Circus - Oakleigh Cannons 4 South Melbourne 1

I managed to overcome the ordeal of a dodgy public information system on the train to get off at the right station - though the confusion interrupted my reading of Steve Kilbey's autobiography, though I have little interest in The Church - and head to Jack Edwards early enough to watch not much of the under 20s game, even though I could've watched most of it. Instead the time was spent having deep and meaningful discussions about life and all that it entails.

That, and having a customary pre-game chat with former South and now Oakleigh assistant coach Chris Marshall, discussing football of all things, and what had transpired over the past couple of seasons.

As for the game itself, the big question was which South would turn up? The good one, the mediocre one, or the terrible one? All three as it turned out. You can read about that in appropriate depth on Luke's blog. Or you can do a google search and try and find his poem about schnitzel.

But let's be fair - the way Oakleigh has been performing for the past three and a half months, no matter how well we played, we probably wouldn't have been able to match them. Three a half months... think back to that time - a time when both ourselves and Oakleigh were playing abysmal football, and Oaks managed to win what was pound-for-pound one of the worst games of football I've ever seen.

At any level. In any code.

We started with Josh Dorron in goals, because Nikola Roganovic had accrued five yellows. Pretty soon Dorron was being forced to make save after save - sometimes in the same sequence of play - and the signs looked ominous for us. That we actually sort of settled and won a maybe dubious penalty - our first for the season, and which we scored from! - didn't really make things any less ominous.

Credit to Bates though. Despite his dodgy hamstrings, which are always on the verge of snapping into oblivion, probably no one else could've run fast enough to get to that ball and win that penalty.

Oh, and credit to Marcus Schroen for putting away the penalty. We'll remember it fondly, if only because who knows when we'll get our next spot kick, let alone score from one?

But the good times weren't going to last forever, with Oakleigh equalising from a sequence of play involving a shot off the crossbar and an easy tuck away that I won't be revisiting on the highlights package. Apologies to George who compiles the highlights, and desperately needs views on the club's YouTube channel so the club can hypothetically promote its metrics to sponsors, but this year I'm in mid-1990s Paul Mavroudis the Collingwood fan mode, where I avoid Saturday replays if the Pies had lost. And back then, it happened a lot.

If memory serves me correct, Oakleigh had an offside goal disallowed, and forced several more good saves from Dorron in the first half. For our part, we still looked lively, at least on the counter. Once we got to the dangerous areas of the ground, things tended to fall apart, but it was nice to get that far.

And if Pep Marafioti's well-guided header had gotten past John Honos late in the first half, well, it provided a case of what might have been.

Nah. We probably still would've lost.

In the end, the what-ifs and might-have-beens were settled the old-fashioned way - by what actually happened on the field. And the second half from our lads was not good, while Oakleigh maintained their relatively (proportionally?) high standard of play.

It finished 4-1 - and not 5-1 as someone in the nearby crowd had thought, but I forgive them - but it could've been so many more for them, and maybe one more for us. Two of the goals we conceded were carbon copies (or at least rough ad libbed short term memory copies) of each other, crosses headed down and slammed home. The fourth goal was some dodgy keeping from Josh Dorron, who probably scuppered any chance he had of ever being considered a permanent first choice keeper in NPL Victoria from 2020 onward.

That's a slightly harsh call, since he'd pulled out a number of excellent saves on the night, but why should Josh avoid being made a scapegoat? Pretty much everyone else of even half note had copped it. Perry Lambropoulos, Marcus Schroen, Pep and Gio Marafioti, Nick Krousoratis, Jake Marshall, Kristian Konstantinidis, Billy Konstantinidis, and even Josh's main rival for the goalkeeping spot, Nikola Roganovic.

The presence of Milos Lujic made the final 15 minutes of a game that
 was cooked, slightly amusing for a gaggle of fools, this reporter included.
Photo: Luke Radziminski.

Speaking of scapegoats, former champion of the club and scapegoat for some of what happened last year (for the five people at the club who don't put the entire blame on the board and Sasa Kolman) Milos Lujic made an appearance off the bench for Oaks, after which he was cheered out of respect for being a South legend, and then absurdly cheered upon by a section of Clarendon Corner encouraging him to score, and mock abusing our defenders for denying him a goal.

