Apologies for this one coming out a little late, and for it being relatively short, and thus almost a placeholder piece than anything else. As you'll see later, I've been sucked in to some other writing duties, plus there's all the the other writing things that I would like to finish, etc.
Look, if there's one certain thing about South Melbourne in 2018 it's that if we fall behind, we're not going to win the game, and we'll be lucky to draw. We're not the kind of team that can break down tight defences which are happy to sit on a lead - at least not until Iqi Jawadi comes back from his injury, and even then - and we're going to rely a lot on getting the first goal. Of course getting the first goal is always the main er, goal, if you like, and if we do manage that and we can coax our opponents to come out and try take us on, I think we might be able to do something in a game.
Last Saturday though, well, 40 minutes of dominance in general play was worth diddly squat when Oakleigh opened the scoring, and speaking of doing diddly squat, thank you very much Andy Brennan for that goal, like a dagger in the heart. Anyway, after that goal we did our other customary thing, which is fall to pieces mentally or near enough to it, and Oakleigh looked like if not world beaters, which they aren't, than at least they resembled something competent. We recouped a little bit, but the taking off Clarendon Corner's new favourite (though I'm still holding off for now) Oliver Minatel for Tim Mala and a strange reshuffle kinda screwed everything up.
Mala gave away a penalty, but it was probably too late by then anyway, and Nikola Roganovic saved it anyway. Not that we would have scored anyway no matter how much injury time was played, but how the referee came to the conclusion that only three minutes of injury time was to be played was anyone's guess. Still that doesn't compare to his decision to do absolutely nothing to dissuade Oakleigh from making stupid tackles early on, which lead to them committing behind the scenes transgressions which also went unpunished.
Anyway, as well as our midfield still being a mess, the forward structure was also wonky. Ndumba Makeche was being played as a lone striker, which is fine, that's the style of the time, but he is not a Milos Lujic type who can hold up the ball against two or three defenders. Makeche is clearly the type of forward who needs to be fed balls to run onto, especially in situations where he can quickly take a shot - something which he seems very keen to do.
The loss was a missed opportunity get away from Northcote and Hume, who both lost on the weekend; we're still only two points ahead of both of them. Conversely, Kingston seem to have found a bit of form, and their win against Port over the weekend saw them go above us.
Next game
Pascoe Vale at home on Sunday, at the unruly time of 7:00PM. That timeslot has been chosen so as to link up better with that night's World Cup broadcast, which kicks off at 10:00PM, and which it is hoped you will watch in the social club. I won't be sticking around for that because public transport dies in the arse after midnight, but at least I might be able to also make the Collingwood-Carlton game beforehand. Probably not the club's intention, but when life gives you lemons, well, you know the rest.
Women's team
Before the men's game, the women took on Alamein. I was still on a tram somewhere along Clarendon Street when the rain came bucketing down and the game had started, and thus missed the first goal which came about 50 seconds into the game courtesy of Melina Ayers. I did get to the ground in time to see Alamein equalise. The game got a bit messy after that, though I wasn't as disappointed by the standard in the first half as some people may have been. Alamein probably should have been in front, but they skied one over the bar from six yards out. The second half was harder to watch, but Ayers and Lisa De Vanna got goals to put us up 3-1 late on, and even a late Alamein goal wasn't going to be too much of an issue to hold out against. The result sees us sit in second, four points behind ladder leaders Calder. The women's next game is against bottom of the table Southern United at Lakeside on Saturday afternoon.
Some very brief thoughts on the quality of the food in the social club
I know that it's not a like-for-like situation, but the food served to those who had booked tables for the Socceroos was light years ahead of the usual canteen fare. Not that it was uniformly superb (except for the roast goat, which was outstanding), but it was a clear step up from the standard menu items. Even the very basic home style food offered on Thursday's social club nights - $20 all you can eat - is better than what you get on a match day, though to be fair, last Thursday I hung around long enough to sample the rather good spit roasted pig cooked by board member Andrew Mesorouni for the non-Muslim and carnivorous members of the squad..
And yes, the club will be showing the Australia-Denmark game on Thursday; not sure about any spit roasts for this week though, but you never know.
Heavy Sleeper 2018
Yes, despite much reluctance on my part, the Heavy Sleeper World Cup diary is going around for another tournament. Check out the Shoot Farken site and its affiliate social media accounts for updates.
Vale Fred Villiers
We forgot to talk about this last week. Sad news, of course, though Fred had a good innings. Later in life Fred's mind had started to wander, including on the one occasion I got to meet him back in 2009. But he still got some crucial points across, about how if we want to get soccer stuff out into the public sphere, we have to be prepared to do it ourselves and we have to be prepared to make the arguments for soccer, because there was and is a status quo which makes assumptions about how little people care about soccer, or how difficult it is to leverage, when half the battle is in overcoming the assumptions of the gatekeepers of our sporting culture.
Around the grounds
Too cold, stayed home and watched Batman and the footy.
Final thought
North Preston and North Heidelberg, oh you wacky kids.
Showing posts with label Shoot Farken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shoot Farken. Show all posts
Monday, 18 June 2018
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Limited internet blues - South Melbourne 2 Melbourne Knights 1
(Preamble) Sign of the Times
While waiting at the tram stop in between Flinders Street and Federation Square to catch a tram to the pub (as it turned out, no one else turned up, so that was a bit of a waste), a Yarra Trams employee on the platform started chatting with me about South and who we were playing. I mentioned 'Croatia', and he asked me about what kind of crowd the game would get. I said probably 1000-1500. It turned out that my new mate was a lapsed South fan - who else would reply to my hopeful crowd estimate with 'but we used to get 8,000 for this game'?
How do you respond to that assertion with anything resembling good grace? Here was a bloke bemoaning the fact that South crowds had gotten smaller, while not acknowledging that he himself was part of the problem. After I somehow made that point to him without directly implicating or blaming him, he then wished me a happy Easter, to which I said 'not for me'.
'Why not?' he said.
'I'm not a believer' I replied.
'You should go anyway' he responded, before I clambered onto the No.1 tram towards South Melbourne Beach, and he went on to help out some other commuters.
The tension mounts (on with the body count)
A Saturday afternoon kickoff, up against just about every other senior men's soccer match in Melbourne - not exactly the most ideal kickoff time, despite the horribly pristine and un-winter-like weather. Upon entering the ground I picked up my 2014 championship pennant souvenir, which was in a soccer style, whereas my idea had been for a baseball/Happy Days style horizontal triangle, in part because of some people at South calling me Richie Cunningham; no matter.
