A 20 year victory (guest post)

This poem originally appeared on Manny's blog

A cold and still night

A traffic filled journey

The crowds arrived late

And then South scored early

The first half a flurry

Aggressive direct

South wanted to score

Not simply protect

The half time break welcomed

By both of the teams

As the Nix clicked into gear

And South ran out of steam

They held the possession

For forty five more

The Nix with the ball

But not with much more

South held their breath

For fifty more minutes

Their small early lead

Pushed the team to their limits

And just as South’s dam

Felt destined to burst

The whistle was blown

And rewarded their work

The players collapsed

The fans on their feet

The scenes of success

Of mission complete

No more can they say

It had never been done

South played an A-League team

And somehow they won

Two different football games (guest post)

This poem was originally published on Manny's blog.


Amongst the family homes

Besides the Merri Creek

No trains or trams in sight

The fans walk through the streets

They wander from their cars

And make their way inside

An old suburban ground

To watch their teams with pride

They join thousands on their feet

Not all can get a seat

They shiver in the cold

Just like the days of old

Down at the MCG

From comfortable modern stands

Far more go to see

Two clubs of foreign lands

Many chose to go

To simply see a show

And there are many more

To watch clubs that they adore

Those who’ve come in suits

are removed from the grassroots

There’s money to be made

And guests to entertain

Deep in Melbourne’s North

Two stories intertwine

One has stayed on top

One reversing their decline

They share a Balkan past

And a football rivalry

And a vision of the future

Gives this game vitality

National aspirations

Beckon both these clubs

A final game before they rise

A taste of what’s to come

The friendly down in Richmond

Is derided by some fans

Too soon after competition

To travel to far lands

The players are too tired

To put on a great show

Many chose to rest

With their families back at home

There’s no three points or silverware

No preseason insight

There’s not too much to play for

For either team tonight

Preston score in seconds

The stadium erupts

Their fans’ nerves dissipate

In a moment of triumph

The South fans are not happy

The urgency soon rises

Losing is not an option

For that there are no prizes

On the pitch each player rides

The passion from the stands

Each kick and tackle fueled by cheers

And jeers of all the fans

Clapping from the MCC

Some flags from fan clubs too

The neutrals of the MCG though

Aren’t sure what to do

A goal – that’s nice – another – cool

Half time substitutions

The first team players slowing down

Young players the solution

The intensity pedestrian

The fans can recognise

The goals don’t seem to matter

It’s a training exercise

Until the end of the first half

It’s tense at BT Connor

South score a goal to equalise

Half time comes soon after

The second half a change occurs

The teams come out much sharper

They’ve learnt their lessons from the first

This next half will be tougher

South go onto take the lead

But the Lions do bite back

The game hangs in the balance

Until South’s winning attack

The MCG goes onto see

And quiet second half

The final score, a one-one draw

Placates the fans and players and staff

To add some tension this can’t be

The solution much be penalties

The Aussie Kuol scores to see

Newcastle crowned the winning team

The fans saw Ange and Kuol and teams

They admire from afar

Many leave the game with smiles

They saw their superstars

The fans up north leave their game

Hungry for much more

A taste of what next year could be

Makes them insatiable

The work from volunteers

The patience of club fans

Was paid off back in spades

They can hope again

Across the country football fans

Tuned in uncertainly

But South and Preston showed in the end

What Australian football could be

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

Allentown

All the way back in the blog's earliest days, when part of the ethos was to have new content uploaded every day - how quaint! - I posted this South Melbourne Hellas oriented reworking of an AC/DC lyric by then new but now old friend Conya. It seems blog favourite Savvas Tzionis has decided to do something similar with Billy Joel's 'Allentown', broadening his scope to match up the plight of the working class Pennsylvanians with that of those stuck in NPL Hell. It has a taste of the 'seven days of bitterness' about it.

Allentown
Well we’re living in the NPL
And the football clubs are stuck in this hell
Out in Mooroolbark they’re killing time
Third string imports
Will they survive?
Well our fathers came out of after the war
Spent their weekends at Olympic Park
Took their kids out to the NSL
Left them to watch
But where was the zeal?
Now we’re living in the NPL

But the restlessness was handed down
And its getting very hard to play

Well we’re waiting in the NPL
For the A-League we never found
For the promises our leader’s gave
If we worked hard
But we didn't behave
So the premierships hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No we never learnt what was real
Mainstream Appeal
Lowy Westfield
And we’re waiting in the NPL

But they've ruined all the national teams
And the old fans they just crawled away
Every team had a pretty good shot
To get as far as their ability got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw the wogs out and they kicked in our face

Well we’re playing in the  NPL
And its hard to keep a good team down
But we won’t be going up today

And its getting very hard to play
Cause we’re stuck here in the NPL

SM Crisis 2017 - With apologies to Michael Dransfield

i was flying over lakeside
in a giant dog 

things looked bad

(original poem here)

Les Murray on Laszlo Urge, and non-linear academic discovery

This is something I started last year but never got around to finishing. Seeing as how Les Murray the soccer pundit passed away this week, and seeing as how South has a week off, it's about time I fished it from the depths of my drafts folder, finished it off, and got it out of the way. I liked what was going on in this a lot more back then than I do now. A more useful version will hopefully end up buried in my thesis' literature review in due time.

This is the story of both the sometimes tedious and arcane nature of academic research, but it's also a story about the meeting of two parts of Australian culture that have little do with one another. If, as the popular notion seems to suggest, that sport and the arts in Australia are inherently irreconcilable pursuits, whose meetings are at best rare and awkward, then perhaps nothing quite encapsulates that cultural schism quite like the existence of Australia's two Les Murrays.

For perhaps most of Australia, even that which is not particularly enamoured with soccer, Les Murray remains the better known of the two Les Murrays. As the face and voice of Australian soccer, and by extension also the face and voice of SBS and a certain strain of the Australian multicultural experience, Murray's fame exists outside of the narrow trench of Australian soccer; this is best typified by the Australian public's familiarity with that strange, untraceable accent, which famously prompted TISM to ask 'What Nationality is Les Murray?' - a song which would not have worked quite so well had people had no idea who Les Murray the soccer pundit was.

Then there is the 'other' Les Murray, often lauded as Australia's greatest living poet and among the finest living poets writing in the English language, but whose work most Australian have probably only come into contact with by accident and most recently twenty years ago (unless they teach poetry in schools; do they still do that?) as the co-author of John Howard's preamble to the Australian Constitution which was attached to the republic referendum. For a minority of Australians, those who might be classed as too educated for their own good to care too much about sport and popular culture, as the poetry editor for the right wing literary and cultural magazine Quadrant, Les Murray the poet is a figurehead of one of the two sides waging perpetual cultural wars against each other.

