*opens newspaper* hmm, let's see what's in the news today

The online response to the club's release of the 2021 membership packages seems to have been pretty muted. Maybe it's because people have stopped caring, or maybe because the club did the right thing (whatever their motivation for doing so) by offering the renewal discount to 2020 members, there's nothing to complain about. And when people aren't complaining, there's fewer clicks, less rage posting, and less overall engagement. Maybe the club should've actually charged the full rate to everyone, getting those social media metrics up?

(Also, where is the link to the membership portal on the front page of the club's website? And are members still going to be charged for entry to home FFA Cup matches?)

Anyway, memberships are for real games with with real meaning, unlike the past two pre-season friendlies, which mean nothing. These two recent friendlies, both played behind closed doors at lakeside, were a 2-1 win over Northcote, with what looked like a pretty soft goal to concede; and a 3-2 win over Avondale, which I hope people won't latch on to as proof of anything, especially competency. 

Not that I think that there's actually much chance of people getting carried away, because I wasn't there and neither were you. So what can we say? Nothing, that's what, except that maybe Marcus Schroen looked thin or trim or skinny or what have you on one of those recent videos the club posted. Maybe I've forgotten what he looks like in person, and while it's not like he was ever the chonky type, maybe a proper pre-season instead of galivanting about the Spice Islands has done him some good.

Much of the rest of the week's focus (online at least) seems to be on the continually degrading state of the Ferenc Puskas statue out the back of Gosch's Paddock. In a recent-ish I noted the reaction to what appeared to be the then vandalism or theft of the plaque on the plinth. Now whether because of more vandalism, or shoddy craftsmanship, the plinth has degraded further, and the calls by South fans (and some others) to repair the statue and move it to Lakeside have been re-doubled.

Most of this anger comes from a good place. The statue is of a South legend, and the statue is in a poor location and in an increasingly poor condition. And after all the effort involved in getting the statue project up in the first place, I don't think that anyone would be happy with the outcome four years on, not just because of the money spent, but also because it's supposed to be honouring a legend of world football, and someone the statue's funders apparently hold in high esteem.

Moving the statue to Lakeside (apparently there's plans to at least try to make that happen now) would probably solve at least some of those problems: namely, the more prominent location, being closer to the club he was closest to while he was here, and you'd like to think also a reduction in the chance of vandalism. Repairing the statue and moving it to Lakeside (hopefully at someone other than the club's expense) won't solve the aesthetic problem of it being a lousy looking statue, or of its design bearing little connection to what Puskas looked like while he was here, but the perfect being the enemy of the good, you'd rather an imperfect solution rather than the situation that exists now. That, and it would be funny to have a statue conceived of and funded in part by a prominent former sponsor long since associated with the A-League, to have visit Lakeside and South Melbourne in order to get close to his attempted homage to one of his heroes

Death and its malcontents

I'm tired of the old shit 

Let the new shit begin

Eels - Old Shit/New Shit

I had begun writing up a post about last week's final friendly, but it was maudlin and stiff to the point of self-parody. Normally that would only bother me a little bit, but there are times when I feel like I've pursued that angle as far as it will go, and that I need to lay off it lest the blog becomes emotionally monotone - especially when there's a whole season to go, where we can all be as pantomime miserable as we like.

So before re-writing the sections I'd already written, I thought I'd write the thing that I should have been writing about in the first place, that being the reason for my break.

Three weeks ago, my father died.

He had been battling pancreatic cancer for the better part of a year, and for most of that time was holding up relatively well; but as was explained to me by the oncologists in what turned out to be the final couple of weeks of his life, at some point the body can no longer fight the fight. The blog's hiatus came on the day before his death, though at the time I only knew that dad's time on this earth was limited, and not necessarily that his end was imminent. So it goes.

I could write about my father's life in great detail, but my telling of it would be incomplete, and besides which, this is not really the place for it. Suffice to say, he was born and raised in difficult circumstances, worked a series of back-breaking jobs throughout his life, and spent most of his life - 49 out of 72 years - in a country he never was able to quite get his head around. It's a story a good chunk of my readership will be all too familiar with.

But there was joy, too, and one of the things that brought my father joy was soccer. His village in Greece, now close to collapse from population decline, was large enough then to have its own soccer team, and in one way or another dad's interest in the game remained for the rest of his life.

Arriving in Australia in 1971, the football scene he saw here was past its 1960s state league peak, but it was still healthy enough for there to be good players and good entertainment. Dad picked Alexander as his club not because he was from the north of Greece - though that became more important later on - but because when he first arrived in Melbourne he lived in the inner-north, in Collingwood. It was about as good a time to get on the Alexander bandwagon, as for the next decade or so they would be at their peak. Later the combination of distance (it's a fair hike from Altona North to Olympic Village), work and family commitments (my brothers have no interest in sport), and off-field politics (Macedonia issue, NSL and Soccer Australia bull-crap, internal club stuff) which gradually wore down not just the Bergers as a force, but also my dad's diminishing optimism about the game's prospects.

Thus he gradually drifted away from the local game; never completely losing interest, but never doing much to reverse that trend. When I came back to South in 2006, dad came with me for a few games, but eventually for all sorts of reasons - not least because I'd managed to attach myself to Clarendon Corner and the smfcboard bunch - his attendance at the soccer became minimal. He would still keep up to date via the Greek papers and radio, but most of his interest in soccer regressed to what was available on free-to-air TV. For a while there in the early-to-mid 2000s, I was headed much the same way, but turned that around in a story I've related in a number of places already.

My love of the game exists both because of, and in spite of, my father's relationship to the game. It exists because of his love for the game, because the game as it was for a good chunk of his first twenty years in Australia, contained a language he understood both in terms of what was happening on the field as well as off it. It's not that he didn't like Aussie Rules, but he had no cultural connection to that game. I only went to one footy match before I was 18, and that wasn't with my dad. When we went together to see a sporting match, it was inevitably a soccer match.

So we went to soccer matches. At Paisley Park initially, where we saw Altona East win the Hellenic Cup on its home turf. Then to Middle Park and Olympic Village and Olympic Park, and even after the Bergers were kicked out of the NSL, he would take me to South games at Lakeside. Dad had the habits a lot of his generation had. Park miles away from the ground and risk a parking ticket instead of paying for parking; never pay for a grandstand seat; always time your run to get to the ground five minutes from kickoff, and always start getting ready to leave five minutes before the end of a game, regardless of the score. So many of these things infuriated me, and still do, but it's just the way he was, and none of my nagging was going to change things.

Besides which, I had found my own way to annoy him. I became a South fan instead of a Berger because I saw the 1991 NSL grand final on TV, and because the team did well after that, too, and because there were enough nearby relatives at the time who were also Hellas fans to keep me attached to that. The novelist Christos Tsiolkas relates the story of how the first time he disappointed his father was when he chose Aussie Rules over soccer, and I guess my picking Hellas over Alexander was something dad could never quite get over.

Dad kept that feeling buried pretty well though, still taking me to South games when he could, and using the line (that was only a half a lie) that watching a good game of soccer, and watching talented players, was more important to him than his team winning. He'd use the examples of someone like Ulysses Kokkinos, or Branko Buljevic, or Dusan Bajevic when he came out here with AEK. The Bajevic example he loved to roll out a lot - on that day the Olympic Park pitch was a mud bath, and yet Bajevic came off the field without having gotten dirty at all. Why? Because Bajevic refused to make an idiot of himself and chase balls when people should have been playing the ball to his feet.

But when I say it was only a half a lie that dad preferred entertainment and quality over the glory of victory, it was because deep down my dad really was a Berger tragic. In 2008, the Bergers' 50th anniversary season - and probably the last proper Bergers game my dad went to that I can remember - the home team came from behind and beat South 2-1. As their second goal went in, he smiled in a way that I hadn't seen him ever do, and he even did a little fist-pump. I didn't even know that he had a fist-pump in his gesticulation repertoire. The ride home in the station wagon from the Village to Altona North was almost unbearable for the smugness in that Kingswood, the years of being humiliated by South during the 1990s melting away for him during the trip back.

But our trajectories as followers of local soccer nevertheless drifted further and further apart. He had a passive aggressive tendency, too, with my attendance, especially because I would take public transport to most grounds. He both wanted and was happy for me to to go all sorts of soccer games; but there were also times when he was befuddled by the notion of my taking a lengthy public transport journey, which would see me return from the other side of town in the early hours of the morning. "Why do you need to go, when there'll be other people there? Does the team specifically need you there?"

And like a lot of the older generation, if it was raining, so much the worse! Why would someone deliberately go out and get wet for no good reason? And don't get me started on what he thought about anyone who would be stupid enough to volunteer at a club, and especially anyone who trusted anyone on a committee, ever. At some level, what my dad would've considered as my crazy and now decade-plus renewed dedication to South Melbourne Hellas and soccer - in terms of attending, writing, and thinking - is my attempt to make up for lost time, and to avoid becoming so jaded that I stop caring about something that matters to me so much. I'm trying to make up for all those games I didn't get to see during the NSL years, for all the soccer friends I didn't have in the 1990s and early 2000s, and for the culture I was not as connected to as I wish that I was.

It's also my attempt to not fall into the trap of self-defeating cynicism that my father fell into. My friends and readers will know that I love to complain, that I instinctively first see how things could go wrong instead of how things could get better, and that I am prone to being openly caustic; but I've seen the alternative, and I'd rather be attached to the glorious mess of Australian soccer than be apart from it. In other words, unlike my dad and so many of his generation - and later generations - I'd rather be mumbling to others at a ground that things will never get better, rather than sitting at home mumbling to myself that things will never change.

But we still talked about all the off-field and on-field happenings, and we would still watch most of the major world tournaments at our disposal. I remember him taping Greece's first World Cup game in 1994 against Argentina, and then when I woke up and asked about it, him telling me it was not worth watching because we'd been smashed. I remember sitting in my uncle and aunt's lounge-room in 1997, where in the only time I ever believed he had any clairvoyant ability - because he'd make these kinds of predictions often, whether one way or the other - he picked Iran's coming back from 2-0 down.