The apparently newly relaid turf was described by one person who had walked on it as having been left long, as well as being both sandy and moist; somehow later in the day, I thought I'd heard overheard someone chanting to themselves 'Epifano walks on quicksand'.
An early detour
Speaking of Nick Epifano, he was both there (in that he was on the bench), and not there (in that he didn't seem to celebrate the winning goal, nor did he get subbed on). I have been told and I have read from the more sympathetic side of this issue that Epifano wants to be at South, and that he had made that decision before the season despite receiving several better monetary offers, combined with denigration of South from persons involved at other clubs.
If that is true, and I don't doubt that to be the case, then he has an awfully strange way of showing it, for example by remaining expressionless on the bench when we do something good, or being the first to leave the ground after a game. That's not a crime in and of itself - the bloke's probably an incurable introvert - but it does cut against the grain of expectation in a vocation where overt and obvious physical and emotional expression is expected as standard.
After last week's episode of rank stupidity, the club went into lock down, and while my initial feeling was that Epifano would have been sacked, every day that went past seemed to make this less likely. What was the hold up for? Why had there been no comment from the club, even if it was only to acknowledge that the incident had happened, and that more news would be released later?
As it turned out, the club went on an atypically 'thorough consultative process' to try and figure out what the best solution would be to this scenario. They even engaged stakeholders across the club, including some members. And in the interests of openness, I was one of those members consulted. Without going into too much detail about that process, my recommendation was that the club sack Epifano, because while I believe that there is a substantial player welfare element involved here, that we as a club do not have the capacity to deal with that problem, as well as being doubtful of Epifano's remorse, especially considering the behaviour of some of those people in his camp.
Whatever the motivations of the club - and they may genuinely believe that this is a player welfare issue, and not merely be seeing it as a case of Epifano being a very talented player who'd they'd rather not let go - it takes a fair amount of guts to take it down this direction. That will sound wrongheaded to a few people out there, who will more naturally equate this is being a sign of weakness and indecisiveness. But undoubtedly, this is an attempt if not to implement than to at least mimic the 'professional' solution a top tier sporting club would apply in the same or similar situation.
The word that I've received on the matter is that within all levels of the club - coach, board, player leadership group - failed to adequately deal with the initial Facebook comment issue; so that while Epifano can't be nor should he be absolved of taking responsibility for his own actions, at least some part of the problem was in the ineffective and inadequate response from the club itself to the initial fuck up. Of course those in charge are well aware that this could all blow up in their face spectacularly, but as far as I'm concerned on this matter, if they can somehow make this work for the benefit of all involved, it would actually demonstrate an increase of maturity and professionalism in the club.
I don't think it's going to work for all sorts of reasons, but it'll be very interesting to see how this all plays out. What's already surprised me is the response from many of those on smfcboard.com - and I don't mean those who are only protesting we keep Epifano because of his talent, because that's no surprise at all - but those who have provided measured, nuanced responses outside the Kiss of Death's 'knee-jerk hard arse' response and the SMFC Mike brand of 'how much deeper can I crawl up the board's arse' response binary.
OK, back on track now
There was also some sort of camera crew attached to someone who looked like George Donikian (wearing his ground access pass on a Melbourne Heart lanyard) who, as far as I could gather, were filming some sort of feature on Australian soccer, starting with community clubs, then NPL, then A-League. Someone bemoaned the fact that they turned up to a fixture that was likely to have a poor crowd, but why not capture the true spirit of forcefully inflicted mediocrity that we've succumbed to? The mood lightened somewhat when the camera crew started filming Clarendon Corner, and we started singing 'We only sing when there's cameras!'.
Even the early Knights goal didn't sink people's enthusiasm, perhaps because we always looked likely to score. A large part of this was due to Andy Brennan, who was given hectares of space to run into on the right hand side, and which he duly used to take apart the inexperienced and/or substandard Knights defense. When he got past them, he put in several good crosses; when he failed to get past an opponent, the result was usually a foul, often with a yellow a card to the offender, though it took some time for the ref to get to that point. Having seen (via videos) the kind of space Brennan was gifted in Tasmania - usually way too much - I was surprised to see him allowed to roam the way he was on Saturday. That's not a complaint mind you, only an observation, in that less space was one of the issues I thought he'd have to deal with in Victorian soccer.
The equaliser when it did come was pretty damn contentious for all sorts of reasons. The penalty call was so soft that it caught everyone by surprise. Milos Lujic's celebration following his successful spot kick only made things more interesting. Instead of running towards the home supporters, or being crowded by his teammates, he made his way towards where MCF were located, and produced an elongated 'shush' celebration, before crossing himself (in the Orthodox manner) and pointing towards the sky. Somehow some folks interpreted the gesture as a return to the Bobby Despotovski incident of many years ago, a claim which soon spread to social media.
While that allegation was later shown to be false, the immediate result was the referee blowing his whistle for halftime, and a scuffle between the two teams as they headed off towards the tunnel. Whatever Lujic did, and however much we've copped from opposition players over the years, I'm not a fan of celebrating in front of the opposition; but then again, I'm not one for outlandish goal celebrations anyway. Under normal circumstances, my personal goal celebration preference list is:
The second half saw us more or less pick up where we left off. Brennan continued to take the piss, and got his due reward when he battled hard, caused a turnover and received the resulting through ball which he slotted home. It was a little ugly, but damn was it effective. The rest of the game saw us alternately try to ice the game - a Chris May double save made that part harder - and try to weather the visitors' attacks. There were a few of those, mostly from the air where we didn't look that comfortable, but we held on and that's what matters most.
As the game wound down to its tense finish, I casually remarked how nice the ground now looked with its new signage; if only it had more people to appreciate what the club is doing these days; and if only the signs were perhaps a metre further back, because they looked pretty close to the touchline. One last thing on the game itself. Now, I'm going to completely disregard whatever the exact rule may be, but how Chris May's blatant and deliberate handball miles outside of his area - and the follow up pretence of being hit in the face - got only a yellow card, when Tim Mala missed two games for calling Kieran Gonzalez a dickhead is beyond me.
On the tram back towards the city, a Knights supporter with either his dad or his grandad bemoaned Hellas' diving tactics. Me, I tried to persuade Steven Chang of the virtues of Frozen Tears' club theme song, to no avail.