So how is it that these two Les Murrays would have anything to do with each other? Many years ago while I was still an undergraduate, I seem to recall - though this could just be me inventing a myth of my own - that some now indistinguishable person told me, probably somewhere in the imaginatively named Building 8 at Victoria University's St Albans campus, that Les Murray the poet had written a poem about Les Murray the soccer pundit. Not knowing where to start looking for it, and not having much help from either the person who must (or may?) have mentioned it, the notion of trying to find the poem died quickly. This was before I had even decided that my honours thesis let alone doctoral thesis work would focus on soccer and its relationship to Australian literature; before, too, my ending up teaching some of Les Murray the poet's works in the Australian Literature unit that we teach to second and third year students at Victoria University.

After laying dormant for so many years, the re-ermergence of this apocryphal poem owes as much to the accidental happenings one experiences when travels Melbourne in the style of a flâneur, as it does to the inner suburbs of Melbourne still having enough bricks and mortar bookshops so that the act of finding one is less a freak accident than a statistical probability.

After meeting with my mate Chris Egan in the city, and conducting another piece of historical detective work at ACMI, we decided to head towards Lygon Street for lunch. Taking the tram up there from Federation Square, we - probably mostly me - had stopped paying attention to where we should have gotten off, went several stops further up Lygon Street than we had intended, and then kept walking in the opposite direction to where we were supposed to be going. By a happy meeting of statistical probabilities, we ended up outside Red Wheelbarrow Books, a small independent bookshop. While we could have turned around and just caught the next tram back, there in the front window were an assortment of books by the anarchist poet Pi O, so of course I decided to enter the store.

After discussing Pi O with the store's proprietor and being offered a returned/secondhand copy of one of Pi O's Selected Works for $15 (as opposed to $35 for a new copy), we somehow moved on to discussing my current doctoral work on Australian soccer and literature; the chance to discuss one's thesis work with interested parties who happen to be people other than one's supervisors being an opportunity few PhD students can afford to miss. The catalyst for this was I suppose my making a remark on Pi O's lack of interest in sport, especially soccer, despite his extensive work covering (whether incidentally or not) the lives and language of migrant Europeans during the 1970s and 80s.

Indeed, one couldn't help but note the sole poem where Pi O does discuss soccer, a piece called 'Soccor', which still barely manages to discuss the topic of soccer at all. From there the proprietor of the bookshop managed to make a couple of suggestions about other literary Australian soccer texts, including Peter Goldsworthy's Keep it Simple, Stupid, which I was already well aware of, but he then recalled that Les Murray the poet had written a poem about Les Murray the soccer pundit.That he could recall no further details of its content, title, year etc was now far less of an issue than it would have been in the past. For nearly a decade on, I was now armed with the resources of the AustLit database and duly went off to search for the database entry on Les Murray the soccer pundit, and works which were about him.

Alas, there were no poems listed as being about Les Murray the soccer pundit. What to do? After noting my disappointment on Twitter that the existence of this poem may have merely been an urban myth - a poem by one Les Murray on the other Les Murray, surely it was too good to be true - someone working diligently and anonymously behind the scenes at AustLit came to the rescue.

@PaulMavroudis @eenfish Found it! 'The Sports Machine (for Lazlo Urge of SBS TV)'.https://t.co/HziNAHlW0d

— AustLit (@AustLit) May 15, 2016

As it turned out, according to people at AustLit the poem had never been published either in a literary journal nor in a collection of work by Murray, but rather in one of the supplements of the Weekend Australian in October 1991. So, after a detour to a university bake sale, it was off to the State Library of Victoria to search through the microfilm, sifting through generic right-wing commentary and classified jobs for professionals, until there it was - in all of its if not quite unfortunate mediocrity, then its being something quite different to what I'd expected.

One didn't expect one of Murray the poet's more stunning efforts, but even so, I could not help but be underwhelmed by the poem's style as well as its content. To begin with, even a quick overview reveals that the poem is not about Les Murray the soccer pundit at all, but merely dedicated to him - and even then, not to Les Murray the soccer pundit, but to Laszlo Ürge, the identity the soccer pundit had left behind at the start of his television career.

Without knowing of the existence of any possible prior interactions between the two Murrays, the motivation for Murray the poet writing this poem and dedicating it to Murray the soccer pundit is hard to fathom. At the end of the poem, Murray the poet affirms that 'I'm Les Murray', but it is hard to read between the lines of whether this signing off is meant to be playful and linked to the opening gambit in the dedication itself, or whether it is instead some sort of pointed attempt at reclaiming the rights to the Les Murray name - and if so, what would be the nature of that resentment?

The poem then seeks to describe, in the semi-abstract, various sports played by Australians - among them rugby union and league, Australian Rules, soccer and basketball - but with a kind of dismissive attitude. These sports seem to Murray to be fueled by an anger and relentless trudging and sense of aimless, furious activity; worse still are those who aren't participants, but who live vicariously through the athletes making those exertions. In that sense the poem's tone is entirely consistent with Murray's oeuvre so far as I'm familiar with it - an innate distrust of modernity, and also of the speed and lack of space for thought and contemplation that is attached to that notion of modernity.

It is strange then that as an Australian bush nationalist of sorts, that one of Murray's preferred sports at the specific time of this poem's publication is not cricket, especially as it may manifest itself in those idyllic John Harms-ian forms played in the Australian bush, but instead what he calls American cricket - in other words, baseball. This is strange in the context of Murray's politics because as Michael Manley has noted, whatever elements of idleness, rest, anticipation and craft are shared by cricket and baseball, cricket in its purest essence is an agrarian and time-less game, while baseball was moulded very early on into becoming an essential part of the ordered and regimented cycle of life in the modern industrial north of the USA.

Strange also are Murray's interpretations of those sports, especially the various football codes enjoyed by Australians. Here Murray plays the accidental historian, placing the rugby codes first in order of genealogy but re-interpreting in a sense the origin myths of union and league, and therefore rugby as a whole itself; while one can perhaps sense Murray vaguely alluding to the class split which saw league split off from union, at no point does Murray place rugby union's origins in the English public school system, nor allude to the inherent link between industrialisation and the professionalism of rugby league. Instead we have 'poachers in blue', who one supposes may be members of the upper classes or the military, playing for a time at least either with or alongside - it's not clear to me which Murray deigns to mean - 'farmers in brown'.

The depiction of Australian Rules in this poem is typical of the generic response someone from the northern states may make of the game - the comical appearance of the players in their sleeveless shirts and tight shorts jumping on top of each other, and the near incomprehensibility of the large crowds who are there to watch them. Murray's familiar dislike of crowds and fear of their encroachment on his personal space gets doubled down in the depiction of soccer - the implied barbarity of the kicking of heads among caged foreigners, with little definition of who is being separated from whom. Aside from this however, Murray the poet offers little more on soccer than this scene of stylised allegorical violence and the crowds of foreigners who watch the game - an unusual step to take when dedicating a poem to a soccer man.