Well, some found it funny. Others saw it as a more of a last straw, seeing nothing noble or amusing in the self-loathing on display. They probably prefer their self-loathing to be directed inward perhaps, or maybe even just want straight up loathing directed toward them by others. Hey, it takes all sorts.

Some people are saying there's a lot of difficult decisions to be made during the off-season, but is it really so? As long as we're comparatively skint (either because we're broke or saving pennies for the alleged second division), the kind of player we'll be able to attract is not likely to be a game changing player. With the instability on the coaching front over the past two years, it's unlikely as well that we'll be able to get a "name" coach, or even a promising up and comer, so chances are we'll probably end up with Esteban Quintas for another season not because he's the best candidate for the job, but only because we've already got him.

That instability goes for the backroom machinations as well - a new technical director, a shuffling of the deck chairs in terms of who's responsible for the football department. The board promised us a competitive team, and at times - even plenty of times, if I'm being fair - the team was competitive. Just not often enough, and certainly not for long enough in most games. The board also said that the aim was finals, and from a finals perspective, the last two games are now officially a wash for us. Already a long shot, our loss on Friday night put paid to our chances of making an unrealistic and frankly undeserved tilt at the title. What's more, other results over the weekend meant that the top six is locked in - no one can get in or out, with only final positions up for grabs.

All we've got left is some experimenting with youngsters, and denying the Bergers what I still call the minor premiership.

Next game
This week is a Dockerty Cup and designated catch up weekend, and thus there is no senior men's fixture on this week. We're back at home not this Sunday, but the one after, against fellow 2019 also-ran Altona Magic.

In the meantime, our senior women have an important game against Heidelberg away this Sunday afternoon at Olympic Village.

As for me, I'm going to spend the week - or portions of it - at the film festival.

So, er, what now for the juniors?
A little while back, we engaged the services of former South player Michael Valkanis - who was an assistant to John Van ’t Schip at PEC Zwolle in the Netherlands - as a sort of distance education coach for our junior program. Now Van ’t Schip is the Greek national men's team coach, and it appears as if Valkanis will follow him there. I don't know if part of the club's arrangements with Valkanis was meant to see us access some of the know-how at Zwolle or not, and if, whether that was actually followed through with.

Still, you'd like to think that a national team job would generally incorporate a lower day-to-day workload, so would this mean Mike could do more work with our kids? I don't know.

Media news
Since the resignation of previous Football Victoria media and communications guy Teo Pellizerri earlier this year, FV has outsourced its media to a company run by Michael Zappone and some other bloke, with news yet to come about what FV has planned for next year on whether the outsourcing will continue.

But one part of next year's local media landscape has been revealed, with Football Victoria sending out a memo to all NPL clubs informing them that they'll be charged a $5,000 levy for marketing and promotion in 2020. For that cost, clubs will receive:

• a pre-season photo-shoot (team and individual players), for clubs to use in their own marketing.
• access to Football Victoria's media studio for podcast and content production.
• access to a central club portal for video footage.
• the chance for clubs to include their own advertising on live streaming (up to 10% of allocated advertising banners).
• match day photography for each club, at least once per season.
• written match reports and previews.

In and of itself, such a move is not necessarily a bad thing. What it is, however, is a realignment of the nature of what is expected of NPL clubs. Previously, there was a degree of autonomy and self-reliance expected of teams - it's your club, and if you don't promote it to the fullest extent of your capabilities, that was on you. Thus the quality of what clubs were able to produce varied significantly, not just because of cost, but because of the lack of will and organisation.

Teams that wanted to spend more, or who had the organisational and/or volunteer capacity to do so, tended to do better work. Those that didn't, often did nothing at all. I suppose then, that the problem with this initiative - even though I would say its intent is good - is how much value will the clubs get back? For clubs who have already invested in equipment and people over a number of years to do this stuff for them, the benefits seem likely to be modest at best.

For those clubs who have struggled with getting volunteers to do this stuff, or who have rarely bothered to make an effort, will they all of a sudden become more likely to become media players? I'm not optimistic, especially as it concerns being able to make a return on this forced investment. As long time South media volunteer Skip Fulton notes:

I personally dont think its worth it. There's nothing there that can be monetized to recoup the $5k beyond what clubs can do now at no cost. There may however be clubs out there with little or no access to media volunteers and they may benefit.