We were both stoked when Australia finally qualified for the World Cup, and like everyone else we watched the Socceroos with awe in Germany, and with less awe in later World Cups. But the best time was probably the 2014 World Cup, where we stayed up late and woke up early and I watched far more of a World Cup than I ever had before, and my dad became a sort of ancillary character in my sleep-deprived narration of events, waking me up for games, and supplying me with tea and biscuits.

The final confluence of our soccer interests was the most unlikely set of circumstances I can think of. Throughout my extended career as a university student - a botched stint at Melbourne University in 2002 and 2003, and a much more successful stint from 2007-2018 - the things I was studying almost never came up in discussion. When I was writing my doctoral thesis on Australian soccer literature, for the first three or so years of that he must've just assumed that I was doing "something", but who knows what. But one day he asked what it was that I writing on, and after I'd explained it his face lit up and he started talking about his own poetry.

Now I knew that he had once fancied himself a poet, and that he had been published in Neos Kosmos in the early 1990s, writing poetry on a variety of subjects - such as the commercialism of the modern Olympics, and the Macedonia issue - but the key here was that he remembered that he'd written a soccer poem, an ode to Heidelberg United Alexander while they were having a difficult season. Not only that, but it had been published in Neos Kosmos in an abridged form, and a Bergers committee member had seen it and was so moved by it that my dad was offered a double pass to their next home game.

But that wasn't the whole of it - dad had also written a poem on what he saw as the unjust sacking of Jim Pyrgolios as Hellas coach and Pyrgolios' replacement by Frank Arok; as well as a lengthy poem on Altona East PAOK's Hellenic Cup win in 1992, which was printed and placed on the window of the wooden portable which was then PAOK's social club space. The Pyrgolios poem and the PAOK one survived in draft form, but the Bergers one I was never able to trace down a complete version of, except for a couple of stanzas in a draft. Maybe when Neos Kosmos completes its digitisation I can finally find the rest of the poem.

Now to be honest, the quality of dad's poetry was firmly in the category of doggerel; but since one of the points of my research was its focus on what existed in terms of Australian soccer literature, rather than the quality of what existed, I was stoked to learn about his soccer poems, and that some of them had survived. I transcribed the remnant drafts, transliterated them, added them as an appendix in my thesis, and cited the poems as works and my father as a writer in the main body of my thesis. I used my dad and his work specifically as an example of how hard it was to find examples of Australian soccer literature by non-English language writers, but also how important it was when one did find examples of them.

Passing my doctoral thesis was an ordeal - I had wildly disparate examiner's reports - so the day that I got notice that the third examiner had passed me with minor corrections, I was more relieved than elated. But the day I graduated was a joyous moment, because I got to share that with my dad, having written a work which had him in it. Like many of the people who followed soccer in this country, my dad's experiences, memories and thoughts of the game will soon be lost. It's in Australian soccer's DNA that we keep forgetting the past, and keep attempting to re-build Troy on top of the rubble and ashes of the cities which  came before. And the nature of most theses is that once they are finished, they will soon fade into irrelevance or insignificance - but knowing that I was able to preserve my father's work and part of his life in some format was reward enough for the effort.

As for last week's friendly...
Returning for my first bit of South Melbourne action for the 2020 campaign - or more correctly, preparation for the 2020 campaign - I felt that not much had changed in the months since I last watched a South game. The greeting at the door before I pick up membership pack was the same.  There were the same old faces sitting in the social club, and later watching the game, in this case a friendly against NPL2 side Northcote. Not everyone was there - more will be back this week - but there were no unfamiliar attendees except for the subbuteo faction on the futsal court, and even they've been there before.

If there were changes to be noticed, they were subtle ones. The complimentary scarf is longer than usual. The faces behind the bar are a little different, but they're still pouring spirits somewhere between a shot and a free-pour. The burger is much the same, including the wait time. At one point, social club manager Vic had Clutch(!) on the social club's stereo system. Outside, the sun-and-rain-bleached blue of the athletics track has been touched up to be of a more robust royal blue hue, while the city skyline to the north was clouded in smoke.

But the meaningless of the hit-out, bushfire relief aspect notwithstanding, was much the same. Whether pre-season form is magnificent or disastrous, there is no oracle which can reliably predict what it will mean for the season proper. But I asked those who had been to more pre-season games than I had this year to offer their assessment of what they've seen anyway, even if I knew that the answers would be non-committal. The most optimistic refrain was that it seemed that at least the team no longer hated each other and themselves which, if true, would be a step up from last season and the season before that.

Then again, give it five minutes and anything could happen. It's a very long season and a very large squad, and all the woodfired pizzas in Shepparton might not be able to prevent internal schisms should things go wrong.

On the field, I don't think it was a full-strength line-up for us. Peter Skapetis was out there, and initially at least he ran harder than I'd seen him do at any point for us last year. Chris Irwin played further up the field, as a pure winger, than he usually did during his previous stint with us, where he was much more likely to be used to as a wing-back. Harrison Sawyer is big, runs hard, and has spindly legs that I predict he will repeatedly trip over, Melvin Beckett looked exactly the same as last season, a lot of sizzle and not much steak. Marcus Schroen was not out there, so someone else was taking corners, free kicks, and penalties.

The tempo was high throughout the friendly, but you know what I think about high tempo at this level - that it's the Max Power Paradigm - not the right way or the wrong way, but rather the wrong way just faster. Both sides created a ton of chances in part because of this high tempo, which has freaked out the kinds of people who treat pre-season friendlt games against lower tier opposition in which we don't run them into the ground (with what I assume is nowhere quite near our likely starting eleven) as an ominous portent of doom for the coming season. Of course, had we belted our NPL2 opposition, the calls may have been that it was not a real hit-out against a comparable opponent. I say let's just wait for the Bergers to bury us on Friday night before we get legitimately panicky. 

Aside from what has been happening on the field, it has been as low-key a lead-up to a Victorian top-tier season that I can remember, apart from the bizarre Avondale points deduction which happened very late. There is no buzz. It's not just us, either - pretty much the whole league, and the federation, too, has approached 2020 as if there is nothing to get excited about, nothing to look forward to. Of course it doesn't help matters that most teams in this competition have no fans to get excited about anything, but even those clubs with what might be classed as "actual supporters" have mostly been quiet.

So is this it? Is this the end, the point where everyone finally, genuinely acknowledges the futility of state league football? One can only hope, though we'll have probably have to wait until after the game against the Bergers to be sure.

It's official
I am glad to say that I am once again officially accredited by Football Victoria to provide the public with South Melbourne Hellas nonsense. Also other nonsense, too, I assume, but I'll have to check the accreditation agreement.

Yes, it has arrived, with "South of the Border" instead of the usual "freelance". pic.twitter.com/KydJkOXXES

— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) February 12, 2020

Keep away from the asbestos trench - South Melbourne 5 Northcote City 3

What to report from this game? Hard to say really. There was a lot of chopping and changing around of the team. Quite a few of the young ones getting a run, but at some point very soon Con Tangalakis is going to have to sort the wheat from the chaff. 

Started off like a house on fire, scoring a goal within the first minute with a move that was so beautiful that we surely won't be able to replicate it for the season proper. Defence iffy - I think Amir Jashari is handling Saturday keeping duties because Nikola Roganovic has work commitments. Northcote could've scored a few more in the first half, and Jashari saved a second half penalty.

Look, the score isn't the important thing here, it's about working out who's likely to start, who's worth keeping around, and hopefully working all of that out soon.

2019 SMFC senior squad roster as of 27/01/2019
Added a couple of youth/triallists. I did learn Melbourne Heart Ball Hog's name yesterday, but then I forgot it.

Signed

• Dean Bereveskos (Bonnyrigg White Eagles) 
• Ethan Gage (Bentleigh Greens)
• Kristian Konstantinidis (signed until end of 2019) 
• Nick Krousoratis (Green Gully)
• Perry Lambropoulos (Port Melbourne) 
• Brad Norton (signed until end of 2019) 
• Kostas Stratomitros (Oakleigh Cannons)
• Gerrie Sylaidos (Northcote) 

Seen hanging around pre-season training

• Luke Adams 
• Manny Aguek 
• Ben Djiba
• George Howard 
• Amir Jashari
• Giordano Marafioti 
• Giuseppe Marafioti 
• Jake Marshall
• Andrew Mesorouni
• Leigh Minopoulos 
• Will Orford
• Nikola Roganovic
• Marcus Schroen 
• Melbourne Heart Ball Hog
• "Zack"
• "Calvin"

Rumours which seem to have gone cold

• English striker in visa slot 

Injured

• Alastair Bray 

Out

• Rory Brian (Preston) 
• Matthew Foschini (Oakleigh) 
• Josh Hodes (Oakleigh?) 
• Christos Intzidis (who knows) 
• Milos Lujic (Oakleigh) 
• Oliver Minatel (Canada) 
• Ndumba Makeche (Penang FA) 
• Tim Mala (North Sunshine)

Unknown / MIA / Assumed dead from 2018

• Iqi Jawadi 
• Giorgi Zarbos

Friendly tomorrow at Darebin vs Northcote City

Tomorrow, at Darebin International Sports Centre, we have a friendly against Northcote. Seniors kickoff at 1:00pm, under 20s at 11:00am.

Brain snaps - South Melbourne 1 Northcote City 1

Apologies for not writing anything sooner. Wanted to see if the club would spontaneously combust, whether or not there'd be more news about the club associate playing area invasion, or whether - and this was a real long shot - something even stupider would happen which would make any post redundant immediately upon publication.

The great thrill of this season, if you can call it a thrill, is wondering what will go wrong next. it's one bad thing after another, to the point where you wonder whether people are trying to fail. That's dangerous thinking with nothing to gain from it, so let's just focus on what went wrong against Northcote.

No Brad Norton, who had gastro, meaning that where one would've probably expected Christos Intzidis to replace Jake Marshall at centre-back, Intzidis had to go to right back to contend with the dangerous Gerry Sylaidos. And what did we do to make it easier for Christos, not the quickest player in the team? We played in a such a way which that allowed Sylaidos acres of space from counter attacks. Intzidis actually did pretty damn on several occasions, but there's only so much any defender can do in those circumstances.