For the rest, basketball gets short shrift, as does tennis and the grunting efforts of its players. But the point seems to be that those watching either in person or drowsily watching on a TV screen, combined with the furious exertions of the players, are suffering form a kind of madness. For Murray, for whom crowds are a form of madness in their own right, the sporting machine is not a benign illness. It's almost as if Murray sees modern professional sport - such as it was in 1991, and goodness knows it's only gotten worse - as a corruption of both work and play. the idea being that play should be left alone, untainted by commercial interests, for when play is turned into work, work too loses its own nobility. Modern sport and professional athletes begin to less resemble people participating in a vocation or ritual attuned to the rhythms of nature, becoming instead automatons.

Warriors, come out to play! North Geelong 1 South Melbourne 5

They tried to make me move from my spot, and failed miserably.

Gains and my ride to the ground underestimated how long it would take him to get to my place. No matter - all the more time while waiting for him to talk about the Russian literature on my shelf both read (Gogol, Nabokov, Tolstoy) and unread (Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn), and the prosaic, surface level differences between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.  Once on our way, the inbuilt satellite navigation system thought that Lara was too vague of a suggested destination, but we figured it out eventually. I traded stories with the driver about visits to various prisons and courts of the land - a far cry from having aircraft swoop in front of you while sitting in the president's car, but that's no slight on the amenities provided on the day.

Despite needing to make a u-turn along the way, we got to the ground early enough to enjoy lunch (delicious but slightly undersized raznjici roll, overpriced and poor excuse for a cheese burek) and the second half of the under 20s game. Unlike the senior match, which was second place and against second last, this was first (them) vs second (us), and good on the boys for rallying from behind to win 4-2 and take top spot with a game in hand. More importantly, the style of football played by our boys was so good that the opposition coach - a rather excitable fellow, if we're being honest - was moved to praise them as the best team in the league, and the best ball playing team in the competition to boot.

Check out this OUTRAGEOUS BACK FLIP goal celebration by Lionel Masudi following his outstanding goal in our Under 20s yesterday. pic.twitter.com/a0htk2vtEi

— South Melbourne FC (@smfc) July 9, 2017

We watched the referees warm up, marveled at them having to ask which of our staff was the South Melbourne coach, and then waited to see which side we'd be kicking to in the first half.  Having picked our viewing spot and in no way apologising for it, not even now, the senior game was about to start and I felt unusually confident that we'd get through pretty easily - probably because I've been reading too many Ante Jukic reports about how ordinary North Geelong have played this season, and especially in recent weeks. The inclusion of Marcus Schroen for Leigh Minopoulos didn't phase me - I figured it was all part of the rotation policy, and that Schroen's more physical style might suit the dodgy surface a bit better.

One of the great attractions of visiting Elcho Park is finding
 yourself in the presence of this homage to the wonderfully
 stupid  cult classic 1979 film 'The Warriors'. Photo: Gains.

Even Michael Eagar's absence due to illness - meaning another start for Kristian Konstantinidis - didn't bother me, and while I was annoyed at falling behind early on, I wasn't as crestfallen as I'd usually be in the circumstances. And soon enough Schroen put the People's Champ through one-on-one with the keeper, and we were back on level terms. Not too long after that, Konstantinidis was left all alone at the back of the six yard box from a corner, and his header led to a goalmouth scramble finished off by Schroen. At this early stage, the surface didn't seem to be bothering us too much, and we were playing quite well along the ground for the most part, much more than I thought we'd do. It would have been nice to have had a bigger lead at the break, because strange things can always happen, and North looked more lively and dangerous than I'd expected them to.

But Schroen's second goal early in the second half more or less put paid to this contest, and even though North kept coming, the gulf in class was too great. Schroen got his hat-trick, allowing Milos Lujic to be subbed off early for Stefan Zinni, as well as giving Tim Mala and Bhardi Hysolli some game time. Depth is just one of the differences between the haves and have-nots of this league, and we're fortunate to have some. The highlight of the afternoon was undoubtedly Matthew Foschini getting forward and scoring our fifth goal of the afternoon, and just as notably his first for the club in his nearly sixty match stint - which he celebrated with gusto. He then somehow sent a header from inside the six yard box over the bar.

I think everyone felt we could've, and perhaps should've come out of this game with an extra goal or two, but we also came close to conceding on a couple of occasions, so the four goal win is not a letdown by any stretch of the imagination. With regards the race for top spot, the Bergers managed to edge past the Knights 1-0 this afternoon, so we're still three points behind - but at least we made up some of the goal difference we gave up last week. We're now on +21 to Heidelberg's +23.

Yes, it's true: Joe Gorman, South of the Border's 4th or 5th biggest fan, has
a book coming out about Australian soccer, the NSL, multiculturalism,
 and why promotion/relegation in Australian soccer will probably never
 happen. It's also got curmudgeons, and is out on July 31st via UQP.

Next game
Away to Melbourne Knights on Friday; or in other words, just an average Friday night out for me in 2017. The Knights are still in relegation playoff danger, but it's a 'derby' and they've seemingly turned a bit of a corner the last couple of weeks. The squad rotation and horses for courses approaches used in recent weeks might be in for an interesting time - one would expect Eagar to come back into the side, but Schroen's hat-trick - even if two of those goals were from a couple of yards out against lowly opposition - do in theory at least provide somewhat of a selection headache.

Upcoming fixture news
It's some time away yet, but our round 24 match away to Pascoe Vale has been moved from Friday July 28th to Saturday July 29th. The kick off times have also been adjusted, with the seniors kicking off at 7:00PM, and the under 20s at 5:00PM. These changes have been made to better accommodate our FFA Cup match against Edgeworth Eagles.

So they added a marketing person, how cute
After laying dormant during the the bulk of the last three and a bit months - coincidentally the best three and a half months of our season - South's A-League bid machine is kicking back into gear. While one could get upset, this was to be expected - after all, we're approaching an FFA Cup national stage date, and so you've got to make hay while the sun shines.

Before we move on, I am aware that by using that metaphor for this situation, I'm ignoring the advice of George Orwell in his famous essay 'Politics and the English language' to come up with new metaphors which are relevant to the age we live in. There's obviously a property developer adaptation to 'making hay while the sun shines' that would fit in beautifully, but since I'm lousy with metaphors at the best of times, I'm going to leave it up you, dear readers, to suggest it in the comments section. I can't do all the work around here.