— FB Skippy (@fb_skippy) August 6, 2019

Being in a competition where crowds are low for all sorts of reasons, and where most club income comes from junior fees and the largesse of wealthy club patrons - the latter of whom will never see a monetary return on their investment - it's almost like misreading the room on why someone sponsors a club in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, more media and more coverage of Victorian soccer is not a bad thing. But the expectations around that - especially the implied notion that such increased media will increase sponsorship - is misguided. More media content under our current situation is good for historical and record keeping purposes, good for providing training and opportunities for young media hopefuls, and good for engaging (up to a point) extant audiences.

But revenue? Crowds are too small and too fragmented to be useful to potential non-traditional sponsors. Live streams do not have the commercial credibility of free-to-air broadcasts, especially when the quality of play is poor, the crowds low, and the atmosphere non-existent.

Other questions remain up in the air. Will NPL 2 and 3 (or whatever those league are going to be called) teams going to be slugged this levy as well, even though they will get less value? Will people providing services to FV - such as the live stream commentators - actually get paid for their efforts?

Skipping ahead to the fights
My interest in the rest of this league and pretty much all competitions below it, is cactus for 2019. The notable exception is the relegation battle that thank Christ we're not involved in anymore.

But even that relegation battle is barely engaging my interest. I tried watching moments of the Dandenong Thunder vs Pascoe Vale game, and got bored pretty quickly. Turns out that I would have been less bored had I popped in the approximately 74th minute mark, where a run of the mill foul and then a Pascoe Vale player kicking the ball - hard - into a prone opponent kicked off an on-field scuffle, which got on to the fence, and even made the cinematic leap into avant-garde film-making when the live stream camera was filming the Paco cameraman filming the violence; a cameraman by the way who had gone all Arnie Pie and wanted to make the news. At least he had the good grace to later apologise for getting involved.

Compared to that, the scuffle near the players' race - with pitch invader - at the Port vs Bergers game seemed almost telescopically quaint.

Final thought
Thanks to Johnny for the lift back to the city on Friday. You've been a champ on that front this year.

Generic car engine sputtering into life noises

Where was the kaboom? There was meant to be an earth shattering kaboom! 
Like an apocalyptic cult waiting for doomsday, we reached the hour of judgement and... nothing happened. How do we go on with our lives under such conditions? Well, like any good cult with a failed doomsday prediction, we'll reconvene and let everyone know of our revised date at some future point of time.

More seriously, the transition from one FFA board and Congress model to another was always likely to cause issues. The current board of FFA, which has been treading water since Steven Lowy succeeded his father - and which cobbled together a half-hearted expansion process that neither they nor the current A-League teams really wanted - has failed to deliver an outcome to its own purported deadline.

These things happen. And what's more, if we are to believe certain media platforms, there are ongoing concerns about the viability of all six final bidders. Well, duh! I said the same thing when there were three times as many bidders; that there was no magic bullet Wanderers-style bid which would solve (or at least alleviate) the persistent issue of stagnant A-League metrics, while also not requiring new stadiums, suffering from uncertain investment streams, or significantly cannibalising the fan-bases of existing franchises.

The more conspiracy minded of you will no doubt gravitate towards the theory that despite its obvious drawbacks and deficiencies, South is probably the only ready-to-go franchise of the remaining bids, but that there's no way that the authorities or whoever succeeds would let that happen. And I'm not here to disabuse you of that belief; after all, since the only way I could ever see South returning to the Australian top-flight is via an extraordinary case of last resort default. I can't entirely deride a line of thought which bears some relation to the way that I think about these things.

Anyway, even if we kept the receipt, it's not like we're (or whichever director was responsible) going to get our application fee back. We're just going to have be a bit more patent as this farcical process extends into the indeterminate distant future. Not that any of that matters, even if it is frustrating.

Of course there is always that second division and promotion/relegation idea
And if you're interested in such shenanigans, then the AAFC have a treat for you. They'll be hosting a forum for potential candidates for the chairpersonship of FFA. Register here if you'd like to go, though I think Football Nation Radio may cover it as well. I'd like to say I'd be there, but I may be otherwise occupied.

But back to more important things
Con Tangalakis' appointment as senior men's coach is finally official. Now that it's official, what can we say about such an appointment? Purely on a surface level, both on the appointment itself and the way it happened, it seemed like Tangalakis was not our board's first option.