There was also no Matthew Millar, on trial for a third week at Central Coast Mariners. Without wanting to delve into conspiracy theories involving jilted third parties, how long does it take to evaluate the merits of the player some-of-us-but-not-me call "Apples"? He can run fast, he can run all day, and his end product is frequently questionable. Look, maybe there's "he's prefect for the Mariners" joke there that I'm not aware of, but Millar's absence has been hurting us a lot, if only because we cannot run out a game for the life of us, which makes you wonder about the pre-season preparations.

Northcote had no end product, and that was their main issue for most of the game. The first half saw them open us up pretty easily, but the final touches were lacking. We weren't completely out of it, but we looked a mess going backwards, huge gaps opening up exposing the back line. That being said, we were at least able to craft chances of our own, and even took the lead for the second week in succession, Ndumba Makeche's cross met by a spectacular finish from Pep Marafioti, the only thing of note that Pep's done for us in his short South stint so far.

Sadly, Mekeche limped off soon after with a hamstring injury, adding further to our 2018 playing stock woes. Two goals and an assist are the visible stats of Makeche's productivity, but that obscures to a degree his work rate, often tracking back to provide extra coverage. Leigh Minopoulos came on earlier than many would've liked, considering Leigh's injury and fitness issues. But at least we had a lead, right?

Unfortunately, things went very badly in the second half from the get go. We couldn't get the ball, and it only seemed a matter of time before Northcote would equalise, and they did. The sheer number of chances that the visitors had created meant that there was a strong likelihood of them scoring eventually, but the manner in which the move began was heartbreaking. Marcus Schroen in his attacking half, going backwards, getting tangled up, and the ball flying up the other end for the goal. In its conception it was uncannily like a goal we conceded against Avondale last season.

At that point you had the sinking feeling that we would cop another one, but before that point we had the latest example in our spectacular 2018 brain fades when George Howard - who had been lining up opposition players all day - finally saw his chance to strike. After a couple of Northcote challenges in front of Clarendon Corner which should've been free kicks to us, Howard threw himself studs up and all in the kind of sick challenge which will see him miss several weeks.

If Howard's recklessness was the end of the affair, that would've been bad enough in our position: in the relegation zone, thin on available players, now with probably ten men to fight out the rest of the match before conceding. But because one stupid thing follows another in 2018, in the ensuing on field melee there came the involvement of a small contingent of what people from outside the playing area, jumping over the fence and getting involved in the fracas. My immediate thought was, "is this Northcote people?", not out of any desire that it was Northcote people, but only because why would a South person get involved when it was a Northcote player that was violently felled?

Sadly, one of the offenders seems to have been injured youth team player Giordano Marafioti, and thus now you wonder what punishment the club will suffer and whether that could include a points deduction. The consensus among some fans, including this one, seems to be that there really is no option but to throw Marafioti to the FFV wolves and hope that the broader club will be spared. Security seemed to move in fairly quickly, escorting away the people who weren't meant to be where they were, but you never know how these things will turn out when they reach the tribunal - especially since there's no such thing as precedent in FFV tribunal hearings.

Then came the "sack the board chants", and the "sack the board" banner, and it's amazing how all hell didn't break loose. In amid all this it took several minutes for a lot of us to realise that one of our players had been sent off. Incredibly, while we could've conceded another goal in the remaining time, we also had the chance to get all three points, as undeserved as that would've been. Minopoulos' back post header should've been better, but we can just add that to the list of things gone wrong this season.

We're not doomed yet - we're still only in third last place - but we're running out of games where we can reasonably consider ourselves having a chance of winning. Having picked up only two points out of a possible twelve against Northcote and Bulleen, we're left with games against only Kingston and Hume where we can take points off fellow relegation battlers. We still have games against Bentleigh, Avondale, and Gully away, and two games against the ladder leading Heidelberg. Being at home has made little difference overall to our prospects of success, and we keep losing players for one stupid reason or another.

The way things are going, it'll be a hell of an escape. I'm not optimistic.

Next game
Melbourne Knights at home on Sunday. Apart from adding to our death spiral, it's a chance for Knights to beat us twice in the same home and away season since 1995. Still, South picking up a win is more important than obscure statistical anomalies.

NPLW team keeps rolling on
Sick as I am of watching our women's team play against Bulleen this season, I nevertheless did make the decision to head out to Lakeside on Saturday ahead of two or three other options. And as usual, it was well worth the effort, the senior women putting in a good performance to finish up 5-1 winners, moving to first on the ladder, a point of Calder United who have a game in hand.

Always a bit more relaxed at women's games for me, which is no disrespect to the women's team who obviously take things seriously. Usual gin and tonic in the social club for me, where I was told by Tegan who's been working the bar that the night before an English futsal hiring had drunk about $3,000 worth of booze, including going through more gin than she'd ever seen before. Got to watch the first half in the match day operations booth, with a relieved George Kouroumalis at the helm, after the scoreboard malfunctions of the previous weeks necessitated repairs by the Trust. These kinds of situations are also good for a bit of scuttlebutt and rumour-mongering, not least that there had been an unusual spike in membership purchases during the week, getting in before the end of financial year cut off date.

Anyway, we were told by one insider that there would be a different style of play that afternoon, with South looking to press high up the pitch, and that proved to be the case early on at least. A very early 1-0 lead bucked the trend of much of what the NPLW side has done this season, which is fall behind and need to wake up and rally from that position. Here though there was the opposite, with the women controlling the game, mostly, and even doubling their lead albeit with a bit of luck from Melina Ayers' not exactly sweet finish. But the side also has a habit of defensive lapses, and copping a goal just before halftime wasn't ideal. Still, the second half was an improvement on the first, and I think the final scoreline does justice to the progress the team has made across the season.

That's a shame, etc
So Nicholas "the People's Champ" Epifano is gone. You could say something frighteningly obvious like "it had to happen", but you'd likely only follow it up with some equally obvious line like "it had to happen years ago". Rather than ramble on and recount the whole complicated history of this player and his time at our club, I'm keen to keep the obituary fairly short.

Along with several Dandenong Thunder players, Nick Epifano joined South Melbourne in mid-2013, during that time when Chris Taylor was appointed coach. The club had the opportunity to sack Epifano after he racially abused the club's own supporters - on multiple occasions - three years ago. Instead it decided to follow Chris Taylor's recommendation to help Epifano deal with his issues - whatever they were - rather than cut him adrift. That the club decided to do just that makes them come across as uncharacteristically noble and progressive, especially when you consider you're talking about South Melbourne Hellas here. Of course people would've also been operating under the idea that Epifano was a talented player that could help us win a championship. Thus followed a few years of South supporters watching Epifano ply his trade for South mostly through gritted teeth, feigned indifference, or with the assistance of supremely ironic emotional distancing. That facade broke apart at last against Pascoe Vale.

To sum up: Nick Epifano is a moderately talented soccer player who is, at best, an Australian second tier talent. Some people think he's got more talent than that, and that it's only character that's held him back, but I'm not convinced. On more than one occasion he was pivotal to our success in our good recent years, but he was just as prone to becoming a liability both on and off the field. He's signed up for North Sunshine Eagles in the state leagues for the rest of 2018 - the state leagues being the only place he can sign for now that the NPL transfer window is closed - and will likely end up back in the NPL somewhere next year, with Taylor's Oakleigh the obvious candidate. Whether we're there for our paths to cross again next year is another matter entirely, and of course the more important thing.

A-League shortlist news
Last Friday the announcement came from FFA HQ that the South Melbourne bid had made the shortlist stage for A-League expansion. Made up of ten out of the rumoured fifteen bids, it's a pretty long list.

• South West Sydney
• United for Macarthur (Sydney)
• Southern Expansion (Sydney region)
• Team 11 (Melbourne)
• South Melbourne 
• Western Melbourne Group
• Brisbane City
• Ipswich Pride
• Canberra & Capital Region
• Wollongong

If I were to attempt to discern some sort of logic as to the selection process thus far, it seems that the shortlist fits in rather neatly with the desire for expansion in bigger television markets - ie, David Gallop's "fish where the fish are" manifesto. Missing out are the Fremantle City, Tasmania, Gold Coast, and West Adelaide bids, and the rumoured but media silent Belgravia bid which no one seems to know anything about.

One could speculate in all sots of ways about why some were kept and some were left out, but that would be a waste of digital ink, and besides, in between now and the final announcement on October 31 there's bound to be all sorts of crazy commentary and shenanigans. Not that any of that matters.

Final thought
I get it now - getting relegated and spending our 60th anniversary in NPL 2 has been designed as a tribute to our 1960 team, which of course played in what was then the Victorian second tier. Coincidence that it was split into two sections back then? I think not! All we need to do is lobby for the east.west split to be refashioned into a north/south one.

That's what you get for caring - Northcote City 3 South Melbourne 2

Apologies for taking so long to get this post up; it's not like there's anything revelatory in the match report segment to make it worth the wait, and not much for laughs either.

The good times seem so long ago now that it's hard to believe that they were still going relatively strong late last year. Fast forward to now, and while it's still early in the season,  we've already reached one of the least appealing markers on the road to being crap, namely, being beaten by the "little" Greek clubs whose supporters (whether full-time or just there for the day) then decide to try and rub it in our faces. Several winning seasons may not have made us any more likable in the eyes of those people, it may not have even made them respect us, but winning at least gave us that psychological boost to the ego of "who cares what those people think?" Still, that's what you get for caring.

Another less noticeable sign of our increasing decrepitude came later, when the SMFC TV video came out. I clicked ahead to the end, and sure enough, there were no post-match interviews with a coach or player. Maybe they were all too distraught with the last minute loss to speak to camera. Maybe no one could be bothered to interview them. Now I'm not expecting to glean clues to explain our poor start to the season, but it's nice to see someone front up even if it's just to spout clichés. I mean, the players do the best they can on any given day, and sometimes their best is nowhere near their actual best.

Nevertheless, someone is responsible for what's going on out there at the moment, and while the players and coaches have to take their share of responsibility, as yet the supporters haven't turned on them. No doubt this is because their anger is being turned squarely at those who have decided, for reasons which may yet be valid but which only they know, to set us on this course. They must have figured that whatever it was that Chris Taylor had done, it was serious enough to turf him out just weeks before the season started, after having scrambled to sign enough players to fill out a first eleven, and letting other reasonable calibre recruits go to rival teams so late in the pre-season that one has to wonder at the planning process which lead to such a situation.