Anyway, the gist of the article is that the extant A-League bid advisory committee will become the inaugural board of a South Melbourne bid in the event that it is granted an A-League licence. That means that the current A-League bid advisory committee made up of:

• lawyer Bill Papastergiadis (current South Melbourne Hellas board member)
• property developer Gabrielle Giuliano (also a current South Melbourne Hellas board member)
• property developer Louisa Chen (South Melbourne's current major sponsor)
• and consultant Andrew Thompson (former federal sports minister)
• 'marketing expert' Michael McEwan (recently added to the bid team)

will move on unelected by the South Melbourne Hellas membership to become the operators of the South Melbourne A-League franchise, in the event that South Melbourne is given the green light by FFA - or whoever FIFA puts in charge of running the game here. Amid the vague fluffiness of the piece and lines like "History is something to be proud of” and “South Melbourne is all about what’s ahead", details like:

• who is going to pay for this?
• what will be South Melbourne Hellas' stake in this?
• who or what is going to run this, and do we - South Melbourne Hellas members - get to have any say in the matter?

remain for the vast majority of us very much up in the air. Because while some (maybe even most - I've not done a survey) current South Melbourne Hellas fans will be happy to have an A-League presence dependent on a privately funded model which leverages our name, history and remnant cultural cachet, others will not.

The bid team remain deliberately vague on these and other issues - understandably so within the context of not showing all your cards just yet. Suffice to say though, that for those who had hoped that a wholly or even majority owned South Melbourne A-League franchise was possible, this seems to put another dent in those aspirations. Those people will have to either try to find a way of doubling down on the promotion/relegation and second divisions angles, or do some rationalising along Port Power/Port Adelaide Magpies lines.

Looking further ahead, it will be interesting to see if members of this bid/possible future South Melbourne affiliated A-League team board other than Papastergiadis and Giuliano will turn up to the AGM to answer questions from the membership - that's if those other members of the bid are members of the club I suppose. The best thing about all this is A-League expansion could be pushed back until 2019/20 - so we could be dealing with this stuff for even longer. Not that any of that matters.

Intermittent poetry corner (vale Fay Zwicky)
The Australian poet Fay Zwicky died the other week, which bears no relevance to South Melbourne whatsoever. But permit me, dear reader, to bumble along in digression as I am sometimes prone to doing on South of the Border, in writing about a particular poem of Zwicky's.

Before there was the Heavy Sleeper's guide to the 2014 World Cup on Shoot Farken, there was Fay Zwicky's poem 'World Cup Spell'. I can't say I'm much of a poetry buff - ask Ian Syson, he reckons I kill just about any poem I read out loud - but I know what I like when it comes to poetry, and I like this one.

The Homeric epithets are used playfully, rather than in Homer's purpose's of repetition and fitting into his rhyming and mnemonic scheme - and why not? This is a short poem about a peculiar kind of solitude experienced within a shared global moment, not an epic being transmitted down the years by bards to a largely illiterate people relying on oral traditions.

The 'hollow anglo saxon silence' is a my favourite line, though it must be looked at in very specific terms - 'anglo-saxon' here meaning Australia, not England. It's a lament and a snapshot of the cultural obliviousness (more likely, and less judgemental) or perhaps even wilful ignorance (less likely, and more judgemental) of mainstream Australian culture. That's my take on it anyway, and the angle I find most relevant to my thesis work - that, and the poem's combination of sport and art, which are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times in our culture.

Some might latch on to the blend word 'mediababble', and doubtless there's scope to wring out meaning from those five syllables, too. But that's for others to do; not 'the great curmudgeon, exploring his own misery'. As far as neo-Homeric epithet in-jokes go, that's a pearler.

Around the grounds
Life in the Forbidden Zone
Trekked out to Port Melbourne on Friday night for Port vs Pascoe Vale, a game of some importance to the finals race - Port trying to close the gap with a late run, Paco trying to consolidate their place in the six and put some distance between themselves and the chasing pack. I used my media pass to sit on the otherwise forbidden outer side, next to the Dodgy Asian Betting guy. A game can be both mediocre and entertaining at the same time. There were some crude tackles early on, but credit to the referee for pulling out the yellows when the received wisdom (which I loathe) is to let everyone have two or three cracks at each other first before punishment is due. I'm sure I've complained about this before in here, but I've never understood the tendency for leniency on the basis of 'it's still early in the game' - haven't most of these players been playing for a minimum of ten years already? Surely that's enough time to learn that a studs up challenge is of equal wrongness in both the 5th minute and the 95th minute? Oh, 'but it will ruin the game if you send someone off early'. Maybe the relevant player shouldn't be such a dropkick so early in the game then?

Anyway, as ordinary as this game was, Port had the lead early and were the better of the two sides a by a slim margin  Then one of their players got a second yellow card on the half hour mark, and Port didn't get close to scoring for the rest of the game. Pascoe Vale scored three times in the second half, which apart from earning them three points also helped calm down Pascoe Vale coach Vitale Ferrante, who had spent most of the game up to that point abusing his players. And while I don't agree with his conduct (while acknowledging that it had its own comedic qualities), somewhere in there was buried an interesting point - at what stage are senior soccer players in Australia expected to have the ability to organise themselves on the field? In a packed and noisy stadium, the coach's instructions struggle to be heard even at short distances; meanwhile at a suburban ground with at most 100 onlookers, a coach with a big voice is able to effectively yell and direct every single one of his players in real time. In Australia the difference between the two playing experiences are literally one step removed. So when do Australian players learn how to sort themselves out on a field independent of constant reinforcement from a coach? Isn't it a bit late by the time they turn fully professional?

Final thought
Thanks to Foti for giving myself and Gains a lift to and from the ground.

Have a go, ya mugs! South Melbourne 2 Hume City 2

I'm finishing this off on a Monday because of a brutal weekend spent laid up with a cold, and one side-trip to the bloody supermarket. Through the haze I'm trying to remember what happened on Friday, and I keep returning to one key thing - that the experience of the game was fun.

Now there's lots of ways you can have fun at South Melbourne but watching the team, in particular this iteration of it with its patented Taylor Tendencies (I was going to say Taylorist, but that's something a little different), isn't always one of them. And we know this because our most vocal internet people keep telling us that we are hard to watch, all while many of those looking way up high to where we sit on the ladder wonder how you can be top of the table and not be having fun.

Now people wanted more entertainment, but I'm not quite sure that they wanted it in this way. Chaotic defending, heroic goalkeeping (again) by Nikola Roganovic and spurned chances; end to end football, heart in mouth moments and South being just a few centimetres from a third goal late on which would have torn the roof off the joint.

Sitting at my keyboard tapping this out with a bad cold, and having made the very poor decision to further compound my headache by playing Mr Bungle's Disco Volante album yesterday, somehow I've still come out of this match in an optimistic mood. If nothing else, we may have figured out this one important fact - that as rubbish as our defending can be at times, the defenses of opposition sides are equally prone to making mistakes and looking all at sea - and that maybe all we need to do is be more assertive or forceful in testing the limits of opposition defenses.

A new banner by the bloke behind the Tibbzy FC youtube account. Nice to
have a new banner on hand, even if I don't agree with the message - not just
for economic reasons, but also because I'd rather South get into the A-League
and then burn the drawbridge, locking ourselves inside. Photo: Gains.

