Mehmet artefact Wednesday - Selangor FA pennant

Oh, so many fond memories of Selangor's tour of late 2013. I suppose it all started before they'd even thought of touring, when former South Melbourne Hellas championship player Mehmet Durakovic quit his post as South Melbourne FC director of football or technical director or whatever it was that he was doing with us, and took up the gaffer's job at Selangor, where he played in the 1990s. Then news filtered through that Selangor was in Australia as part of their pre-season schedule, and were using Lakeside as a training base. Would South Melbourne play them in a friendly? Would it be open doors? Would someone from the club say it was closed doors even it wasn't? Yes, yes/no/kinda and yes, but with appropriate caveats! And thus Gains and I went to this game expecting not very much and getting it. All of which is a very long winded way of saying that this week's artefact is the pennant Selangor presented us with prior to the game, and which was last seen somewhere in team manager Frank Piccione's dungeon. You know, because we don't have a social club and stuff.

Selangor FA pennant from our friendly kick about with them in December 2013. Also
partially visible is an 'I Love This Club' sticker from the 2010 season. Photo: Paul Mavroudis.

This club is alright, I suppose

That's the slogan I want for next year. Did you know that 'I Love This Club', the slogan for the 2010 membership campaign - looks great on a car sticker - is actually a volunteer in-joke? It's true. It got attached to every stupid, funny or bewildering situation, comment or character that made a post-ironic, post-modern, coping with the absurdity of the universe impression amongst the people who spend far too much time at the club.

Me, I don't spend that much time at the club, and so I never really took any ownership of the term. That, and Aristotle said that you can only love something which has the capacity to love you in return. So, does the club have the capacity to love me? I don't know. It depends I guess, whether you define the club as either an abstract collective of people, who are capable of love, or as merely the name by which a loose association of otherwise disparate individuals pools their collective wealth and time in order to watch some blokes kick a ball around for the glory of becoming Victorian champions.

Then again, if we follow the words of Thomas Aquinas, that to love is to will the good of another, than I guess, maybe, if the club is considered a suitable other, and perhaps even if not, at least the players out there can be loved, and since they are the team playing on behalf of the club - playing on behalf of the club, of course, though for payment, in exchange for their temporary loyalty, and because the fans of the club actually playing would lead to a massacre. Money talks, bullshit walks. You won't find that in Aristotle. Well, at least not in such blunt language.