Whether Bentleigh coach John Anastasiadis was serious about considering our offer to him, or whether he was merely stringing us along, there was an offer made from us to him - and it didn't work. Whether the club had anyone else in mind, I do not know. Whether anyone else would've been interested is also a question that you'd hope would be answered in the affirmative, but it could be that we are seen as a basket-case not worth bothering with, a condition working in tandem with free-agents of any worth being vacuumed up by cashed-up clubs.

When combined with scandalous rumours and articles about our perilous cash-flow situation, and 2018's unceasing aura of senior squad disharmony, things aren't exactly looking chipper. Anyway, pre-season training starts in a couple of weeks - or so some of the forum people say - and it'll be interesting to see which players actually turn up. Speaking of which...

Farewell Milos Lujic
It was a fait accompli, some would say from months ago, but it's now official: Milos Lujic has departed the club. Five times our leading scorer, even in 2018 when his commitment levels (and the service to him) wasn't at its best. That's going to be a huge gap to fill, but it probably won't be the only one.

And just in case some of you were holding out hope...
Former skipper Michael Eagar has re-signed at Port Melbourne for 2019. So we're not getting him back.

From a distance, the world looks blue and green (and the snow capped mountains, white)
Mike Valkanis has been appointed as "Head of Football Development", which seems an odd thing to do for someone who fairly recently decamped for The Netherlands to work in football there. So is Mike coming back? Er, not quite.

While the reaction from our own fans on social media was one of unbridled enthusiasm for having a sort of favourite son "come home", the supporters of Dutch club PEC Zwollw - where Valkanis is currently employed in some sort of assistant role - certainly seemed to be confused by the situation.

Valkanis himself clarified that he would, in fact, be remaining in The Netherlands while delegating day-to-day operations to other people. How all that will work is a question best left to those who have made the decision and those tasked with making it work.

Besides, as long as the stream of players from Queensland to Victoria doesn't stop, do we even need juniors anyway? I mean, apart from fulfilling our duties under the NPL licence agreement?

South Radio to return in 2019?
Heard some talk that there's a chance of a South Melbourne Hellas radio show returning to the digital airwaves in 2019. If it happened, it'd be via Football Nation Radio, who are trying to fill out their programing with club specific shows. Not sure if we're likely to take up the offer, though I believe other clubs are keen to grasp the opportunity.

Haven't done this in a while
Match programs! Well, one South one, and one Queensland one. The South one is from our ill-fated first attempt at the FFA Cup national stage - ie, the Palm Beach game. The other is from 2017 NPL Queensland grand final. Many thanks to Garry McKenzie for sending these our way.

I've put the call out Knights fans for what South of the Border is missing in terms of Knights vs South match programs from 2005 onward... we'll see what happens. I'm more hopeful of getting match programs involving South Melbourne and Newcastle's various NSL representatives, though we'll all have to be very patient with those.

Part 2 of ERT Doco

Once again, thanks to Mildura Vasili.

In this segment (all in Greek), Mike Valkanis, Johnny A, Jimmy P and Ange P get extended chat time.

Part 1 of SMFC ERT Doco

Here is the first part of the ERT documentary that has been uploaded online. Parts 2 and 3 are also online, but I'm posting the videos in different entries (and different days) to spread it out a bit. A massive thank you must go to Mildura Vasili for uploading as much as he could of the documentary onto youtube.

Unfortunately for our non-Greek speakers, it's mostly in Greek, with no English subtitles - but Jimmy Armstrong gets his fair share of talking time. Also included are Mike Valkanis, Ulysses Kokkinos, Takis Mantarakis, Jimmy Pyrgolios, Con Boutsianis, Manny Poulakakis and discussion on the late Ferenc Puskas.

smfcTV special feature - Paul Trimboli, Michael Valkanis, Steve Panopoulos

Slow news week

Mike Valkanis retired from Adelaide United... rumours have inevitably circulated that he's going to play out his career with South, but it's just rumours as far as I know. Brisbane Olympic is holding a Hellenic Cup tournament including several interstate Greek clubs - South isn't one of them, but whether that was due to not being invited or us rejecting it is sorta up in the air... though if we did reject the offer, it was probably because the paltry prizemoney on offer (in a cost/reward analysis) wasn't really worth it. Rockem Sockem Poutakidis will be captaining Northcote City next year. I also got food poisoining and was hooked up to a saline solution drip in hospital for a couple of hours yesterday, not very fun. Hopefully more interesting things to report on soon.