That's not how everyone's seeing this, and that's totally OK. I get it. How much more obvious is it that two up front is better than one solitary Lujic? When are we going to settle on what our midfield looks like? Will Iqi Jawadi ever be forgiven for whatever his indiscretions have been? Why are we persisting with short corners to the point where we almost conceded a goal from one on Friday night?

But that's only part of the story. Some have decided that Hume were the better team, with numerous chances to put us away, especially in the first half. But I would counter that with Lujic having his one on one chance saved, and the header that hit the post, with the scramble that couldn't put the ball away.

Like in the game against Richmond, we moved the ball quickly, looking to take advantage of the complacency of sides who feel that you should just sit back and set up, because South Melbourne won't play in quickly (except from a damn short corner). Sometimes this resulted in long ball after long ball, and that would have been hard to watch. But sometimes those long balls worked, sometimes they led to the opposition making errors, and sometimes we even managed to get the ball moving towards advantage along the ground. Whatever else, our last two or three weeks have seen our attacking maneuvers portray a sense of unpredictability and versatility.

At 1-1 at halftime, there's an argument to be had that we were lucky to be level, what with our getting an equaliser via a fortunate penalty. Yeah, maybe, sure, possibly? I don't know. Can you make your own luck? Does it even matter? Are we so obsessed with the how that we forget about the how many? Do we, like, even have a midfield? Maybe. But gathering our thoughts together, we remember, that South Melbourne is about results + style + entertainment. Results is points on the board, entertainment is goals and action, but style in the South Melbourne Hellas sense is about attitude - the attitude that South Melbourne Hellas should fear no opponent in this country and play its football accordingly, if not with perfect technique then at the very least with ambition.

The introduction of Manolo changed the game. Of course it did. All of a sudden the best player available to either side on the night was on the field, and playing forward in support of Lujic. One can gush about his talent on the ball, but what is of equal importance is his zeal for the contest. That cross to Lujic which saw us take the lead wasn't just an example of perfect placement, but proof of the importance of having a red hot go; Manolo is out-sprinting and out-working opponents and teammates alike.

The People's Champ, who has improved in that regard (albeit from a very low base), could learn a lot about what it takes to be a professional footballer, but also a South Melbourne Hellas style footballer, from Manolo's example. There were, again, too many petulant moments where his body language magnified his lack of effort and apparent self-loathing. All this while Taylor's attempts in 2016 to play the People's Champ more centrally have started bearing some fruit. Passion and effort aren't enough though, and there's something to be said for keeping your head. Even given Hume's penchant for scoring soon after conceding, giving up the equaliser straight for the kickoff was a horrendous moment. Not much better was Tim Mala's straight red card. What was the point of that exactly?

That last ten minutes was the best football we have played for some time. Three glorious chances to score, scuppered alternately by Hume's defensive desperation, imprecise finishing and finally the woodwork. It is fair to say we have been waiting all season for Marcus Schroen to hit a shot like that, which I suppose is much easier for him to do if he's in front of goal instead out wide. It may have been unjust to have snared all three points, but there are bigger things to focus on. The team, possibly because of the humiliation of the Bentleigh FFA Cup, clearly has some fight left in it. As important has been the change in attitude. Whether it has come from Taylor or from the players themselves, there is clear evidence now that we would rather attack than sit back.

That of course doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement. The team set up, with Mala at centre-back, and some of the very shoddy defending on Friday night, won't be as fortunate in future matches, but you've got to start (or in thus case, re-start) somewhere. But remembering some of the most important things about what made this club great in the first place - the willingness by its players to have fun, to display a zest for the game and show no fear - will at least give the team a chance.

Next week
Bentleigh away on Friday night, without Lujic (five yellow cards) and Mala (for the straight red). Does this mean that Koroma gets another go t right back? Will Taylor (or his stand in for the night, Chris Marshall) start Michael Eagar? Is Kristian Konstantinidis any closer to making a return? And who's going to play up front?

Those wishing to use public transport to and from Kingston Heath should be aware that there are significant disruptions to the Frankston line as part of the removal of four level crossings. Take that into account when planning your journey to and from the ground.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and you know what, I traveled down both of them, just because I could (and that made absolutely no difference)
Last week we asked what the deal was with the split path carpet shenanigans leading out of the players' race. We got no answer. This week, in addition to still wondering what the deal with the split paths is, South of the Border is asking what was the deal with the two teams taking the same branch on Friday night? Was that because of the night's charity theme? Has inspiration for the split paths been taken from somewhere else? Are we channeling or satirising Robert Frost here?

Is the honeymoon over?
The new security mob who have replaced Blue Thunder have had very little to do with Clarendon Corner thus far, but they did come by for a visit on Friday night during the first half. I don't know what was said during the heated conversation, but people weren't happy. Whether it was because of an official instruction from the club (I thought the recent pre-game warnings on anti-social behaviour were new, but others assure me they are not) or done of security's own volition I do not know. There was also an altercation of sorts on the other side of the players' race in the second half, but I'm not sure who was involved with that or what it was about.

Victory tribunal decision
Well the tribunal result finally came in, and there's a sort of resigned sense of disappointment at the outcome. A six point deduction for this season, a 12 month suspended six point sentence, and no fine.

Some have attempted to frame the disappointment and anger about the perceived leniency of the tribunal decision as being about 'bitters vs the new dawn', and it would be foolish to deny that there's not an element of that embedded in the reaction. But it's more complicated than that, and to limit it to the confines of a niche ideological skirmish misses the broader picture - which is what is the place, function and treatment of a top-flight, wealthy and privately owned team like Victory in FFV competitions, especially when compared to the treatment meted out to community owned clubs?

Rightly or wrongly, the perception among at least some of those interested in senior men's football in Victoria is that over the years Victory have a received a very fair deal from FFV. Branding, co-operation, advertising - with the most extreme notion being that FFV has seen promoting Victory as the easiest way of promoting its own operations - while those at community clubs still wonder what their annual fees - and fines - go towards when they themselves have to pay for refs and facilities, as well as performing functions such as filling in scores, self-promotion, etc.

It's also an environment where an increase in fines was used not only as a draconian deterrent for poor behaviour, but also as a means of correcting a dismal financial position at FFV. Seen within this context, you can see why people in the lower reaches wanted to see a very specific outcome in this tribunal case - one which was as near as possible equivalent to that received by Dandenong Thunder for the troubles at the 2012 grand final. That would mean not only a large point deduction,but also closed door matches and a massive fine. Instead, FFV limited themselves to the point deduction, for a team already staring down the barrel at relegation following a long run of poor results.

But how FFV's tribunal got to that decision is what's most important. We need to remember, first, that FFV's tribunal does not use precedent as part of its decision making process. That in itself means that there is a large amount of leeway available to them when making a decision.