Deluxe Ultra Crowd Estimator Segment 3000
Due to a certain amount of demand, here is the beginning of a new crowd estimator segment - and maybe the end, too, because new segments on South of the Border are never guaranteed to last. To be honest, I hadn't even thought about this last week, but one of our readers came up to me during the game and suggested what he considered to be a 'realistic' number. While I was trying to come up with a catchy name for the segment - which as you can see, didn't happen - another fan wearing a Manowar hoodie also provided a 'propaganda' number.
So in an effort to spread the love between both factions, and in lieu of the club actually releasing genuine attendance numbers unless you happen to be in the car with El Presidente at the time, here are both possible answers.
Realistic: 1000
Inflated South propaganda: 1800
If you would like to participate in this segment, please see me at any South game in order to provide your answer.
Next game, holy crap, that's on tonight!
Dockerty Cup action against North Sunshine Eagles at Lakeside. The game is free for members, but not free for the general public, after a stadium issue arose making the previous announcement from the club that it would be free for all, redundant.
A Magyar homecoming at Melbourne’s Greek Derby
It's been a fairly hectic few weeks for me of late. One of the downsides to this chaos is that I haven't been able to keep up with my reading as much as i would have liked, and that includes stuff on the net. Nevertheless, I finally got around to reading Engel Schmidl's latest piece on Shoot Farken, and it was well worth the wait. It's set during the most recent Heidelberg-South derby game, which is the angle I'm using to justify promoting it. Do check it out.
Next year in Jerusalem
Did you know that the 'no social club' clock on the blog doesn't come up in the browser on my crappy mobile phone? Anyway, thanks to the good people on smfcboard.com who noted that we've notched up five years without a social club, except for some casino night and the doomed from the start attempts to make Beachcomber Cafe a temporary replacement of sorts.
Around the Grounds
So it's come to this
I went with Steve from Broady to Port Melbourne vs Heidelberg, and apart from picking the worst spot on the ground to view the game, it kinda felt like old times, before 'Griffo' became a massive Victorian soccer celebrity, at the same time as the amount of non-South games he watched decreased dramatically. No matter. I was expecting big things from this game, what with both teams doing well this season. Alas, I was left disappointed. The Bergers scored a goal in the opening couple of minutes, and finished off the game with a second goal in the 91st minute. In between all of that, very little of note happened, except for Port skying the odd chance way over the bar. Slightly more interesting was Port's canteen, which was serving cans of Fosters, and the linesman who before each half thought that it was a matter of great importance that the goalkeeper's water-bottles were on the outside of the side netting rather than on the inside. Heidelberg goalkeeper Griffin McMaster, who received the lesson just before the start of the second half, could only comply with a look of utter disbelief, while exclaiming that he'd never come across that request before.
Final thought
After 28 years, it's farewell to Altona North, and hello Sunshine West. Where did the time go?
While waiting at the tram stop in between Flinders Street and Federation Square to catch a tram to the pub (as it turned out, no one else turned up, so that was a bit of a waste), a Yarra Trams employee on the platform started chatting with me about South and who we were playing. I mentioned 'Croatia', and he asked me about what kind of crowd the game would get. I said probably 1000-1500. It turned out that my new mate was a lapsed South fan - who else would reply to my hopeful crowd estimate with 'but we used to get 8,000 for this game'?
How do you respond to that assertion with anything resembling good grace? Here was a bloke bemoaning the fact that South crowds had gotten smaller, while not acknowledging that he himself was part of the problem. After I somehow made that point to him without directly implicating or blaming him, he then wished me a happy Easter, to which I said 'not for me'.
'Why not?' he said.
'I'm not a believer' I replied.
'You should go anyway' he responded, before I clambered onto the No.1 tram towards South Melbourne Beach, and he went on to help out some other commuters.
The tension mounts (on with the body count)
A Saturday afternoon kickoff, up against just about every other senior men's soccer match in Melbourne - not exactly the most ideal kickoff time, despite the horribly pristine and un-winter-like weather. Upon entering the ground I picked up my 2014 championship pennant souvenir, which was in a soccer style, whereas my idea had been for a baseball/Happy Days style horizontal triangle, in part because of some people at South calling me Richie Cunningham; no matter.
The apparently newly relaid turf was described by one person who had walked on it as having been left long, as well as being both sandy and moist; somehow later in the day, I thought I'd heard overheard someone chanting to themselves 'Epifano walks on quicksand'.
An early detour
Speaking of Nick Epifano, he was both there (in that he was on the bench), and not there (in that he didn't seem to celebrate the winning goal, nor did he get subbed on). I have been told and I have read from the more sympathetic side of this issue that Epifano wants to be at South, and that he had made that decision before the season despite receiving several better monetary offers, combined with denigration of South from persons involved at other clubs.
If that is true, and I don't doubt that to be the case, then he has an awfully strange way of showing it, for example by remaining expressionless on the bench when we do something good, or being the first to leave the ground after a game. That's not a crime in and of itself - the bloke's probably an incurable introvert - but it does cut against the grain of expectation in a vocation where overt and obvious physical and emotional expression is expected as standard.
After last week's episode of rank stupidity, the club went into lock down, and while my initial feeling was that Epifano would have been sacked, every day that went past seemed to make this less likely. What was the hold up for? Why had there been no comment from the club, even if it was only to acknowledge that the incident had happened, and that more news would be released later?
As it turned out, the club went on an atypically 'thorough consultative process' to try and figure out what the best solution would be to this scenario. They even engaged stakeholders across the club, including some members. And in the interests of openness, I was one of those members consulted. Without going into too much detail about that process, my recommendation was that the club sack Epifano, because while I believe that there is a substantial player welfare element involved here, that we as a club do not have the capacity to deal with that problem, as well as being doubtful of Epifano's remorse, especially considering the behaviour of some of those people in his camp.
Whatever the motivations of the club - and they may genuinely believe that this is a player welfare issue, and not merely be seeing it as a case of Epifano being a very talented player who'd they'd rather not let go - it takes a fair amount of guts to take it down this direction. That will sound wrongheaded to a few people out there, who will more naturally equate this is being a sign of weakness and indecisiveness. But undoubtedly, this is an attempt if not to implement than to at least mimic the 'professional' solution a top tier sporting club would apply in the same or similar situation.
