Showing posts with label Jason Hicks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jason Hicks. Show all posts

Sunday, 14 February 2016

Dooooooooooomed! Bentleigh Greens 3 South Melbourne 0

With Leigh Minopoulos being kept in mothballs and moonboots in the lead up to season proper, and Milos Lujic reputedly in Kokomo on his honeymoon, we were short-handed up front for our defence of the Community Shield, sticking Andy Kecojevic and Marcus Schroen up front. The question then was not if we would lose the Community Shield, but rather by how many goals. To be fair, in the first half we at least managed to match Bentleigh, if not in clear cut chances (their one, hit straight into the oncoming Roganovic, to our none), then at least in hustle and bustle.

That hustle and bustle however lead to a rather more torrid affair than perhaps one would have expected for even a more formal pre-season hit out, so much so that there were several flare ups during the course of this match. The passion on display from us was fine, but the apparent willingness to get sucked in to the opposition's antics always threatened to become costly, and thus Nick Epifano managed to get himself sent off with a straight red for retaliating. The eye witness accounts differ between Epifano kicking or stomping on his Bentleigh opponent.

Either way, it was a damn foolish thing to do, and Epifano will probably miss the opening two or three games of the season. Other than that there were moments where our interplay was rather pleasing to the eye, even if the end product was never going to amount to anything. As the game slipped away from us and Bentleigh took their foot off the pedal somewhat, our finishing only became more comical. Unusually in the mood to make bold statements, it seems to me that if we don't end up getting a strike partner for Lujic, we'll probably miss the finals. If we do, and he's half decent, then we'll win the league.

Next week
Round 1 at home vs Heidelberg. You may as well make an effort to come to this, because afterwards we have our customary slog of away games to start the season.

That's OK, I wasn't looking for a long term relationship anyway
Jason Hicks, once lauded as 'an experienced player', 'a versatile option', and a player who we were excited to have 'join us' has left us to join Melbourne Knights. Apparently we are openly crying into our cornflakes about this, which is news to me. Hicks' departure does open up a visa slot however, which according to scuttlebutt in the crowd yesterday will be used on an overseas striker.

Making things up again
Now I'm sure that Chris Marshall is a lovely bloke who loves puppies and hates mean things, but why is the club calling him a 'senior football adviser'? Is assistant coach too old fashioned?

Optional extras
Every NPL game will have a fourth official with one of those electronic boards informing the paying public of substitutions and the number of minutes of injury time to be played. Those of us not paying to enter venues should probably look away at those moments.

AGM? What's that?
Still no announcement of the AGM date as of this moment, though I have been lead to believe an announcement is 'imminent'.

 Candy/Iron anniversary approaching
Someone looking far further into the future than your correspondent has noticed that the sixth anniversary of not having a social club will actually land on a South home game. According the internet the traditional gift for the sixth anniversary is either candy or iron.

Who was Robert Stewart?
In the match programme for our 1981 away fixture against Blacktown City, there is mention made of a young striker from Hearts of Midlothian named Robert Stewart. Now I've never come across this name before, so I assume that Stewart played no games for South Melbourne. But how did he get to South and where did he end up? Is he the same player as Rob Stewart, who is listed as playing for Frankston City in the 1981 Victorian state league season? Seeing as how the Victorian season started a week after that round six match, it's not an implausible theory.

The system works
Yes, your correspondent has once again been granted FFV media accreditation for 2016. This is despite my steadfast refusal to step into a press box, conduct interviews or write proper match reports. Best of all, I have been listed as a freelancer rather than being under the auspices of the club. Not that it'll make much difference to what I write, of course, but it's nice to have on the pass anyway.

New season's resolution
In order to try and actually pay more attention at our games this year, I will no longer be tweeting during South matches. Thus, those of you who wait with baited breath for my withering observations of modern life during Hellas match days will have to either wait until I get home or actually come and hear my comedic slivers of gold in person. Given phenomena such as Bentleigh charging $12 for a souv, I expect this vow to last all of abut five minutes.