For instance, in this case, the tribunal has cited the co-operation given by Victory and its guilty plea as a mitigating factor, as compared with Thunder's inability (or refusal?) to name the relevant culprits. This line of thinking is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, there is talk - which has been claimed to be from those in attendance at the tribunal hearing - that Victory initially pleaded 'not guilty' to the charges, and then changed their plea (is this what is referred to when "After an initial discussion with the panel"?). Second, they get credit for identifying those persons responsible for the attack on the South Melbourne fans - this is despite the fact that South Melbourne had already done much of the legwork in identifying the culprits - including compiling a dossier.

Now it's possible that Victory had done its own homework in identifying those responsible, but there are also question marks about that. Those supporter marshals of theirs in attendance at the Lakeside game - would they not have known the identities of at least some of those responsible? Would they have been able to identify the culprits without the services of the surveillance equipment at Lakeside, as well the the work of the South fans and independent journos who took photos and footage? And what would have happened had this occurred at a ground - such as Epping, for argument's sake - where those surveillance facilities were not available?

The delays in dealing with the matter have also caused consternation. Knowing that a repeat of the violence at Lakeside was possible at the following week's Victory vs Knights game at Epping, FFV did not create a closed door situation, and in part this lead to violent incident which occurred at that game - an incident which has no yet been dealt with by FFV - and has served inadvertently as a free hit to those people who wanted to act up this and potentially any other game which followed the Lakeside game but before the tribunal decision was handed down.

(As an aside, it also makes you wonder why Victory's matches against South and Knights were played in consecutive weeks. The thinking may have been to get them out of the way in as short a space of time as possible, but that probably should have been measured against the potential of violence at either of those fixtures. This is not to say that violence should be expected at such fixtures, but clearly the potential for it to occur was factored into the security arrangements at the Lakeside match. Why not then space those games out, so that in the event that something like this did occur, there would be sufficient time to deal with it both in a tribunal setting and in time for the next 'high risk' fixture.)

The language used by FFV is also problematic. Take this for example.

Mr Robson, the club Chief Executive gave evidence about the attitude of the club to the behaviour. He was a credible and respected Chief Executive of a sporting club that is in an unfortunate and difficult position. He said that the violence that occurred was abhorrent to Melbourne Victory. It was and is a successful football club with many more supporters than those who misbehaved. It has a turnover of in the vicinity of $19 million and spends “a significant six figure sum” on security at its games. 

It almost seems as if the tribunal is falling over itself to separate the conduct of Victory's management from its supporters. This is an approach that is so rare (almost to the point of fawning), that it is hard to imagine it ever being applied to community owned clubs, many of which have had onerous fines placed upon them due to the actions of rogue supporters or individuals. As I noted on Twitter last week after first reading the judgment, the tribunal's reasoning to leads one to the conclusion that,

There's a sort of structural or logistical disconnect between MV management and club associates rarely granted to community clubs #PS4NPLVIC

— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) June 27, 2016

The reasons for the lack of a fine are also somewhat bizarre,

We have elected not to fine Melbourne Victory for what occurred for four reasons. First we accept the credible evidence of Mr McLeod and Mr Robson that fines will have no detrimental effect.

So has the tribunal elected not to fine Victory because Victory is so wealthy that fines have no impact on them, or because the supporters involved don't care? If it is the former, then that is a case of discrimination based on how much money a club has. If it is the latter, then why bother giving Victory's youth team any punishment? After all, those responsible clearly couldn't care less about the impact of their actions on Victory's youth team. Neither would Victory's management be particularly fussed about the point deduction, because they were probably on course for relegation anyway.

Second, Melbourne Victory took all reasonable steps to prevent that which ultimately occurred.

It is hard to know what happened here, as little information is provided, beyond the existence of meetings in the lead up to the game. It is likely we will never know what 'all reasonable steps' means.

Third, it is their staff members who are responsible for gathering the evidence that has led to 17 spectators being banned from the game.

As we have noted already, South Melbourne had already compiled and submitted a dossier of many (20+ names) of those involved in the incident, which included some ex-South Melbourne fans and people banned from South matches, and yet South Melbourne's contribution to this gets scarce mention, if any mention at all in this ruling. The reasoning for the six point deduction is also strange:

As a matter of deterrence, and to support the objectives of the GDT, if supporters of clubs see that clubs will be penalised for violent supporter behaviour then supporters will exert social pressure on each other not to misbehave and particularly not to be violent. If their fellow spectators know who they are, they will hopefully identify them for the benefit of the FFV and the Victoria Police. To do otherwise might penalise the team that they support. Presently, it is only due to the hard work of the Club that 17 wrongdoers have been identified. If the supporters knew that the conduct of the unruly supporters might affect the team that they all support, then they might assist the FFV and Victoria Police in stamping out this behaviour. If the supporters were aware that their behaviour might cause the team to suffer a penalty then they might calm each other down rather than winding each other up and inflaming the situation, which is what occurred

It is strange because as we have noted earlier, those responsible and their friends have little concern about the league fate of this wing of Victory. They had misbehaved in several other matches subsequent to the incident at Ballarat last year, including dislodging corner flags (and therefore interfering with the match and match day operations), and yet little to nothing was done by supporters, their own club or FFV to stamp out this behaviour and weed out the troublemakers.

In addition. point deductions as a deterrent may work for community clubs, in at least forcing them to get rid of those responsible for bad behaviour at games, but within the self-described 'ultras' segment of football support that the guilty Victory fans have found themselves in, it is likely to have no impact at all. That group defines itself by its (supposed) rigid independence from the club and their support for Victory as being far more meaningful than that offered by other supporters. Most Victory supporters, who have nothing to do with and no interest in their NPL team, are probably oblivious to what has occurred.

In that sense, neither docking Victory's NPL team points nor fining them nor having them play games behind closed doors will have any meaningful impact. In which case, why not impose all three punishments, as happened to Dandenong Thunder? To my mind, the only punishment that could possibly create an impact is to go after Victory's A-League team, by docking that side points (they are, I believe, already on a three point suspended sentence there). Of course that was always extremely unlikely to happen, but that is the only hope of things changing: that these supporters do enough damage to the one thing that matters to all of their supporters - the points tally of the A-League team - that the vast majority of sensible supporters say enough is enough.

Further adding to the confusing nature of this result are the lack of charges thrown towards South Melbourne and our supporters. Whatever one's thoughts on self-defense - its applicability, where one may draw the line into what is self-defense and what isn't - the usual procedure, or perhaps better worded as 'the usual outcome', is to go hard after both sides for an incident such as this. Yet the tribunal was at pains to emphasise that one side - Victory - was the aggressor, and that the other - South Melbourne - was the victim, to the point where the premeditated nature of the attack is acknowledged,

Some of the spectators must have known that the South Melbourne banner was to be stolen (as this was approximately 150 metres across the pitch from where they were sitting) and that their support could be required. Many of them had clothing and sunglasses to cover their faces. The game was played in warm conditions and at night. There was no need for sunglasses or clothing to cover faces. This meant that the process of identifying the wrongdoers has been made all the more difficult.