The word that I've received on the matter is that within all levels of the club - coach, board, player leadership group - failed to adequately deal with the initial Facebook comment issue; so that while Epifano can't be nor should he be absolved of taking responsibility for his own actions, at least some part of the problem was in the ineffective and inadequate response from the club itself to the initial fuck up. Of course those in charge are well aware that this could all blow up in their face spectacularly, but as far as I'm concerned on this matter, if they can somehow make this work for the benefit of all involved, it would actually demonstrate an increase of maturity and professionalism in the club.
I don't think it's going to work for all sorts of reasons, but it'll be very interesting to see how this all plays out. What's already surprised me is the response from many of those on smfcboard.com - and I don't mean those who are only protesting we keep Epifano because of his talent, because that's no surprise at all - but those who have provided measured, nuanced responses outside the Kiss of Death's 'knee-jerk hard arse' response and the SMFC Mike brand of 'how much deeper can I crawl up the board's arse' response binary.
OK, back on track now
There was also some sort of camera crew attached to someone who looked like George Donikian (wearing his ground access pass on a Melbourne Heart lanyard) who, as far as I could gather, were filming some sort of feature on Australian soccer, starting with community clubs, then NPL, then A-League. Someone bemoaned the fact that they turned up to a fixture that was likely to have a poor crowd, but why not capture the true spirit of forcefully inflicted mediocrity that we've succumbed to? The mood lightened somewhat when the camera crew started filming Clarendon Corner, and we started singing 'We only sing when there's cameras!'.
Even the early Knights goal didn't sink people's enthusiasm, perhaps because we always looked likely to score. A large part of this was due to Andy Brennan, who was given hectares of space to run into on the right hand side, and which he duly used to take apart the inexperienced and/or substandard Knights defense. When he got past them, he put in several good crosses; when he failed to get past an opponent, the result was usually a foul, often with a yellow a card to the offender, though it took some time for the ref to get to that point. Having seen (via videos) the kind of space Brennan was gifted in Tasmania - usually way too much - I was surprised to see him allowed to roam the way he was on Saturday. That's not a complaint mind you, only an observation, in that less space was one of the issues I thought he'd have to deal with in Victorian soccer.
 |
| Placed here just in case you've never seen this before. |
While that allegation was later shown to be false, the immediate result was the referee blowing his whistle for halftime, and a scuffle between the two teams as they headed off towards the tunnel. Whatever Lujic did, and however much we've copped from opposition players over the years, I'm not a fan of celebrating in front of the opposition; but then again, I'm not one for outlandish goal celebrations anyway. Under normal circumstances, my personal goal celebration preference list is:
- Thanking the player who passed the ball to you.
- Celebrating with your supporters.
- Dedicating the effort to Jesus/Buddha/Allah/recently deceased person/currently ill person/new born person/your high score playing as Questor the Elf on Gauntlet
- Only carrying on like a complete pork chop if you've scored an absolute cracker or decisive, season defining goal.
The second half saw us more or less pick up where we left off. Brennan continued to take the piss, and got his due reward when he battled hard, caused a turnover and received the resulting through ball which he slotted home. It was a little ugly, but damn was it effective. The rest of the game saw us alternately try to ice the game - a Chris May double save made that part harder - and try to weather the visitors' attacks. There were a few of those, mostly from the air where we didn't look that comfortable, but we held on and that's what matters most.
As the game wound down to its tense finish, I casually remarked how nice the ground now looked with its new signage; if only it had more people to appreciate what the club is doing these days; and if only the signs were perhaps a metre further back, because they looked pretty close to the touchline. One last thing on the game itself. Now, I'm going to completely disregard whatever the exact rule may be, but how Chris May's blatant and deliberate handball miles outside of his area - and the follow up pretence of being hit in the face - got only a yellow card, when Tim Mala missed two games for calling Kieran Gonzalez a dickhead is beyond me.
On the tram back towards the city, a Knights supporter with either his dad or his grandad bemoaned Hellas' diving tactics. Me, I tried to persuade Steven Chang of the virtues of Frozen Tears' club theme song, to no avail.
Deluxe Ultra Crowd Estimator Segment 3000
Due to a certain amount of demand, here is the beginning of a new crowd estimator segment - and maybe the end, too, because new segments on South of the Border are never guaranteed to last. To be honest, I hadn't even thought about this last week, but one of our readers came up to me during the game and suggested what he considered to be a 'realistic' number. While I was trying to come up with a catchy name for the segment - which as you can see, didn't happen - another fan wearing a Manowar hoodie also provided a 'propaganda' number.
So in an effort to spread the love between both factions, and in lieu of the club actually releasing genuine attendance numbers unless you happen to be in the car with El Presidente at the time, here are both possible answers.
Realistic: 1000
Inflated South propaganda: 1800
If you would like to participate in this segment, please see me at any South game in order to provide your answer.
Next game, holy crap, that's on tonight!
Dockerty Cup action against North Sunshine Eagles at Lakeside. The game is free for members, but not free for the general public, after a stadium issue arose making the previous announcement from the club that it would be free for all, redundant.
A Magyar homecoming at Melbourne’s Greek Derby
It's been a fairly hectic few weeks for me of late. One of the downsides to this chaos is that I haven't been able to keep up with my reading as much as i would have liked, and that includes stuff on the net. Nevertheless, I finally got around to reading Engel Schmidl's latest piece on Shoot Farken, and it was well worth the wait. It's set during the most recent Heidelberg-South derby game, which is the angle I'm using to justify promoting it. Do check it out.
Next year in Jerusalem
Did you know that the 'no social club' clock on the blog doesn't come up in the browser on my crappy mobile phone? Anyway, thanks to the good people on smfcboard.com who noted that we've notched up five years without a social club, except for some casino night and the doomed from the start attempts to make Beachcomber Cafe a temporary replacement of sorts.
Around the Grounds
So it's come to this
I went with Steve from Broady to Port Melbourne vs Heidelberg, and apart from picking the worst spot on the ground to view the game, it kinda felt like old times, before 'Griffo' became a massive Victorian soccer celebrity, at the same time as the amount of non-South games he watched decreased dramatically. No matter. I was expecting big things from this game, what with both teams doing well this season. Alas, I was left disappointed. The Bergers scored a goal in the opening couple of minutes, and finished off the game with a second goal in the 91st minute. In between all of that, very little of note happened, except for Port skying the odd chance way over the bar. Slightly more interesting was Port's canteen, which was serving cans of Fosters, and the linesman who before each half thought that it was a matter of great importance that the goalkeeper's water-bottles were on the outside of the side netting rather than on the inside. Heidelberg goalkeeper Griffin McMaster, who received the lesson just before the start of the second half, could only comply with a look of utter disbelief, while exclaiming that he'd never come across that request before.