Pity that this first eleven, which would've been covered by a degree of depth last year, is withering away on and off the field. To our on field struggles, lack of a Plan B, or even ability to run out a game, we've now got players sitting on the bench who are injured and unlikely to take part; why else would Leigh Minopoulos, who the previous week set up a goal and scored one himself, not come on even for the sake of fresh legs? Thus you get the strange situation of going down to ten men for the last twenty odd minutes and making just the one sub because that's all you can really do.

One of the more naturally pessimistic supporters said that season 2018 feels like season 2008, and to be honest, at this point it's not that far off the mark. Each week a little bit of hope is chipped away. Can't defend. Can't run out games. Can't hold a lead. Treading water until the mid-season transfer window opens up in several weeks.

But we've got to keep supporting the team through thick and thin, it's just what we do, and goodness knows the boys need all the support they can get at the moment. Maybe an unlikely cup win can spark something? Look at me clutching at straws. See everyone on Friday, unless they've got you working the night shift.

Next game
Hume City away in the FFA Cup, on the Good Friday public holiday. The match will be streamed by FFV.

Unimportant observations
Northcote has changed its point of entry to the gate back of the venue on Clarendon Street. Northcote is also the latest club to move towards night (or at least this stage, twilight games), although they haven't yet bitten the bullet (or received the necessary approval) to go to Friday nights like everyone else. The candy bar in the social club is also gone, so if you're in the mood for Skittlebrau at John Cain Memorial Park, you're going to have to bring your own Skittles from now on.

There's also action going on in the western part of the ground with the hill behind that goal dug up, and where the small secondary pitch was there is now a massive hole in the ground which some people were speculating was for car parking for apartments, but is in all likelihood a "proposed underground water storage facility", which will likely include the reinstatement of the "full size senior football pitch to west of existing NCFC stadium pitch."

Within the John Cain Memorial Park Master Plan released in 2017 (which is an intermittently fascinating read) there is this tidbit:

The priority for FFV is to relocated the administrative base back to John Cain Memorial Reserve.

Which will of course have people flailing their arms in bewilderment. So it goes.

The following brain fart is based upon paying attention to about 35 minutes of under 20s NPL Victoria football for the first time this year, in between eating a souv, checking Twitter, and inadvertently eavesdropping in on other people's conversations
And as if there weren't enough disclaimers in the segment title, here are some more. Each year's quality of youth players is going to vary, even if that's not the point of the NPL. It could've been an off day for every player from both teams. It's Australia and we still have to be if not forgiving, then at least tolerant and expectant that the skill level won't be world class. Like everyone else, the kids are trying to do the best they can. Making sense of a game from up in the stand is much easier than making sense of it at ground level. And as always, my soccer opinions should always be taken with a large grain of salt.

But this is what got me unexpectedly flustered, because I usually invest very little emotionally into youth soccer, knowing that the results only really matter if you're at the top of the table at the end of season, and that most of the players will end up being nowhere near the standard of the state's top tier when they finish youth football. It was the on field decision making that dare I say it, actually upset me. The skill level wasn't great in last Saturday's 20s game, but there were so many bizarre decisions made that I feel like it's worth highlighting two of them to show what I mean.

The first moment actually involved a well executed piece of skill, which lead to an absolutely dead end situation. It was a cross-field diagonal ball, perfectly placed from the left wing to a player running towards the right hand corner post. And the brilliance of that pass masked the fact that the receiving player had nowhere to go, and no one to pass to. The best that could realistically be achieved in that situation is a corner, because it's unlikely that the player is going to be beat one, let alone two defenders in order to get into the box.

The second example had much less going for it in either aesthetics or thoughtfulness. A high loose ball was heading toward a defending player somewhere between the centre circle and his own 18 yard box. There was ample time to control the ball, but instead he took a massive swing at the ball, missing it completely. As much as he looked a fool after his air-swing, what would have happened if he had connected with the ball? It would have gone flying up the other end of the field, turned over back to the opposition goalkeeper.

My reaction to these and other confounding examples of poor decision making was, how did it come to this?

And I know that writing it all out like this probably makes me come across as petty, and naive, and ignorant, and I'll wear that because it's not like I have any education or interest in youth football methodologies. I can't tell you who or what is to blame when things turn out awry; the best and only advice I can give any young soccer player is to go out and watch more state league games, preferably ones with some elevated viewing spots. But I say this in part because that's the κουτσό στραβό  method I mostly rely on to learn about soccer.

But I am intrigued now about how decision making is taught to young soccer players, and I am even prepared to be enlightened on the matter by those who know about such things.

An old battered trophy, on a cheap plastic base.
The inscription reads "Winner, Port Melbourne,
 Summer Cup"; there is no date on the trophy.
Photo: Paul Mavroudis.

Musings on a trip out to the Greek archives at La Trobe University
The other week I ventured out to Bundoora to visit La Trobe University's Greek archives, ostensibly to offer an extra hand to Tony Wilson and Rob Heath who are making that Ferenc Puskas documentary that I've mentioned here once or twice. Of course, as well as hopefully being of use to Tony and Rob as they looked for relevant materials, one of the other benefits of visiting the archives was to see what South Melbourne Hellas stuff they had more broadly. The results of that secondary goal were a mixed bag.

But first to the archives themselves. Located on the southern fringe of La Trobe's Bundoora campus, the archives are located in a former high school site, almost invisible to the general public. To be fair, almost any kind of archive held at a university is invisible to the general public, who more often than not don't know that these kinds of archives exist, and that they can be accessed by the public.

Though who knows whether such contact information is even current. Hate the FFV website? Try navigating a university website looking for current and correct information after they go through countless updates and tweaks to their interface.

The Kambouropolos-McKay Memorial Cup, awarded to
 the winner of the 1998 "all-stars" (I assume veterans)
  match between Heidelberg United Alexander and
 South Melbourne Hellas. Photo: Paul Mavroudis

Anyway, from my place in Sunshine, it takes a good hour and forty-five minutes to get to the archives by public transport. Luckily on that day I got a lift to Sunshine station, and a late route 350 bus meant that I didn't have to wait an extra 15 minutes for a later bus. The bus winds its way through the inner north, goes up the freeway, than meanders through Ivanhoe and suburbs like that. It stops at the corner of the old high school, which is convenient enough.

The first thing you notice when arriving is the Melbourne City (Heart, not the Argentines) branding on the buildings. It is of course where their Melbourne headquarters/colonial outpost is situated. I got there a bit early, so ended up loitering outside in the rain as Heart players and personnel I didn't recognise filed inside, until I was eventually visited by an office staffer asking me what I was doing.

I could've provided any number of sarcastic answers, but settled for the truth, that I was waiting for people so we could visit the archives. Then she directed me to a completely wrong area. These things happen.

Tony and Rob having arrived we get ushered in by Michael, our guide for the day, through a side gate. What follows is a few hours of searching through boxes and plastic sleeves, interspersed with a potted history of Greek life in Melbourne, Victoria, and occasionally places further afield. Michael shows us the film room, filled with posters and film reels of the golden age of Greek cinema, the history of such being one of his specialties.

Another copy of a photo I first saw in Jim Pyrgolios' personal collection. Of
course, a blown up version of this photo is now part of the displays in the
 South Melbourne social club's museum space.

As is often the case, there are grievances aired about university funding and resource priorities. With similar issues coning up across the university sector, I feel like I could contribute a lot to this conversation, but decide to let it unfold as a monologue. Tenured scholars, archivists, librarians, post-graduate students; we all know the issues intimately, especially as they relate to the humanities, and the temptation is always to join in and vent. But sometimes you've just got to sit back and listen.

The archives are in if not quite what one would call a chaotic state, they are nevertheless not in their optimal catalogued state. Many boxes exist, the items contained in those boxes usually correspond to the box's chief designation, but items within the box are more often than tagged with a reference number and not much else. There is hope that one day a thorough and proper cataloging of items will takes place, but that will take several years, and the persistence of those who care about the archives. Looking at the troubled history of these archives, there's no guarantee that the quality of their itemisation and preservation will improve. But we can always hope!

Assorted graffiti, including "HELLAS RULES YOU'S FOOLS",
"LONG LIVE MAKEDONIA", a swastika, and some flags
 Unknown location, date, provenance.

Anyway, as part of their research for the film, Tony and Rob were looking for photos of Ferenc Puskas in Australia; moving out to images of South Melbourne Hellas from that era; moving out further again to images from South Melbourne Hellas history; and most broadly of all, images from Greek life from the 1950s to early 1990s. On that last front, there are a lot of photos to sort through, of social and regional brotherhood club clubs, of soccer clubs, picnics, church and festival days. Some photos are marked on the back, noting the event, the date, the location, but most are blank, its subjects anonymous. Over time, the people involved will become only more obscure.

Sorting through the boxes was a ramshackle affair, and yet also soothing in the way familiar to researchers both lay and professional. You get into a zone where the eclecticism of a collection becomes its own reward, and you get distracted by the breadth of materials on offer. So while I was there primarily for the task of finding materials relevant to the documentary, I could not help but go down detours, and to that end I found all sorts of photos and objects worth noting, including things you want to check out later on; in my case, the collection of Athletic Echo, Athletic News, and Athletic Flame Greek-Australian sports newspapers are likely to have all sorts of interesting information (and doesn't this stuff just need the most urgent digitisation!).

Two Northcote City Hercules players. The photo is dated
 "1969". Who the players are, where they are, who took the
 photo: all of that remains a mystery.

But there are of course problems with accessing archive collections such as these, and chief among those is the ever present spectre of copyright. In cases where stuff is old enough (say, prior to about 1954) things are pretty clear cut, but later on it all gets tricky. Who owns it? Under what circumstances can I or someone else (re)-distribute images of materials included in the archives? And is it possible that if I put up photos of photos into the public domain, that another researcher will have tighter restrictions placed upon them?