Just on that...
$12. For a souv. A not even very good souv, hugely overrated in part because people from Melbourne's south-east generally have no clue what they're talking about on these matters, and in part because of this particular souv's appearance at the Food Federation Cup a couple of seasons ago. Now I know I'm very tight with money (I prefer the term frugal), but $12! And burgers $10! Absolutely outrageous! What's the thinking behind this? Are their profit margins in the canteen that bad? I'm not usually one to make too much comment about food at grounds, nor am I really the right person to complain about food prices at grounds since I get in for free most weeks, but what about those people that don't? Do we have to follow the FFA Whole of Football Plan manifesto of squeezing every penny from people in the game?

 Match programmes and such
Received a couple of folders worth of match programmes, finals series booklets and the first ten issues of Studs Up. I have started scanning and uploading some of these things, but will be delayed a little by the fact that I've only now just figured out to apply OCR (text recognition) to the documents, which will allow users to perform searches within documents but also hopefully for search engines to be able to dig through them.

What that means alas is that I will gradually have to re-upload most of the stuff I've put up already, which is irritating but probably necessary. Not that the text recognition effect always works or works well, but usually it seems to be OK and something is better than nothing in these cases, especially with the very large and data dense yearbooks.

Final thought
No, I have not become a Berger, I just happened to figure out the answer to their quiz question, OK?
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Monday, 30 November 2015

November 2015 digest

Social club and Lakeside lease saga
Unresolved. And what's worse, none of the important people I tweeted yesterday asking what's going on have seen fit to respond.
Look, I know it's a slightly informal way of going about things, but I thought I'd save myself the postage and make use of the wonderful internet we have in Australia. Have I been blacklisted like the Kiss of Death? I hope not - I thought we were all friends. Maybe big news is just around the corner? Or are they looking for a way to tell us we're only going to get 21 years and not 40?

 Season 2016 start date
NPL Victoria's 2016 season will begin on the weekend February 19th/20th/21st/22nd.

 Trip to Sydney in 2016?
There has been talk from both South Melbourne and Sydney Olympic folk that South will be making a trip to Sydney in either late January or early February to play Sydney Olympic in some pre-season fixtures. 

 I've also come across a rumour that Olympic may also head down to Melbourne for some pre-season fixtures, but that has not been corroborated yet.

 South Melbourne in the National Youth League?
An article by Mike Cockerill on the revamped and cut down NYL seemed to slip under the radar somewhat, at least as far as it concerns South Melbourne. To a degree, that's understandable - having being split into two five team conferences, it's merely another step in the process where youth football is done as cheaply as possible by most of the franchises, by dumping them in the state NPL systems. The best playing the best? Hardly. 

 But more to the point, Cockerill makes this observation about where such a two conference, cost cutting summer NYL system may end up:
According to the grapevine, NPL clubs like South Melbourne, Blacktown City, Perth SC, Gold Coast City (replacing Palm Beach Sharks) and Wollongong Wolves, as well as state federation-funded entities Tasmania United and Canberra United, are also exploring their NYL options.
So, does Cockerill's rumour have any validity? I don't know, but if it does, it will be a situation which will no doubt serve to spread division and hatred throughout our membership. Which, to be fair, is as things should be at our club, but you have to wonder if too much self-loathing can be fattening and therefore dangerous to your health. Anyway, if there was a chance for our boys to take part in the NYL as South Melbourne, for me it'd be a good thing - you'd hope that at the very least it would help attract and keep talented youth players at our club instead of having piss off to other teams. That, and it'd be just going back to what we had in the NSL anyways, except this time we'd be the state league club with delusions of grandeur.

The (re-)construction of Ange Postecoglou
I don't know why Australian Story has introductions to their episodes. Unless you're adding genuinely adding something to the experience, in the manner of the legendary Des Mangan, I don't really see the point. As for Santo Cilauro's comment on the game in Australia being called 'soccer' by the unconverted, there's about 50 million things wrong with the question is where would you start?