Final thought
After 28 years, it's farewell to Altona North, and hello Sunshine West. Where did the time go?
Monday, 16 March 2015
Notes from the 2015 Worlds of Football academic conference
A combination of flawed recollections and shoddy note taking, interpolations of my own thoughts merging with the words actually said, resulting in the inevitable: a busted chronicle from an unreliable narrator.
First, I would like to apologise for putting this up so long after the conference actually happened, and for any lapses in memory resulting from both the time that has passed and the indecipherable nature of my note taking. Corrections and additions are most welcome - I've probably especially mucked up my review of Desiree Barron's presentation, which was outstanding.
This is the third of these Victoria University conferences that I've attended, and the fifth or so academic conference I've gone to overall. In some ways then, while not being an out and out veteran of these events, I've been to enough of them to get to know different people, and also move up the scale of seniority even if I haven't presented at most of them, as I didn't here. While I was writing these reviews as a relative novice, the complex networking relationships that needed to be negotiated didn't really occur to me - but as an unofficial quasi-historian (and in this case, de facto official chronicler) of these things now, one has to by necessity tread a little more carefully, avoiding the bluntness that may have characterised some of the previous reviews of these conferences.
(for reference, you can view my reports of the 2010 Worlds of Football conference here, and the 2012 one here.
The overall theme of a conference is usually there only as a guide, and conference programs are notoriously difficult things to set up. While often times you can put together sessions where the different presenters will share much in common, often times the outliers will end up in a hodge podge session, interesting for their diversity and idiosyncrasies, but harder to build a cogent narrative out of. This year's theme, of 'football in the Asian century', only made things more difficult, especially for the often narrowly focused (when they're not suffering from self inflicted tunnel vision) Australian rules people.
The opening night panel session included Satoshi Shimizu of the University of Tsukuba; Jennifer Curtin of the University of Auckland; Matthew Klugman from Victoria University; and Seongsik Cho – Hanyang University.
Much of what Shimizu had to say was covered in his keynote the next day, and thus I've decided not to include his remarks here.
Jennifer Curtin made some strange assumptions about the audience's familiarity with the women's rugby union world cup, and by extension I think with how much Australians knew or cared about rugby union in general. This hampered her presentation somewhat. Her overarching argument that women's sport should be treated more fairly by sponsors and the media is a noble and fair one, but it failed to address the issue of quality. What if women's sport is broadly inferior to men's sport, because women can't run as fast, kick as long, or be as strong as male players? What if the highest level of a men's version of a sport is simply more aesthetically pleasing, or played to such a punishing level of professionalism where the game becomes dull, surely a sort of high watermark for sporting excellence? Framed like this, I think, it doesn't become only an issue about gender inequality - though that surely exists, in terms of support and opportunity for female athletes - but something applicable even in male sports. There are reasons more people in Singapore (for example) follow the EPL rather than their local leagues, and one of those reasons is the playing standard. It's likewise why many people from Western Australia and South Australia, rather than ignore the West Coast Eagles and Adelaide Crows and instead follow their local clubs, instead followed the newly founded de facto state teams to the detriment of long standing local sporting institutions. How women's sport overcomes these non-gender specific institutional barriers is something that also needs to be addressed when discussing the gender imbalance in support and funding of women's sport.
Matthew Klugman's point that professional sports leagues and organisations are now primarily media content providers was one of those things that I really should have already known, but had in my own way never been able to articulate; indeed, it's an issue that I've somehow avoided talking about as a specific phenomenon, rather than as a consequence of other influences. Much of Klugman's point is about the NFL as the market leader in this, going back into the 1970s, but the implications of that philosophy are both apparent for all to see, and yet also simultaneously not yet fully realised. What would happen to these leagues in the event that free to air and/or pay television - a crucial funding source of the massive salaries of the athletes and teams in these competitions - is no longer relevant? What would happen if television remained important, but to the expense of people attending matches to the point where they stopped attending in numbers? Do television audiences also implicitly demand that there be crowds and atmosphere on their screens? Do audiences of different sports react differently to uneven competition, and for those that expect a relatively even playing field, does a lopsided competition decrease interest to the detriment of the 'product? Conversely, does too much interference by the governing body to ensure a level playing field also put people off? And if the European footballing giants managed to create their own league, would their overseas fans jump off the bandwagon if an English giant (say Liverpool), got nowhere near winning the competition for a decade?
At the other end of the scale, if the top tiers are media content providers, what does that make lower tiers? While we can conceive that the lowest tiers of sport will still be mostly about social competitions, there's a middle tier - say, a place like where the NPL clubs are, or the VFL/VFA teams - where the clubs can't be sustained merely by the social aspect; nor are there enough funds to make it something more than a development league. In some ways, this can be extrapolated even to the experience of teams in top leagues who happen to be mid-table also-rans, with next to no hope of ever winning a championship.
Seongsik Cho's discussion on the status of South Korean soccer was interesting, at the very least because despite the increasing official/top-level engagement of Australian soccer with Asia, our knowledge for the most part in terms of the common person is extremely poor. Cho's assertion that South Korean soccer still lagged behind baseball (with the exception of the national soccer team) for example would probably be news to a lot of Australian soccer fans. Cho added that despite club soccer trailing the relevance of baseball, the national soccer team evoked a sense of identity in a way that baseball did not, and that naturalisation of foreign players into the South Korean national team elicited different attitudes - in this case, much more xenophobic/nationalist - in soccer compared to other sports; Cho's assertion being that a foreign born naturalised footballer would be far less acceptable to South Korean society than an equivalent athlete in another sport.
Day 2
Satoshi Shimizu provided the day 2 keynote address, on 'The Transformation of Asian Football Cultures in the Last Two Decades: A View from Urawa, Japan’ Shimizu is a softly spoken academic, but unlike one colleague of mine who boycotted this because he thought he wouldn't be able to understand Shimizu, all it needed was a little bit of patience. Shimizu provided a sprawling presentation, veering from the micro to the macro and back again, but never failing to be less than engaging.