That's why I've been careful here not to reproduce too much. The South Melbourne Hellas "Red Vee" photo? I've put it up here because versions of the image are already out in the public domain. The trophies? They aren't photos, and ownership of their copyright quite clearly belongs to no one. The graffiti photo? So obscure that it's unlikely anyone will ever come calling to claim ownership of it. The Northcote photo (see right) of two unknown players, of unknown provenance, seems like the kind of thing that could safely be reproduced by again, the laws around these things are often murky.

It's one of the problems that Rob and Tony are going to have to deal with in making their documentary. The photos they found in the archive and which they may want to use were created by someone, and unless those people have relinquished copyright, they'll still have intellectual and moral ownership of the items. Similar issues come up in using different archives, including soccer collections like the Laurie Schwab and Les Shorrock collection at Deakin University. There are loopholes, considerations around fair use and honest attempts at finding out who owns the rights ti particular materials, but this is one of the reasons why Tony, Rob and I want the South Melbourne Hellas community to dig into its own attics, basements, cupboards and drawers to see what material it has, so Tony and Rob can get access to material which not only has a sense of cultural authenticity, because it was produced by non-journalists, but also because the ownership rights of such material will be much easier to trace.

Now I didn't want to do this
And that's why I'm a bit dumbfounded that the club hasn't put up anything yet promoting Tony and Rob's search for these kind of materials. The club's Facebook page has nearly 60,000 followers, and the club has 13,000 followers on Twitter. As far as social media goes, I have a reach of 60 people on Facebook (I barely use it), fewer than 1,000 followers on Twitter, and this blog which is read by the same old 300-400 people unless there's someone jumping a fence to attack someone else. Even if a good deal of the club's official social media followers are fakes, its reach would still be way bigger than anything I could muster.

And in case anyone is wondering, yes I have forwarded on stuff about the call for homemade South Melbourne Hellas materials to the club to use and adapt as they see fit (and if they don't like that, they can even write their own stuff), and I've received no response. The lack of any promotion of the documentary and its call for footage and photos is especially weird because the club is aware of what Tony and Rob are doing, and Tony and Rob actually got an invite to the club's jersey night the other week, where I assume things went well. The club would even benefit from whatever film and photography gets unearthed by the call out because first, it will make a better documentary about South Melbourne Hellas, and second, because the club will probably get access to a whole bunch of material it didn't have before.

But there's also this
Folk from a range of former NSL clubs who have tried to get match footage from the any of the networks, and SBS especially, have come up against the problem that it costs a hell of a lot of money to get access to that footage. As much as it annoys me, I understand why this is the case, even if I can see little scope for any of these networks ever making money from NSL footage. Apart from oddballs with acute historical connections to the relevant clubs, the only use for that footage is television networks looking for easy access for soccer riots - and even then, they've got most that stuff on speed dial.

But televised soccer history isn't just the games, it's also the news segments, the off-field pieces, the humorous segments. While NSL matches may have (as far as we know, and only after certain dates) largely survived the "we need space" culls of network television archives, it came to my attention that other elements of our soccer culture have been taped over to create space. That this has been done by SBS is disturbing on several levels. First, SBS is a public broadcaster, whose remit goes beyond whatever short termism may exist at the commercial networks. Second, SBS is (or at least was) the self-proclaimed home of Australian soccer. Third, SBS was the network most closely associated with migrant - that is non Anglo-Celtic Australia.

All these things make SBS' erasure of our history something to be despondent about, but what's done is done and there's not much that any of can do about it. Except, of course, those who have (probably) broken the law in the past to record television programming onto VHS tapes despite the ubiquitous copyright warning notices, and who have then gone one step further to definitely breaching copyright by uploading those materials to online platforms without getting any permission to do so. As far as Australian soccer goes, these people have inadvertently saved otherwise impossible to find moments of our soccer history.

But here's the catch. If you want to use those videos in a commercial production - videos containing footage which no longer exists in any other format because of its destruction by the original broadcaster - they can still charge you for using that footage! When I heard this, I was dumbstruck. I mean, by erasing their footage, haven't the broadcasters forfeited the right to charge  if not legally, then certainly morally?

It's a mad world, to be sure. The good thing is that the interviews for the Puskas doco have been going well, and that most of the people you'd expect to be called upon to give their version of events have done so. No spoilers though!

Match programs update
Thanks to the visit to the archives, I managed to get copies of several home match programs from 1988 to add to the collection.

Around the grounds
Guinea Pigs
As is increasingly the case in Melbourne nowadays, there are more Friday night soccer options than you can poke a stick at, as clubs strive to get some of those sweet TGIF metrics, though the jury's still out on whether Friday night games make any difference in the long run. It's not like we have anything more than anecdotal evidence to go on, since almost no club posts attendance figures anyway. Given the choice of five NPL 1 matches, most of them within reasonable reach even for me, I decided to head to the round 1 State League 1 South-East  contest between Richmond and Beaumaris instead.

It was a mini late South Melbourne NSL reunion of sorts, with Richmond being coached by Sam Poutakidis, and Beaumaris by Marcus Stergiopoulos. The reunion didn't extend to Kristian Sarkies, who was unavailable for Beaumaris because he was in Hawaii. It was also an informal reunion for several people associated with Richmond's brief golden era, the circa 2010 period where the club finished minor premiers and grand final runners up, with the then coach (Mike Chatzitifronas, his first soccer game in several years), team manager (Mark Boric), president (Helmut Kalitzki) and a few others reminiscing and asking where some of the old players had ended up.

To be honest, my main interest in this match lay in its prurient qualities. Richmond is in the unenviable position of being the first club to have been relegated from Victoria's NPL system (Bendigo City were also relegated, but they disbanded their senior team soon afterwards, as was expected). So what happens to a club in that position and how do they rebuild? And what does rebuild mean? To answer that last question, Richmond's goal is to get back into the NPL, and to do so as quickly as possible. That much was clear from the visa player heavy squad which took the field.

Funnily enough, Richmond's trophies and pennants were absent both because
 of a fire several years ago and because what remained was being restored. 

Elsewhere, one had to look for clues in the way match day was being run, while being careful not to jump to doomsday conclusions. Entry was free, but that could have been a sign of goodwill for the first game of a 65th anniversary season. There was no memorabilia on display, but that was because it had been packed away for restoration and a hope for improved display in the social club. The crowd was small, but it was still bigger than most comparable affairs last year. according to those in the know. Even the canteen, which somehow ran out of bread rolls and was cooking nearly everything to order - even the bain marie staples - was apparently running along the same lines as last year.

More concerning is how does an NPL club's culture regenerate or persist when it is no longer an NPL club? Eavesdropping in on conversations over the course of the night, it appears as if most of the juniors which had played NPL with Richmond had moved onto other NPL teams. The introduction of the NPL itself, with its rigid junior squad frameworks, means that there are a lot of people at NPL clubs (youth players and parents alike) who are there only because of the fact that they club in question is an NPL club. Now to be fair, this was a trend that was in evidence before the establishment of the NPL, but the NPL has solidified it - nearly everyone's presence at an NPL club is strictly conditional upon the club remaining an NPL club. Just as concerning, is that in order to become or re-become an NPL club, the juniors you've accumulated along the way will have to largely be discarded.

(There's also the matter of the free-for-all signing sprees going on in the state leagues for teams hoping to become NPL clubs, especially with regards to visa players, compared to the at least nominal restrictions placed upon the senior squads of NPL clubs.)

As long as there's enough of the strange few who remain attached to senior men's football in a spectator or supporter capacity, there's a cultural bulwark in place to make sure those kinds of clubs can remain as such. But what happens when that cultural foundation is discarded, or wears away? What will the NPL clubs whose senior football reason for being becomes obsolete or discarded? Bendigo was always going to fall away, because there was no shared history for anyone to really care about. But if you think that some of the once upon a time stalwart clubs are going to be able to fare much better in the next ten years or so as interest in senior second tier men's wanes, then you are a much bigger optimist than I could ever hope to be.

Looking towards the bottom of both NPL2 divisions at the moment, and there's at least one candidate that I can see struggling to recover should it fall out of the NPL system. Richmond themselves were not so far away from that fate last year, with a large tax debt and relegation seeing the then custodians of the club prefer to pull the plug than fight it out, letting a long if not altogether storied history go by the wayside. They got lucky: they got a benefactor of sorts to pull them back from the ledge, restoring a sense of equilibrium. But as we should all know by now, regardless of the success they may bring, benefactors are a poor substitute for a strong supporter culture in terms of holding clubs together.

As for the game itself, it was pretty forgettable. Richmond opened the scoring with a nice enough move from the left, and Beaumaris drew level before halftime with a penalty, after an earlier penalty shout was changed to a free kick. At best, the two sides each produced a five minute burst of tolerable football during the opening 45 minutes. The second half was marginally livelier. Richmond retook the lead, had a man sent off for a second yellow card after some confusion, and polished off the game with a penalty of their own. Beaumaris, despite having the extra man and a game to chase, only looked like a team with those twin motivating factors

Final thought

🎵Believe it or not
Ange isn’t at home🎵 pic.twitter.com/FJBbPXJdST

— Nice Orange 🌈 (@AardigOranje) March 23, 2018

Summary of March 2018 AAFC roadshow Melbourne edition

Introductory remarks
Derisory as I am of the idea of promotion and relegation in Australia, attending the Association of Australian Football Clubs roadshow event in Melbourne last Thursday seemed like a no-brainer. This meeting was meant to be held in Sports House in Albert Park, but a text message received while I was on the train up there said that a burst water pipe had necessitated the relocation of the event to the South Melbourne FC social club.

Of course. What else could they have done at such short notice?

Nursing my gin and tonic I had not intended to tweet much about the event, but rather take some brief notes on my phone (I'd not bothered to bring pen and paper as I do for say, South Melbourne AGMs), but after getting a polite request and checking that I had enough battery left on my phone, I decided to give it a go. I did note that Shouty Mike was also in the room, and though long since blocked by him on Twitter, I guessed he would tweet at least some of what was happening on the night, so there's always that if anyone wants an alternative view of proceedings.