This is not the kind of outcome or reasoning that one sees very often in FFV tribunal decisions. Given that the acts of violence and theft were premeditated, one would have hoped for a more significant punishment.

Lastly, it is interesting to note also that Blue Thunder security, the security company in charge for the day, get no mention whatsoever in the tribunal report. Security gets very little mention at all in fact, though there is the odd nod towards security failures,

Notwithstanding the agreed increased standards of security, the banned spectators
gained entry and other spectators were not safe

How those banned supporters managed to get into Lakeside is not elaborated upon in the tribunal's report. One is left with the feeling that, as much as what took place on the day was important, how things got to that stage was not considered as important, except where the tribunal could find ways to mitigate Victory's responsibility.

How much any club can control every single one of its supporters, regardless of whether they are players, coaches, frequent attendees or once in a blue moon trouble makers, has always been the question at the heart of such matters. That there could have been more effort made to prevent certain people from attending this match for instance, is without doubt - but would that have necessarily prevented others from acting up on the day? Or the next week?

But this is the environment that the vast majority of teams at this level live in. They are considered responsible for any (usually spontaneous) trouble caused by rogue supporters, or by anyone even vaguely affiliated with one of the teams. Thus the attempts by FFV to be seen to not be critical of Victory,

A superficial reading of this decision might lead to a conclusion that we are critical of Melbourne Victory. We are not. 

are perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole experience. So many clubs attend tribunal sessions already feeling that they have already been found guilty. That once in the tribunal space, their side of the story is not given any respect. That the actions of sometimes unknown individuals (for example in the cases of those who light flares, often in - ironically - poorly lit and poorly patrolled venues), can have consequences for a club as a whole, with scarcely any sympathetic noises being made by the tribunal. The feeling is that by pleading guilty, even when you think have a legitimate case, that at least you get out of there quickly and on to figuring out how you're going to pay the fine.

And then you see the FFV tribunal seemingly falling over itself to find excuses and platitudes for an organisation that is better organised and better resourced than almost any soccer team in the state, and thus surely able to defend itself far better than most. To have those 17 supporters from that team be tried and banned, and the results initially posted without any mention as to which to team they were associates of, until - perhaps coincidentally - attention was brought to that fact.

The tribunal's decision, based on their reasoning, may have been technically correct. But justice also has to deal with the matterof  perception. If the general Victorian soccer public perceive that one group - whether that's an A-League team or NPL team - is getting more favourable treatment from the tribunal than another group, then that is not a good look for the game in this state.

Final thought
Harry Lookofsky's album Stringsville is not jazz. Discuss.

XIV

May this epistle
prove them wrong, show them that no end
could ever justify their means, my friend

Tim Thorne - 'Letter to Egon Kisch'

Soccor - П. O.

П. O. (pronounced 'Pi O'; the link also has some more info and further links)  is an anarchist working class poet of Greek-Australian heritage. He is also, in my humble opinion, one of Australia's most important poets.

Before П. O. went off the deep end and lost much of his audience (or at least me) with his number poems (strange concrete poems with mathematical in-jokes), П. O. was best known for, I suppose, mastering two things - the world of the inner city migrant, and the language and especially the sounds of the street and of those ethnic communities.

П. O.'s exploration of sound (as well as the attendant narrative imagery) is not however there to act as simplistic mimicry - it is also not about accents or parody - it is about the mangling and re-imagining, or the 're-hearing', of Australian English grammar as it appears in the real world. Before sociologists and linguists got all on board the 'Globish' bandwagon, a writer like П. O. was essentially years ahead of the curve in his portrayal and analysis of the way migrant Australians used English to communicate with each other, and even set cultural-linguistic barriers of their own preventing others from understanding them.

П. O. does this by playing with grammar and phonetics, in his own way undertaking the guise of an ethnic and working class Dr. Samuel Johnson, collecting and recording the linguistic world of the migrant and the streets of Fitzroy. Of course, this in itself creates a limited sphere of 'research', because that period when the Southern European migrant was king of the inner city is rapidly diminishing (something addressed in his more recent work); neither does Fitzroy equal Footscray or Sunshine or Brunswick, where different migrant groups make different sounds.

Anyway, apart from the journals he has contributed to and the poetry books he has published, his main achievements are probably as follows: the mammoth 24 Hours, 700 pages on one day in the life of the English language (it's subtitled 'the day the language stood still'); and more recently, the publication of Fitzroy: The Biography. But back to the poem at hand. 'Soccor' is an atypical poem for П. O. on several levels. First, even a cursory glance at his oeuvre reveals that П. O. has a blindspot when it comes to sport, especially the migrants' game of soccer. Secondly, this poem is not littered with too much of П. O's experimenting with punctuation, phonetics, phonemes and what might be termed 'Greeklish'.

Indeed, in many ways this poem is prototypical, almost primeval in nature when it comes to much of П. O.'s work. It is not about listening or hearing, but about learning to do those things and not even that, because most of the poem is about what the narrator sees. The departure of the Hellas fans for the 'soccor' game creates an aural vacuum of sorts; it is only upon their noisy return that things seem to get back to a sense of normality. The poem then, in its recording of the few passersby during the shop's quiet time, is in this way antithetical to П. O.'s obsession with sound - the poem is private, introverted, quiet - it is about the lack of noise. The poem is also indirectly about the outsider-ness of being literary and thoughtful in the boisterous migrant culture of the time (and one would argue even the one that attempts to mimic that sort of environment in habitats like Oakleigh's Eaton Mall). In its autobiographical Promethean moment, it shows П. O., or a writer like П. O., about to start the journey into the literary.

'Soccor' from Pi O's Fitzroy Poems collection published in 1989. Click the image to enlarge.

I had, or at least I thought I had, nailed down the details of the relevant match between Juventus and Hellas at Royal Park, in order to pin down a date for when the subject poem is supposed to have taken place. Maybe someday I'll have a look again.

Thumbs up! South Melbourne 1 Green Gully 0

It started off with getting there later than i usually would, because the under 20s game had been moved to Middle Park to preserve the Lakeside surface - take not, that next week's undfer 20s game has alos been moved down to pit lane - and thus the lead up to senior match was spent talking crap with various people, which when I come to think of it, was not much different to every other week.

Oh, and we had a good look at who the ref was going to be for the senior match.

Oh no, it's Bruno! #nplvic #smvgg
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) July 6, 2014

He actually ended up having very little impact on a game that was littered with lots of little fouls but no serious ones until the right at the end, but more on that later. Of more immediate concern was the fact that as good as we were looking going forward early on, the back end was messy. Those fear were only partly allayed by Matthew Theodore's early goal and the decisive moment of the game, heading home from close range with the Gully goalkeeper Kieran Gonzalez stranded thanks to Jamie Reed's superb cross from the right. Even more impressive was Reed's burning of Osagie Ederaro to create the space to get the cross in the first place. If reed's not going to score goals, then at least play him into space so he can make fools of the opposition, because no one on our side comes even close to having the dribbling skills that he does.