Shumizu's analysis of the stagnation or plateauing of the J-League provided interesting insights not only into the state of Japanese domestic football - which like Korean football, still lags behind baseball, despite Japanese baseball's own long term problems - but also into Japanese society as a whole. In that respect, Urawa and the Urawa Red Diamonds are both an anomaly because of their status as a regional soccer hotbed prior to the establishment of the J-League; but also typical in that elements of the problems Japan is facing as a society, especially as regards to racism, xenophobia and the ageing population.
While the J-League has had occasional spikes in attendances since its establishment in the 1990s, these were mostly linked to the opening of new stadia and the occurrence of big events, the effects of which did not last long. Now the thing that I think people are having difficulty figuring out, is whether this plateauing of support is a strength, in that they are not losing fans, or a weakness, in that the halt of growth signifies the point where eventually the sport will begin to decline. This is of course not a problem unique to Japan; but where other countries may be able to ride out a whole series of peaks and troughs regardless of the short term alarm that may be on display, Japan's significantly demographically aged population offers less hope for renewal.
That the Japanese as a whole are wary of immigrants and of diluting their racial and cultural purity only adds to the problem. While hardly at the forefront of the overall problem, the way this has manifested itself at Urawa Red Diamonds is a neat example of the kinds of issues Japan is facing. Where once Urawa were at the forefront of good relations with overseas clubs - the example Shimizu gave was of an Asian Champions League match against Shanghai Shenhua, where after the match the Chinese were so impressed with the Urawa fans' support that they shared drinks with them and attempted to emulate their kind of support. A few years later though, and the Urawa fans became embroiled in controversies over xenophobic banners and chants.
That in a heavily self-controlled social polity like Japan, where displays of personal expression and deference to hierarchy are paramount (at least in daylight hours; at night things are often different), it's important to note that the football stadium is perhaps the last regular, organised democratic intermediary space in a late-capitalist society. Behaviour which would clearly not be acceptable in everyday society, especially if conducted within the guise of a large mob, all of sudden has a space allocated weekly for people to vent all sorts of frustrations.
Finally, I was intrigued and largely unaware of Japan's attempts to promote its domestic football throughout South-East Asia. In this case, it must compete against several different factors. Firstly, the popularity and reach of the EPL, La Liga and the UEFA Champions League. Secondly, disinterest from potential markets in Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore for their own leagues, let alone a Japanese league. Thirdly, not even taking into account the fact of the bitter historical prejudices which still exist, the potential influence of a more assertive or aggressive Japan in alienating potential support away from the J-League.
Hunter Fujak's presentation (with Stephen Frawley, who was absent) ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ A Longitudinal Analysis of Football Attendances and the Australian Population' was a great example of both the necessity and the pitfalls of trying to see into the future of Australians' interest in the different football codes. Readers of this blog will almost certainly know that I'm wary of statistics at the best of the times, especially as they get extrapolated from small samples towards building up a bigger picture - regardless of the mathematical models which can demonstrate how it's a perfectly legitimate way to measure things. Still, there will always be that bit of me, and I think many others who will always feel an instinctive reticence to give in to mathematics while we still trust that oh so much more reliable judge of data, the gut feeling. Fujak's presentation was completely the right kind of provocative, entirely evidence and methodology based, but still leaving enough room for people to be able to point out the possible blindspots and assumptions made. Whether Fujak has accounted for changing media landscapes I don't know, but the perceptive analysis - already being seen in the EPL for example - first, that the average age of season ticket holders is likely to get older; and second, that relative to population size, Australian football crowds are at a much smaller percentage of the population than they used to be, should be of some concern to all of football's governing bodies. The question that follows on from that is this - have we hit peak football?
When the title of your paper is 'The Demise of the Australian National Soccer League, 2000-2004', you've by necessity set up a powder keg just waiting to go off; but even by that hyperbolic assertion, I don't think young researcher Goce Risteski could have quite anticipated the response that his presentation would receive. First things first - you have to admire the chutzpah of Ristevski in trying to cover such a huge topic in the 20 minutes allotted to most of the presenters. Unfortunately, Ristevski's relatively shallow analysis of the financial mess waiting to happen that was Carlton (and its ripple effect across the league), or the Despotosvki incident - in other words money, ethnicity and violence - was met with incredulity by certain members of the audience. Chief among these was Roy Hay, who delivered a brutal assessment of the presentation: 'You've set the course of Australian soccer research back 20 years'. Thankfully another soccer academic, Mike Pierce, came to Ristevski's defence, telling him to ignore Hay and his pet theory about the issue of the governance structure in Australian soccer being the key impediment to the long term success of the sport, and to keep pursuing the angles he wanted to. Later on, I was informed that Hay had apologised to Ristevski for the blunt manner of his criticism. My problem with Ristevski's paper was more straightforward - I simply felt that it offered almost nothing new to a topic that has been raked over countless times by journalists, academics and public servants alike. That's not to say there aren't new angles worth pursuing - the individual histories of the clubs and major parties involved in the transitional period; comparisons to the way that suburban NSL teams often had similar problems to suburban rugby league, Australian Rules and basketball teams, similarities often obscured by the obsession with Australian soccer's ethnic question; and the effects on those supporter groups who have stayed loyal to their former NSL clubs, while their then fellow supporters moved on. These are questions which seek to tackle specific cultural, sociological and historical issues, rather than a broad and generic overview of history that has more or less been settled.
Matt Harvey's 'Rebels with a Cause: The Melbourne Rebels – Rugby in the Heartland of the AFL', while entertaining due to Harvey's half serious, half parodic presentation style, in the guise of the boorishly insular and ignorant Victorian sports fan for whom little other than footy exists, was not even borderline academic, and there's really no way of getting around that fact. Harvey's assorted musings on why the Rebels even came to exist, jokes about nomenclature and the kinds of people that the team attracts in Melbourne, were all undone not only by the lack of evidence and academic rigour on show, but even by the simple fact that Harvey had not even been to a single Rebels game. On the plus side, it did a good job of alleviating the tension in the room.
Jorge Knijnik's 'They Will Never Understand Us: An Ethnographic Study of the Western Sydney Ultras Fandom Culture' is the kind of paper I would naturally be suspicious of, it being about ultras, the A-League and people who I perceive to have an incredible sense of self-regard. For better or worse, I wasn't won over by Knijnik's method; maybe I have an innate distrust of the kind of immersive anthropology he's involved in, especially as he is also a supporter of the Wanderers and someone who stands within the RBB not only as an academic, but also as a fan; and I say this as someone who covers similar territory in terms of writing about South Melbourne and the behaviour of certain supporters, albeit not with the same official academic lens. Not having much of a background in anthropology - a few years ago I did one semester's worth of an honours unit looking at a range of theoretical problems; I was forced into a PhD unit looking at ethics in research; and I've seen all of Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which deal substantially with the problems of anthropology - makes my judgement less than useful here.