There were also summary notes taken by freelancer/interested onlooker Matthew Galea, if one cares to go back far enough in his time-line, and there has been a positive overview of the night by journalist Jonathan Howcroft on Football Nation Radio. Also on Football Nation Radio is an interview with Tom Kalas.

Through my limited internet trawling, there appears to have been very little comment made about any of the roadshow meetings outside the Melbourne event. I'm not sure why that is the case - was the roadshow not publicised well enough, or is there just inherently more interest in these matters in Melbourne? One thing which came across during the Melbourne meeting is that there were at least slightly different messages given to different AAFC constituencies. This makes sense because, as I'll reiterate later, each state's experience of the National Premier Leagues, let alone Australian soccer, is quite different from each other.

The crowd built up to about 40-50 people, mostly in casual (non-club) gear, with a few exceptions. I recognised (and learned over the course of the night) that there were representatives present from South Melbourne (Andrew Mesourouni and Leo Athanasakis), Northcote, Heidelberg, Goulburn Valley Suns, Bendigo City(!), and North Geelong, but not much more beyond that. There were some non-club representatives - that is ordinary fans, and one bloke from local Greek media who I see around a lot but don't know the name of nor who he works for - but otherwise the audience seemed to be mostly committee members of various NPL teams.

It is interesting that more ordinary fans didn't show up. That being said, AAFC only has a couple hundred more followers on Twitter than I do (I have no idea about their reach on Facebook), so maybe this was actually about as good a turnout as one could expect. Indeed, we were told on at least a couple of occasions that the Melbourne meeting had the biggest attendance of any of the AAFC roadshow sessions up until that point, with only Newcastle yet to come. Why was that the case? I suppose it helps that Victoria has one of the larger NPL setups in terms of numbers of clubs, at over 30, and more NPL teams means more people likely to turn up.

(As an aside, when AAFC representatives were asked who were the Victorian NPL teams not under the AAFC umbrella, it was noted that Whittlesea Ranges and Sunshine George Cross were among them. Ranges I could understand, I guess, from their Victory/sponsor connections - though Moreland Zebras/Victory man Joe Mirabella was in attendance on the night - but the Georgies one has me a bit stumped to be honest.)

There's also a continuity in recent times in terms of Victorian clubs getting together to fight the establishment, namely, the (mostly) united front by leading and aspirational clubs against Football Federation Victoria's original NPL framework. Indeed, two of the key figures in that campaign - Tom Kalas and Nick Galatas - are now key members of AAFC. There's probably other factors for the larger turnout too, like the more obvious seething antipathy in Victoria for Football Federation Australia compared to other states, which would extend to the general distrust of New South Wales' dominance of Australian soccer. Neither do Victorian clubs, even the powerful ones, have anything like the facilities (on field or off) of the wealthier New South Wales clubs. Add in existing under the Aussie rules hegemony, and I guess everyone feels a bit more vulnerable than they'd like to admit.

(As another aside, FFV president - and according to one source, also currently acting FFV CEO - Kimon Taliadoros was absent, due to a competing engagement. FFV had some representation at the meeting in the form of Gary Cole, recently hired by FFV as "Manager, Football Strategy and Special Projects". While an FFA representative attended AAFC's Queensland roadshow meeting, it was speculated out loud that FFA were not likely to attend a Victorian meeting due to the hostility they were likely to receive from members of the audience.)

Representing AAFC on the night on the front table/panel of sorts were Dean Hennessey, current Pascoe Vale technical director, ex-coach and TD of a few places; Tom Kalas, ex-South Melbourne board member, interim AAFC chairman during parts of 2017 and frequent spokesman for the group; Nick Galatas, South Melbourne chairman until very recently; and AAFC chairman Rabieh Krayem, one time Northern Fury chairman. Oddly, of those four only Krayem offered any significant contribution to the night's proceedings, with Krayem at times sharing the stage or delegating proceedings to AAFC treasurer Christo Patsan of Northern New South Wales.

From then to now
The evening began with an address by Rabieh Krayem, giving an overview of AAFC's progress and success up until now. He outlined the reasons for the establishment of AAFC, a summary of AAFC's rise to (relative) prominence, and noted the ongoing unity of AAFC member clubs. This theme of unity was returned to throughout the night, out of a certain degree of truth no doubt, but also in its own way acting as a polite reminder to AAFC member clubs that anything which would undermine that unity would be detrimental to their collective aims.

But as with so much of what AAFC is about, it's about adding a positive spin to everything that they do; thus extolling AAFC's ability to unite so many disparate soccer clubs, and celebrating an unprecedented collective effort in "putting football ahead of self-interest". This was reiterated by comments such as the unity of the AAFC clubs apparently confusing FFA. Added to the repetition of the need for continued unity were the virtues of focus and patience; not everything would happen at once, and the keenness for reform from NPL clubs needed to be properly directed.

Krayem went on to list the three broadest issues which the NPL clubs suffer under and which AAFC hopes to fix:

1. Unsustainable NPL model. 
2. The high costs of junior soccer. 
3. The limitations on growth for NPL clubs under the current system.

Some of these issues were covered in relative brevity, either by the night's two main hosts, or during the workshop period of the meeting. As best as I can recall, no specific details were offered in terms of fixing points 1 and 2, but point 3 was addressed in detailing what AAFC hoped to achieve as part of its aim to help create a truly national second tier.

The Championship/Second Tier discussion
After announcing its initial framework for a second tier model (among other demands) last year (see my take here; or the guest point-counterpoint here), AAFC announced at the roadshow meeting that it is in the process of creating a working model group for the second development stage (out of three) for its second tier/Championship model. The intention is to finish this stage by June, and seeing as how AAFC met its own October 2017 deadline for releasing its original/stage one proposal, we can be optimistic that we'll see the results of stage two sometime in mid-year.

Sceptical as I am about many facets of this plan, one development (or the absence of) I was interested in seeing was whether other relevant Australian soccer parties - federations, players, etc - would become involved in trying to develop a second tier model. And this is where one of the more interesting - and as it turns out, also contentious - parts of the meeting took place. AAFC claimed that it would be working with FFV, Football New South Wales, and Professional Footballers Australia to develop the model; indeed, that those three groups would also provide funding for the necessary research. Apart from the (however vague) political vote of confidence that such a collaboration implies, the news that there would be pooled funding for the working model group caught the attention of a few onlookers both at the venue and among those observing online.

Later on though there emerged conflicting reports about whether FFV had actually agreed to provide funding for the working model group, as opposed to merely providing moral and/or logistical support. In communications I had with different people, from the AAFC side there was insistence that FFV (and even FFA) had committed to funding the working model group, while two sources from the FFV side insisted to me that no financial commitment had been made by FFV. Confusing things further, from the AAFC side I later received "clarification" that AAFC was still in discussions with the different groups about the possibility of funding the working model group.

When combined with the suggestion, made at the Adelaide meeting, that AAFC member clubs would be asked to contribute financially to the working model group, there seem to be mixed messages floating around about how the working model group will be funded.

Not doubting Paul but FYI - at the Adelaide stop of the roadshow it was suggested member clubs of AAFC would be asked to contribute to cover this instead. I think it was $500 pa per club up from the token $100 it cost to first register w AAFC. All attending seemed to agree to it.

— Mathew Doolan (@mdoolsy) March 8, 2018

So far, AAFC has apparently spent $90,000 on research - originating I assume from a mix of club donations, but principally from the generosity of some of its wealthier patrons. It's an expensive business getting together not just the conceptual framework for your new competition, but also putting together the mechanics of how you claim it will all work.

It's also necessary, not just from a "prove the doubters wrong" aspect, but also from a "putting in a competing framework to the only one that currently exists" aspect. When the NSL Taskforce Report was released many years ago (perhaps the most overlooked document in Australian soccer history, because everyone keeps focusing on the Crawford Report, the latter of which was related to governance, not the league), it had the added heft of being based on the research of the PFA, at the time "the most stable and cohesive institution within the game" according to Joe Gorman. The PFA model is what the A-League was born from, albeit not in its pure form; nothing is ever taken straight the shelf, much like the FFA governance model wasn't a direct lift from the Crawford Report.

The main point however is that long ago the one prominent organisation in Australian soccer that had not been sullied by Australian soccer's reputation of mismanagement and corruption was the only one that came up with a plan, funded by itself. In a moment when confidence in Australian soccer's leading institutions is once again at a low ebb, AAFC has the opportunity to do something similar to what the PFA did in the past, by transitioning from being a fledgling advocacy group to something which has its own intellectual property in the form of a firm plan - not just ideas - about how to improve the game in Australia. In an environment where the best ideas anyone else can come up with to rejuvenate the A-League and by extension Australian soccer are "maybe we should add a couple of teams, maybe..." and "all we really need to do is have an independent A-League" - as if either of those alone would be anything other than short term solutions - a bold, costed, detailed and logical plan would stand out.

If some observers of my Twitter feed were upset by the suggestion that FFV and/or FNSW would use "junior fees" to pursue the dreams of a collection of rebellious/ambitious/arrogant clubs, it wasn't just those people that had their jimmies rustled by information provided during this segment. When a slide was put up showing a comparison of current NPL club costs compared to possible Championship model costs, some in the audience were a bit stunned by the figures of current NPL costs, thinking them too high, especially in terms of wages.

The broad range offered by the AAFC's slide claimed that current player wage bills were up to $800,000 a season; the exclamation from some in the crowd was that most clubs would be paying, at best, half that amount. Along with questions about how AAFC got those figures, reasonable comment was made from the floor that this section of the presentation should have included "bands" of spending to more accurately reflect current spending trends. And I agree that there should have been more detailed information about how many clubs were in different wage spending bands, (as well as other costs) and that this data should have also included a breakdown of these details by state, so AAFC members and interested onlookers could see a more complete economic picture of Australian soccer at the second tier level.

Of course, this means more clubs opening themselves up to the kind of scrutiny that few clubs at this level would be comfortable with, but what price the greater good?