Speaking of dribbling, remember when that was a skill that lots of players had? Check out the SBS classic world cup matches - I'm talking up to the mid 1980s here - to see what a fundamental and entertaining part of the game we've lost, that marvelous moment where you just sat there mouth agape at the way feet, ball and mind combined to outwit and humiliate an opponent.

But I digress. Within two minutes of our goal, Gully surely should have equalised - the space and time were both there - but could only watch on in horror as Tim Mala cleared it off the line. Now Tim Mala, there's a player I did think highly of last year, but his improvement has been a key reason for our good run so far this season. Yes, he still mistakes, but he's making fewer of them, and for a lot of players that's as good a place to start as any.

The rest of the half saw us on the back foot,with Gully having the better of both territory and possession, and us requiring the intervention of Saldaris far more often than I would have liked. Nick Epifano, who's been in the wars injury wise this season, copped another blow, and had to be subbed out during the first half. With Leigh Minopoulos unavailable - overseas attending a family wedding according to smfcboard - Tyson Holmes entered the field, necessitating a reshuffle in midfield. More important than all that though was the fact that we held onto the lead going inot the break. which allowed us to regroup.

The evidence of that was there to see in the first part of the second half, as we turned on the style. Unfortunately, neither Reed nor Milos Lujic were able make the most of chances that are bread and butter for any striker. That inability to close out the game of course meant that Gully were going to be a threat once our period of dominance faded, and so it came to pass. Only their own wasteful finishing, and desperate defending with bodies being flung in the way of incoming shots kept them out.

The game went into a 95th minute - and even though I'm not a fan of the re-tooled scoreboard's colour scheme, I love that the clock now goes past 90:00, so thanks to Cuddles for taking my suggestion on board - because James Musa was apparently stomped on while on the ground, to which to our mate Bruno only dished out a yellow card. Nevertheless, we held on for all three points, and got Frozen Tears' official club song blared over the speakers, another nice feature of the 2014 match day experience, even though the 'summer's here' line is now representative of an increasingly distant past.

Some other thoughts. Shaun Timmins may be a decent player, but I'm not yet convinced that he's any better than Brad Norton, the bloke he's dislodged from the starting eleven. He hasn't yet shown the attacking ability that Norton has over the journey, and if Timmins has been recruited because he's more solid defensively than Norton - not an unreasonable assumption - than he's yet to impress me on that front either. Though it's only been two games, Timmins seems to play very narrowly, which is great if he times his interceptions, but horrible if his aim is not true. Indeed, his positioning reminded me somewhat of Ramazan Tavsancioglu, who also had a habit of finding himself far too central when he was with us.

Also of a concern is the centreback situation, with Dimi Tsiaras now off on his honeymoon I assume, and Andrew Mullet - was he even on the bench yesterday? - getting precious little game time, and likely to get even less now that Timmins and Norton will be, in theory at least, fighting over the left back position. More pleasing at the back end of things was the improvement in Jason Saldaris' kicking. Though there were still the occassional iffy moments - as much as to do with the problematic footing situation at Lakeside at the moment - the apparent instruction, and I really I'm only guessing this is what has happened, to get Saldaris more touches of the ball and to make the first priority to get it as far up field as possible seemed to lead to him getting real purchase on clearances.

After all that, our lead at the top remained at six points, after Oakleigh brushed aside Port Melbourne on Friday night. They've got Gully away this week, so there's conceivably a chance of Oakleigh dropping points out there, though I doubt that their forwards will be as profligate as ours have been recently.

Next week
Hume City at home. Will I even make it to the game? Who knows, but never fear dear reader, I do have a backup reporter in the event that my return from Sydney becomes complicated. Will the Hume players on holiday in Brazil - apparently one of the Franjics and Kliment Taseski - make it back?

Various shenanigans
Hilarity ensued when for some reason the scoreboard somehow ended up changing to display Gully as being up 2-0. Cue the '2-0, to the Gully' chant from Clarendon Corner. When the scoreboard the chamnged to show the Adidas logo, the chant became 'Adidas, Adidas, Adidas'.

As usual with a Gully game, there was fun to be had at the expense of the Vargas brothers, with Andy copping the brunt of this time. To some hostile chanting directed at him, he at least had the good sense to stick his thumb at the crowd rather than the middle finger, to which he received the 'you can stick for fucking thumb up your arse' chant. At the end of the match, a few people headed down towards the players' race, both thumbs stuck up in there as the Gully players walked past them down the race.

Asian Cup is coming! (because you all care so very much)
Sure, we're all still in world cup mode, but if H.G. Nelson hasn't compelled you to book your seats for the Asian Cup, I'm here with my own exhilarating story.

I bought my tickets to this tournament during the week after conferring with two other blokes to splurge for Category 1 Melbourne venue pack tickets. We ended up with some pretty decent seats for every game - though naturally slightly worse (though still more than acceptable) for the opening match with the Socceroos and the quarter final). For some appropriately vague but still obviously stupid reason, I'm looking forward to Palestine and Jordan in particular.

The scheduling is quite packed - all the Melbourne games are two days apart - but the value is very good whether you want to buy venue pack or single tickets, especially since there's no thing as a bad seat.at Melbourne Rectangular Stadium. However, those looking to chase the Socceroos up and down the east coast come January 2015 - like our old mate Steve from Broady - will have their work cut out for themselves with organising tickets, flights and accommodation, because the Asian Cup organising committee couldn't give a stuff about those types.

More Shoot Farken world cup stuff
Has the law of diminishing returns been achieved here? Find out for yourselves below.

• Brazil vs Chile, Colombia vs Uruguay, Costa Rica vs Greece
• Germany vs Algeria, Argentina vs Switzerland, Belgium vs USA
• France vs Germany, Brazil vs Colombia

Meanwhile, over on the Melbourne Heart City forum
Short lived franchise, now
frontier corporate outpost;
Still keeping it real.

Around the grounds
Sweet rays of afternoon sunshine
Headed out to Campbell Reserve to see what's become a bit of rivalry in this division and its predecessor. Sadly the contest provided by Altona East on this afternoon was meek, with Morerland running out 4-1 winners, though could have easily scored twice as many as that, hitting the post twice and having a penalty saved among a host of missed opportunities. Still, the outing did give a chance for Ian Syson to photograph the late afternoon Melburnian sunlight he's so fond of.

#MCFCvAEPAOK 4-1 now pic.twitter.com/tlcjGCX33I
— Ivan Sysonovic (@IanSyson) July 5, 2014

Final thought
As Cuddles noted to me the other day, 'no wonder no one's coming to games anymore, everyone's busy porking birds'.