At times I was concerned with the way Knijnik seemed to portray the RBB as a far more homogenous group than it probably is; while his emphasis on the way a group like the RBB, as part of the broader Wanderers' philosophy (or marketing strategy) promoted inclusiveness, improved socialisation and harmony between different ethnic groups, I wanted more on what the different groups within the RBB were, and how they related to each other; who's the boss, and how are cases of violent incidents both within and outside of the ground dealt with? How and via who are relations with police, the club, the FFA and the media organised? Is everyone who stands with the RBB equal, or are some supporters more equal than others? Does the group dynamic of the RBB imply a sense of obligation rather than one of spontaneous chanting?
On a more positive front, considering my persistent criticism of the way that various presenters at this conference have often (whether intentionally or not) conflated the experience of one city or state as being equivalent to a national experience, it was good to get a perspective on Sydney that acknowledged the fact it's at the very least two different cities, if not three or four. Of course a topic on the Wanderers makes this so much easier, the Wanderers and their supporters perennially reinforcing their otherness or apartness from what they perceive Sydney proper and by extension Sydney FC to be, by emphasising real and/or imagined differences and fissures. Loyal vs fickle; multicultural vs cosmopolitan; workers vs the upper class; born of the people as opposed to being funded and operated as a rich man's plaything; standing for something specific and tangible, both communally and geographically, as opposed to something far less tangible. How valid any of these binaries are is something certainly worthy of discussion, even if it in some ways falls outside the what Knijnik is looking at.
To hear Knijnik in his own words, visit Brogan Renshaw's Behind the Game podcast series, where Renshaw interviews Knijnik about this and other topics, including Brazilian football.
I was keen to see the presentation by Andy Fuller (with the absent Fajar Junaedi) 'Supporter Groups in Indonesia: Trajectories in Fandom, Politics and Soccer Activism', principally because of my interest in the Jakarta Casual blog, which tries to make sense of South-East Asian football for an English speaking audience. Fuller's interest in the topic differs from Jakarta Casual's though, in that the emphasis was on the members of PSIM, a club from Yogyakarta, and their attempts to negotiate the perilous world of Indonesian football fandom, and doing it by getting close to the locals speaking in their own language. In some ways, this presentation is related to Brian Moroney's look at the ultras scene at Lazio, which was covered at the previous conference.
Indonesian football, to put it bluntly, is a mess. The league structures are erratic at best; interest from anyone other than the lowest classes is more or less non-existent, with the possible exception of the national team, and those who can leverage the sport for political purposes; most of the stadiums are well past their use by date; the clubs are run exceedingly poorly; referees treated appallingly, the players somehow worse (some have died for lack of wages and medical care); the police routinely prevent games from taking place in a club's host city; and yet despite this, there are still often good crowds for games, and diehard supporter groups will travel across the country any way they can to cheer on their team - though as Fuller noted, not always the heads of the supporter groups, who have bounties on their head from other supporter groups.
The interesting part of the research was the attempt by some members of PSIM to start detailing the history of the club. Media coverage of the sport has been poor, but the internet age allows for the possibility of fans taking matters into their own hands. In a country where local football seems to exist outside the bounds of polite bourgeois society (who are more interested in the fortunes of foreign leagues, especially nowadays the EPL) - the government itself has little to no interest in fixing the endemic corruption in the game, and occasional national team success in the ASEAN tournaments is viewed as the pinnacle for Indonesian soccer - it's almost inevitable that a grassroots effort in recording the history is the only way it's going to happen. Whether this will translate to something will move across to other clubs, I'm not sure, as the supporters of Indonesian clubs often have fierce and violent rivalries with each other.
You can see an unrelated post of Fuller's on Shoot Farken on match tickets as memorabilia, and in this case as mnemonic artefact of the 2015 Asian Cup.
Tony Ward's paper - whose title escapes me, as like nearly everything else, the conference programme booklet is packed away in some box as I prepare to move houses - focused on the long term (20 years or so I think) analysis of the popularity of various football codes as conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The data seems to show that the AFL does a good job of maintaining fans throughout the years/various age groups; the NRL not so much, losing fans over time (whether this is terminal, and not part of a cycle, was not clear). One crucial point of difference between the two codes is that in the AFL, women continue to patronise the competition at every age, while in the NRL women's attendance drops away significantly after their early 20s. Likewise, when looking at the two competitions, and their principle cities, Melburnians were more likely to attend other sports in addition to Australian Rules, whereas for Sydneysiders, Ward's analysis seemed to suggest that they tended to exchange sports and sporting allegiances rather than add to their collection. Sadly, due to government cutbacks, this kind of data will no longer be collected.
Ian Syson's 'Losing Contact: Soccer's Place in Post-World War I Melbourne', continued on with his recent efforts in researching the effects of World War I on Victorian soccer culture. This paper focused on the relationship between soccer and Australian Rules in the 1920s through to the 1930s, which starts off well but soon deteriorates as the Victorian Football League in particular becomes more insular and xenophobic. Syson demonstrated that in some cases in the early 1920s, Australian Rules bodies and journalists were more sympathetic, even cooperative, with regards to soccer. By the late 1920s however, the VFL had turned the other way, belittling soccer and pressuring its clubs (and the relevant venue managers) to no longer allow soccer to use their facilities. While the downturn in soccer's fortune's in Melbourne in the late 1920s and early 1930s were partly self-inflicted - a disastrous split destroyed the growth of the game at the time it should have been solidifying its recent growth - the onset of the Depression, and the fact that few enclosed grounds were available to them for big games also took its toll. How much soccer was hurt by its inability to secure its own enclosed ground and some sort of headquarters, was perhaps only properly realised in the 1950s, when the code managed to secure Olympic Park as its premier venue.