With costs, including wages, obviously rising across the board for a national second tier model, it felt to me for a moment that for some clubs the penny may have finally dropped about how realistic participation in a national second tier would actually be for them. But then the discussion moved on to whether second tier teams would be obliged to spend that much, or whether they'd be allowed to get away with spending a lot less. And therein lies one of the problems to be worked out among those arguing for a national second tier. There is a very broad spectrum of people discussing things like a second tier and associated reforms, ranging from a complete laissez-faire approach to something much more regulated, but which side of that ideological ledger will AAFC's second tier model prioritise?

Among those who criticise the A-League, much of that criticism centres around things like the salary cap, the salary floor, minimum player wages, and the assortment of other measures which see the A-League operate as a cartel like the top competitions of the other major Australian football codes. (This includes what might be called the Rolls Royce model around fan experience, stadiums, etc). Apart from disagreeing with that cartel approach from the position of "it's not how a real soccer economy or system works" or "it doesn't replicate the global standard", the argument also claims that the cartel approach entrenches mediocrity. Teams that struggle on the park have less incentive to immediately do better in order to secure their position in the league; successful teams have artificial barriers preventing them from actually putting out the best product that they can, because they must be kept in relative check with all the struggling teams

Cost is one thing, revenue quite another. Of course a lot of the doubters are wondering where the money will come from, especially as costs increase. While some potential national second tier clubs are reasonably well placed to cope with the wage increases (and some will have the benefit of less travel than potential competitors), there will still be significantly increased costs which will need to be covered. In the discussion which reiterated the preferred administrative model for the hypothetical national second tier, there was also some discussion about pooled revenue and profit sharing. Uneducated as I am about these matters, it nevertheless seems to imply a certain degree of cartel discipline, and thus a step removed from a no-holds-barred spending model. It also says something about the fact that AAFC believes that there will be profit to be shared.

But where someone like me sees problems, AAFC sees opportunities. AAFC is frequently on record with talking about how much money is generated by its member clubs for the Australian soccer ecosystem (some would counter that by claiming that it's mostly generated by the junior fees paid to NPL teams), but also about the limitations placed upon teams outside the A-League because of Australian topflight soccer's closed shop. Almost inevitably, AAFC expects that increased sponsorship opportunities will emerge for teams participating in a national second tier. But aside from that, AAFC believes there is an opportunity to take advantage of a changing media landscape, which for me is code for non-traditional (and non-terrestrial) broadcast media.

Previously, if not from AAFC itself than from people advocating for similar outcomes, the idea (or hope) was that SBS would be a partner of a national second tier, an idea which I never had much confidence would be realised. For starters, SBS's Australian soccer content - indeed its soccer content outside of its lone EPL game a week at midnight Saturday -  has now regressed to an almost negligible existence. What could possibly prompt them to spend the necessary funds to show a second tier competition with limited opportunities for recouping any investment? This suggestion, which goes back years before the existence of any tangible second tier movement - and which was originally formulated around showing live state premier league games - has always left me stumped.

Should this subtle rhetorical shift in emphasis - from securing a traditional and established broadcast media partner to a non-traditional equivalent - concern prospective members of a national second tier? It's something that certainly bothers me, but I'm already long gone on the prospects of this thing even working. For those more open-minded on these matters however, it should still be something that they keep an eye on - every cent that The Championship model doesn't get from a broadcast deal is that much more revenue that will need to be collected from other sources to make up for it.

In terms of player recruitment for The Championship, Krayem was adamant that it was "not designed as a retirement home", and that rules would be set up in order to promote younger Australian talent. This was clearly a riposte to the geriatric progression of the A-League, but also perhaps a critique of the NPL as it currently functions with regards to player recruitment. For example, does the luring of players from Queensland to Victoria help Queensland soccer? It may help those individual players by having them play in a higher standard competition, but it also weakens the standard of Queensland soccer. And what does the Victorian appetite for recruiting players from outside Victoria - previously British backpackers, currently Queenslanders and players from smaller states - say about the lack of opportunity given to Victorian players? And in the case of bringing in players from Tasmania, might this actually be much more justifiable? It's a lot to chew on.

Regarding questions from the floor about the transfer model to be used in The Championship, and Australian player transfer reform in general (as part of the now longstanding grievances state league clubs have about their players being poached by A-League teams, including the latter's designated NPL sides), the short and only answer given was that this was something that would be worked on.

The Championship would be a summer competition, with men's and women's components. I was not able to ascertain on the night whether successful applicants for The Championship would need to field both men's and women's teams as part of their participation. (update: see the comments section for clarification) This is an interesting point for how women's soccer exists in Australia. More often than not, the wealthiest soccer clubs in Australia (below the A-League level) are those which have a long tradition of successful male teams, with their female teams, where they exist, being an afterthought. Meanwhile those state league clubs which have historically been most successful at running female teams - often by women themselves and existing in the void left by the absence of a strong senior mens' program - would struggle to find the means to support a grandiose venture such as ongoing participation in a national second tier competition.

There was no elaboration on the matter of promotion and relegation to and from the A-League, or from and to the extant NPL competitions. While perhaps this meeting was neither the time nor the place for an explanation of how the different league layers would be formally linked together, it did leave a gaping hole in the area most casual onlookers (admittedly not in the room, but among those observing online) wanted to know. Krayem said that the NPL would persist; insofar as my understanding goes, this positions The Championship as the mechanism by which Australian soccer begins to achieve a necessary realignment of the its competition hierarchy.

Christo Patsan said that the founding principles and intent of the NPL and National Competitions Review were sound and largely still relevant and worth pursuing. I'm not sure that feeling is shared by everyone. If I was to summarise what I think AAFC want, it is a nationally consistent NPL approach (and eventually second tier) where clubs have the ability to control their identity and destinies. Are the ideals of a consistent framework and the freedom for clubs to do their own thing compatible concepts though?

That the NPL competitions would continue means that there needs to be a lot of work done to sort out how this is all going to come together. I mean, that much is obvious to everyone. Even among the advocates for a promotion-relegation regime however, there are a range of views of how this would work, ranging from a "quasi-cartel, necessary criteria to be met" model, to something much more cut-throat and free-market. At the moment. it also appears that apart from Victoria and New South Wales, most states are only paying lip service to AAFC's aim of a second division. Cue the NSL conspiracy again. Should the Championship become operational, AAFC says its administration would be based in Melbourne, a deliberate challenge to Sydney's dominance of Australian soccer administration.

(And while really not important from the fact of its obvious implausibility, it is worth noting that there was also the odd call from the floor - with slightly more than muted approval from the guests in attendance - that if FFA and everyone else didn't want to get a second tier up and running, that the clubs should just breakaway and form their own competition. This idea had cold water poured on it from AAFC panel members, but it does highlight that there are very diverse views and attitudes to Australian soccer matters within AAFC's constituency.)

The most left-field proposal on the night...
Was AAFC's desire to hold an annual junior tournament for AAFC member clubs. The age range would be 13-16, for both boys and girls teams, with the event held in a single location. The annual extravaganza would also include conferences and seminars. Aiming to start in April 2020 - one assumes over the Easter break - this is a logistically bold, perhaps even insane proposal. It would require accommodating thousands of travellers (kids, parents, coaches, support staff), would cost a lot of money to organise, would require a lot of grounds, and all sorts of other things which someone like me who has never organised or been involved in such an undertaking could possibly think of.

Credit for the scope of the idea, but its scale is such that I'd love to see how this would all come together. Reading online, this idea was a hit with the Canberra people in particular.

FFA Congress progress
Another one of the key issues was the status of reform to FFA's Congress. FIFA and the AFC representatives had recently been in the country and left again, and looking in from the outside it appears that not much has changed. Naturally those involved closer to the action have a better idea than us mere plebs. In terms of AAFC's hope of getting a seat on FFA's reformed Congress, it all seemed to depend on who was speaking for AAFC. Krayem said that Victoria was the only state federation which was for AAFC having a vote on FFA's Congress, while Queensland was happy for AAFC to have observer status.

(A non-AAFC source later told me that most state federations were happy to let AAFC have observer status, until such time as AAFC could "prove themselves", whatever that means. I assume it means in part holding itself together through what will be the much more difficult phase of actually getting some of its grand schemes up and running.)

Krayem was hopeful but cautious about whether AAFC would get its seat in the FFA Congress, but Nick Galatas, making one of his rare contributions during the evening, piped up to say with uncharacteristic confidence that AAFC will get there. This belief is based on the support that AAFC believes it is receiving from FIFA and the AFC; they certainly aren't being made to feel welcome by FFA and the A-League teams, and probably quite a few of the states. This international support gives AAFC a kind of leverage that forces their inclusion into discussions.

The issue of representation
Every state and region is going to be different when it comes to its soccer experience; in fact, this is a problem that cuts across almost every aspect of Australian sport, that rather than anything resembling a uniform and universal sporting culture, we are instead a nation of micro-sporting cultures. One thing I didn't note earlier on about the make up of the audience was how overwhelmingly male it was. I don't think there were any women present at all. Intentional or not, it is not a good look for an organisation that will need to argue that its attempts to reform Australian soccer also include the best interests of women and girls, and not just high level senior male players. Indeed female football was very much an afterthought to the entire evening's proceedings, with AAFC talking heads mentioning little about the topic, and the questions from the floor referencing nothing about women's soccer at all.

This is a serious issue, and I don't doubt for a second that those representing AAFC don't take it seriously. However, apart from the issue of optics - never mind female participation and professional pathways being the zeitgeist of Australian sport - the lack of any almost any reference to the female side of the game plays right into the hands of those who would oppose AAFC solely on the accusation that the group was merely a front for a collective of culturally regressive ethnic clubs who had been unable to keep up with the times. And to be fair, some of those accusations would not be too far off the mark. The room was made up of at least some clubs who represent conservative or traditional ideas of what soccer is about in Australia on this and other issues. Related to those clubs would be those who, like South Melbourne perhaps, espouse a cautious modernism in its approach to women's soccer.

(Albeit a modernism as yet untested by what happens when the female program's principle advocate, in South's case Gabrielle Giuliano, moves on. The matter of cultural and club continuity has always been at the forefront of women's soccer.)