I did have to laugh at the mention of 'lead, follow, or get out of the way', but you would too if you had seen Idiocracy; the use of Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk' by comparison for the intro music is just confusing, unless they only wanted for its tribal rhythm. And then there's Les Murray, talking about the reason for the existence of ethnic soccer clubs in Australia - first and foremost, they are used as a refuge by people in a strange land. A refuge is one thing, but surely there were also people at these clubs who maybe liked soccer? Because soccer is not the only avenue for safely expressing Greekness, or Italianess or whatever the case may be?

But at least Les has the right to make that judgement by virtue of once upon a time spending much of his spare and working time in around ethnic soccer clubs. In contrast, I'm less sold on the notion that Francis Leach knows squat about Greek football, let alone the squalid third division cesspool that Panachaiki were in at the time and the circumstances in which Ange found himself there, and then found himself leaving.

The main thing that I took out of this show was how Ange's character was portrayed as some sort of lone wolf; a pioneer who, if not quite coming out of nowhere, had few antecedents or direct influences. Anything that may have influenced him was almost limited to the environment he was in, and even that took a secondary role compared to his own drive to succeed. It's hard to know if the show took the direction it did because of Ange himself, or perhaps more likely, the production team generally had not very much knowledge of Australian soccer and thus skewed the final edit in that direction.

At the beginning, there is Ange's father and his love for his son and the sport; but there are no mentions of Ferenc Puskas, or Len McKendry, or Frank Arok, or even George Vasilopoulos, the bloke who gave him the South job because he was the least expensive of the suitable candidates available for the job. Ange claims, quite fairly, that his own interest in the game is to see attacking football - but how did he come to that conclusion? Was it not influenced in some part by the expectations that South Melbourne Hellas fans had of South Melbourne Hellas teams? Was not a huge part of the joy of the 1984 and 1991 teams their free-wheeling, free scoring manner? In Joe Gorman's article on South Melbourne and Middle Park, Ange doesn't shy away from acknowledging the impact of playing under Puskas (as well as being his interpreter).

The second, post-Australian youth teams era of Ange Postecoglou is remarkable in terms of succeeding to a large degree on his own terms, but also for having now no (obvious) mentors, and no patronage. But that question of soccer lineage remains frustratingly out of reach. Here's one of the chief links between old soccer and new football, and yet there's nothing made of that. Instead the image is of a sort of compulsive loner, sitting at a computer for hours looking for obscure Australian talent; a man who once read everything to do with soccer because of his love of the game, but who now is interested if not more so by books or management - something which you would not learn from this doco, but rather the first edition of Leopold Method.

Player movements and contract statuses
Confirmation this month that forward David Stirton is on his way to Port Melbourne. Meanwhile, back up goalie Fraser MacLaren has joined Dandenong Thunder. He has been replaced by Thunder keeper Zaim Zeneli, back for his second stint at the club. Hume City midfielder and former South junior (and two game senior player) Marcus Schroen has also joined South. Never did quite find out how that happened when Hume were supposed to have signed him for next year.
We've also signed former Wellington Phoenix midfielder Jason Hicks, and utility Matthew Foschini, most recently of Oakleigh Cannons. South fans with razor sharp memories will recall that Foschini was listed as part of the 2009 squad, but disappeared soon thereafter. No word on any potential forward recruits. By the time of the next monthly update, the squad will have begun its pre-season regime.
Players signed until the end of the 2015 season.
Players with unknown contract statuses
  • Jake Barker-Daish
Gone
  • Andy Bevin (Team Wellington)
  • Thomas Lakic (Oakleigh Cannons)
  • Fraser MacLaren (Dandenong Thunder)
  • Dane Milovanovic (Hong Kong Pegasus)
  • Nick Morton (returned to South Hobart)
  • David Stirton (Port Melbourne)
In
  • Zaim Zeneli
  • Marcus Shroen
  • Jason Hicks
  • Matthew Foschini
Meanwhile, in 'Internet is Serious Business'...
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