yard top corner screamers and curling shots from the edge of the box help. By full time it was 4-1, and Rangers like the rest of us must've been wondering where East managed to pull out that kind of football from. Makes you want to go there again to watch more of that style.

Final thought
We will fund our A-League enterprise by playing Croatian matches at the 2018 World Cup on loop in our social club, attracting local Croatians to our bar like moths to a flame.