At the same time, apart from your different flavours of ethnically derived conservatism and cautious modernism, you have clubs which exist outside those frameworks, and those which go across several demographics. So while there are clearly clubs in the AAFC movement with a chip on their shoulder about FFA's treatment of ethnicity, there are also those clubs for which ethnicity is not even close to being at the top of their list of complaints. Then there are the clubs from regional areas. The ambitious clubs who have no NSL history. The clubs from states and regions which have never had national representation of any sort, and no obvious development pathway for their talented kids. All of these groups are being presented by AAFC as a unified collective with a common purpose, and not as the motley collection of clubs that this group actually is.

And it's not all smooth sailing. There was some discomfort from the floor about some of the decision making and negotiating processes of AAFC, namely that it does not consult as much as it could or should with its member clubs about key issues.

(I'd also add in the strange and sometimes unprofessional social media antics of AAFC. I think they'd be better off sticking to a conservative online approach - discussing only their affairs, and avoiding clogging up their timeline with stuff outside their immediate remit of being a representative organisation for second tier clubs. At present their social media efforts lack focus - probably operating on the whim of whoever's in control of the relevant social media accounts - while also coming across at times as petty. They need to at the very least get an off-the-shelf social media policy.)

But for the time being, in those narrow schemes where people actually pay attention to any of this stuff, AAFC is winning. It's winning the ideological battle because it is presenting a positive outlook for Australian soccer (even while often talking down present day Australian soccer); it's winning because its opponents have been successfully portrayed as out of touch and stagnant. And whatever the flaws with its social media/PR game, AAFC has also succeeded in having its public face, its front office if you will, obscure whatever disquiet and misgivings clubs under the AAFC umbrella have.

We are all in this together, but for how long?

Unity and patience are the virtues preached, but old habits and attitudes die hard. The nature of soccer in Australia has been, at least since after the migrant lead boom, one of self-interest and self-preservation. (The A-League has been the notable exception to that.) The pursuit of excellence (in all its forms) applies first to your club, and good luck to the others trying to catch or keep up.

But at one point during the meeting Krayem made the salient point - the kind of comment that can deflate a room full of fighting optimists - that "what may be good for football may not be good for your club". Amid the positivity and reinforcement of what it is that AAFC is trying to achieve, it's a message that cuts through, and it's certainly a message that we will look back on if and when a second tier gets up and it's not to everyone's liking.

Of course what the common good is insofar as Australian football goes depends on who you ask, and I'm in no good position to answer that. To me it's at best a nebulous concept, one that's been tainted because more often than not it's been used as a weapon rather than as the vague ideal that it is. For whatever it's worth, I don't think Krayem used the "good of the game" argument here in any sort of malicious way, more as reiteration that even within this group of (for now) united clubs, there would be winners and (at least relative) losers from AAFC's plans.

A word on the "NSL conspiracy"
There are some few pushing the line that AAFC and all of its associated antics are merely a front for getting ethnic NSL clubs back into the national soccer system. At the most extreme end of that argument is the accusation that AAFC is a front specifically set up to get South Melbourne Hellas back into the Australian topflight.

Such thinking (whether directed at ethnic NSL clubs or South Melbourne more specifically) requires two pre-existing notions in order to get off the ground. First, it requires the ethnic NSL teams having the necessary political, financial and grassroots clout to re-emerge from their otherwise terminal decline and irrelevance to Australian soccer (a terminal decline and irrelevance diagnosed by their detractors no less). Second, that these clubs would have the capability and competence (again, both of which their detractors claim these clubs lack) to establish and sustain such a complicated and unwieldy campaign in order to get back into the national league system. Needless to say, I find such conspiracy thinking beyond laughable. Truly, it is at the level of the conspiracies cobbled together by the so-called "bitters" of Australian soccer over the past decade and more.

Whatever else AAFC's faults, or the disagreements one may have with the aims of AAFC, it has been established and managed to succeed beyond the limits placed upon it by its detractors and opponents for a number of reasons. We have already mentioned the support AAFC is receiving from FIFA and the AFC, however much that support may be overstated by AAFC representatives. It has also managed to keep its broad constituency together for longer and greater ends than many people expected. Just as importantly, in an Australian soccer situation which reeks of stagnation - especially with regards to FFA and the A-League - AAFC is putting forward the boldest and most optimistic view of what Australian soccer could become. Whether their approach has gained any traction with people outside those few interested in the narrow field of Australian soccer politicking is almost beside the point; within the demographic that does care about such things, they come off looking more often than not like the good guys.

Something rather obvious that gets missed however is that AAFC exists to represent clubs which exist in a rather strange and hitherto unprecedented "between space" in Australia's football chain of command. The NPL clubs play under the auspices and control of their respective state federations, while at the same time participating in a system largely designed by the national federation. While in cases like Victoria, NPL clubs are able to perhaps organise well enough to exert a measure of influence over the running of their state federation - and thus alter elements of their own NPL environment more to their liking - they have no ability to act as a collective to put pressure on the body which set up the NPL framework in the first place, that being FFA.

Because of this bizarre operating system, no state operates NPL in the same way. When one person from the floor of the Melbourne roadshow complained (fairly enough) about A-League teams having more visa players at their disposal when they play FFA Cup matches against Victorian NPL teams, Krayem noted that when Victorian teams played against Queensland teams in the same competition, that Victorian teams had a PPS cap of 200 compared to Queensland's 170. Meanwhile other states have no restrictions on visa players. Not all of this is FFA's fault, and the clubs themselves - certainly in the case of the Victorian NPL - are also to blame for the mess that NPL has become.

But the point is, while ethnic ex-NSL clubs may be best placed to push for national second tier participation, they are not the only ones doing so. Neither are all of the former ethnic powerhouse NSL clubs best placed to take advantage of any changes. The goal here clearly is to start a competition which adds value across the country, and not just in forgotten suburban pockets of Melbourne and Sydney.

But still, what is it that South Melbourne Hellas is trying to do?
(I included this section because Leo Athanasakis asked what I thought was an unusual question, on the matter of potential A-League expansion and NPL/second tier queue jumping. While this was directed at other A-League consortium bids, I felt the queue jumping element could have - and indeed already has - been directed at South itself. Also South of the Border is a South Melbourne blog, so you know...)

When the campaign against FFV's original NPL model was begun by Green Gully and Melbourne Knights, South Melbourne - represented on this issue by one Tom Kalas - notably took a different tack, preferring to remain what it called "in the tent", believing that it could effect change more effectively from within the system rather than fighting against it from the outside. Then, like magic, South gradually changed its position to the point where it (and to be fair, a whole bunch of other Greek clubs) somehow became the leader of the movement against FFV and its NPL model.

Among those clubs who care to remember that this happened at all, there is understandably distrust and resentment about how that all played out; that the more obnoxiously regressive clubs on all sorts of issues who stuck their necks out on principle (however misguided that principle may have been) only for a bunch of Greeks to come in and take all the credit for getting not just a solution to the NPL impasse, but credit as being the leaders of a re-found boldness for clubs to stand up to the post-Crawford federations for their rights.

Me, I liked the fanciful idea that I invented that it was all coordinated; that certain clubs that had a more uncompromising ethos when it came to rejecting forced modernity would do the initial head kicking and grunt work, allowing more palatable alternatives - ie, us - to come in and finish off the job.

But the truth is that ever since it was compelled to vacate its position in the Australian topflight by the forces which took over Australian soccer, as well because of its own decrepit state, South Melbourne has had one distant goal in its sights above all others: to get back into the big-time, as soon as possible, and by any means necessary. So we bid for the second Melbourne A-League licence under the Southern Cross gimmick, losing out to Melbourne Heart. We tried to buy out the then failing Central Coast Mariners, under a scheme which may have included keeping some games in Gosford for however long it took for people to realise it was a stupid idea and just have all our games in Melbourne. Then we tried buying out Melbourne Heart, and failed there too. Currently, we've thrown our hat in the ring for the zombie A-League expansion process which may not even have ever existed.

They say that you miss all the shots you don't take, and when it comes to failed attempts to get into the A-League, no one's taken more shots than South. And yet, for whatever reason, South has never been at the public forefront of AAFC, other than by proxy association. To its own members, South has played AAFC and promotion-relegation issues as low-key affairs, preferring to put up a wait and see approach. The emphasis has always been on first and foremost getting into the A-League under its own steam (even if details of those attempts provided to members are sparing), and not through wholesale reform of Australian soccer's league structures.

And yet in most recent times, those paying attention to the social media contributions of especially our president Leo Athanasakis indicate a shift in our prior reticence to openly support a promotion-relegation model. Such a shift leads easily to the allegation from within the AAFC tent and from promotion-relegation fellow travellers alike that South Melbourne is not really ideologically committed to the principle of promotion-relegation; rather, South Melbourne is only committed to whatever South Melbourne believes will get it back into the topflight soonest. And if that happens, the rest be damned.

While not serious enough to threaten the unity of the AAFC revolutionary project by itself, it's the kind of fissure that people will need to keep an eye on; when persistent calls are made about unity and its virtues, any deviation from that ideal invites the possibility of infighting and sniping.

The question of heart and soul

I tried to write and re-write this section a number of times, never to my own satisfaction. So I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet.

Community, authentic, grassroots, corporate, franchise, elite. Words like these and many others can be useful in describing the cultural schisms that afflict Australian soccer. Used carelessly however, instead of clarifying the ways in which Australian soccer is divided, these words serve mostly as an act of self-justification.

By any measure, FFA and the management of several A-League teams have treated NPL teams poorly. There are countless examples of this, some of which were given on the night. But it's possible also that NPL teams are seen in a similar light by teams far lower down the food chain.

Claiming the moral and ethical high ground is a dangerous business. Anyone making claims for their own purity of support of the game is on dangerous ground. Resorting to the kinds of rhetoric which filled up forums a decade ago, and which paints simplistic pictures of an "us and them" which does not actually exist, is a tactic fraught with issues.

The focus should be on the actual examples of disrespect given by the top tier towards everything below it. Emotive language which loses sight of that should be avoided.

Final thought
During the aftermath over the next few days, it was funny to see the same info I'd received from different parties via Twitter DMs and text messages - sometimes intended for clarification, sometimes intended for further dissemination - make its way out to the public domain via other trusted vessels. It was like a proxy social media battle in the broader war for hearts and minds, except that I don't think anyone but the already interested even noticed.