Despite its unwieldy title: -'Annual General Meetings Newspaper Narratives Showing How Different Victorian Football Association/Victorian Football League Football was in the 1890s' - Abdel Halabi's presentation was one of the more surprising (for me at least) papers of the conference, looking at how Australian Rules football club AGMs of the 1890s were more than merely formulaic procedural sessions, but also events which brought communities together. Apart from the specific issues relating to the club, which saw the club's performance and finances discussed, the AGMs were a social event unto themselves. This could mean that town halls would be hired to accommodate the huge numbers of people seeking to attend, prizes would be awarded, songs would be sung, entertainment provided etc. What I suppose astonished me about this was not only the large attendances,. but also the depth in which the media of the time covered these events. The difference with AGMs these days couldn't be more different - relatively low key, and in the case of a club like South, attended by only a very small percentage of the membership base. Usually I frame attendance at a South AGM as both a moral duty of sorts for our members, but also as a means of making use of and reiterating one of the key differences between our ownership model and those of the privately owned franchise system. In many ways, while this approach is well intentioned, it also shows how limited the AGM has become as an event in itself compared to what it used to be; and that would equally go for the AGMs of AFL clubs. In these days of the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of sport, with the ordinary fan increasingly relegated to the role of faceless wallet, the AGMs of the past show how a more democratic, inclusive and plain old fun event could perhaps lead to a revival of people power in sporting clubs. Something to ponder, no doubt.
Day 3
Jennifer Curtin's keynote address kicked off day 3, looking at the complicated history of women's involvement with rugby union in New Zealand, including anti-apartheid protests, their involvement as players, and as supporters of men's rugby. It seemed to be the case that while rugby union in New Zealand is clearly the dominant sport, it also contains an element in its make up that elevates it above the station of other sports that may have an equivalent level of dedication - and that element is that rugby union has been at the centre of key moments of New Zealand civic history.
Rugby in New Zealand is an essential element of Pakeha (white European) identity, male identity and national identity. Women's participation in this culture though has often been sidelined by patriarchal imperatives, whereby women becomes invisible participants in the culture. Because of this, women were discouraged from playing rugby, and instead funnelled towards netball. Thus women choosing to play rugby despite the cultural and structural impediments is unavoidably a political act. Women were accepted as supporters of men's rugby - as spectators and someone to do the laundry, but discouraged from playing. What was interesting about this is that Curtin seemed to suggest that gender stereotypes were more prevalent in the Pakeha culture than in the Maori culture.
The net effect of all this though is that many women in New Zealand who have an interest in rugby have a love-hate relationship with the game. This perhaps reached its peak during the controversial Springbok tours of the 1980s. Feminist groups who were involved with anti-Springbok tour protests were often described as being anti-rugby, and by extension anti-male and anti-New Zealand. For those involved with the protests, it was a difficult tag to shake off. Any attempt at contravening the conservative 'invisible' roles allocated to them makes visible, shocking the patriarchal rugby world.
That these kinds of issues are manifest across the world when it comes to women's participation in sport is not surprising in the slightest - what this keynote showed however is how much more clearly the obstacles facing women in sport are via the example of New Zealand, a country with a small population and particular focus on this one game, with all that extra cultural and imperial baggage attached.
Tim Hogan's presentation, 'Reading the Game: Documenting the Text and Art of Australian Rules Football', saw Hogan discussing his continuing work of cataloguing Australian Rules football material, including various literature, and even songs, but also looking onwards to choosing websites to preserve. Quite how the selection process works for that, should a website exist outside the parameters of the Wayback Machine project, I don't know. While I'm aware of some efforts in Australia to preserve different websites of note, their publicity departments could do with a bit of a kick in the pants.
Trevor Ruddell's 'A Future for Footy Books?' looked at the history of Australian Rules books, especially the increase in production, and what the future may hold for that genre. Prior to the 1980s, there were few books looking at Australian Rules. Since then there has been substantial growth in that market, but there are also potential problems related to both the status of the book industry but also the status of Australian Rules. Australian Rules, having probably already reached its peak spectator/audience/interest level, has basically nowhere else to go; thus it relies a lot more than say soccer or cricket on being able to exploit the audience it has. With the larger and wealthier clubs (especially in Melbourne) also looking to cash in on this area, often with elaborate and expensive coffee books, what are the chances that eventually the target markets will suffer from merchandise fatigue? I also wonder how many of these kinds of books are bought and treated more as an ornament than actually read? And how much of these histories are an attempt to mask the fact that the clubs are largely bland copies of each other nowadays?
Having gone through parts of the Victoria University PhD system with Julian Ross, I was looking forward to seeing what stage he'd reached with his work via his presentation. 'Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer and John Newman: A Content Analysis of Football Life, 1967-1976'. Ross overall project is looking into a biography of Sam Newman, putting forward the interesting notion that the Sam Newman persona has little to do with the private John Newman, and another persona which Ross claims to exist alongside those two. I'm interested to see how this comes about, in part because I come from a literary background, including having done some work on the auto-biography - inherently relevant here as Newman has carefully gone about cultivating two very different characters, keeping them as separate as possible - while Ross comes from outside the literary tradition. The relationship of Graham 'Polly' Farmer then, Newman's footballing mentor and immediate predecessor as number one ruckman at Geelong, seems to be a pivotal part of the picture that Ross will have to cover. Unfortunately, Ross' presentation covered little of what the title suggested it would, instead becoming mostly a digression into some of the specialist football newspapers and magazines of the time, that existed outside of the mainstream newspapers media, and very little on the relationship between Farmer and Newman. A missed opportunity.
Desiree Barron's 'Playing Against the Chief: American Indian Representation and American Football in the Twenty-First Century' was perhaps the must see presentation of the conference, one of those events where woe betide the person who happens to be presenting in a parallel session. Barron discussed the not just the issue of the Washington Redskins, and the increasing pressure from activists and the general public for them to change their name and logo, but what the wider implications are of this debate. Barron discussed the history of Indian related names became a part of the culture of American sports (and by extension, the military) from the top level to the grassroots. One theory is that it was a way of European immigrants to 'Americanise' themselves, as part of their efforts to disassociate themselves from their British and European histories.
Barron also highlighted a crucial element that has been overlooked. Yes, the logos and names are racist, and would be completely unacceptable if it depicted other ethnic groups in such a way. But the issue is also one of sovereignty. These images challenge the right of Native Americans to control their own imagery and cultural property, a problem which extends into all areas of their lives. Barron discussed how American high schools have begun to gradually change their logos and names where they cause offence, but the big money in the big leagues - and the supporters of these teams - are resisting hard. The solution Barron argues, especially in cases where Native American groups and their non-Native counterparts seek to work out a middle path, need to be seen as authentic and meaningful to both groups. In a later discussion after her presentation, I asked Barron about what the situation was in Canada, where some similar names and logos exist (though not nearly to the extent of the US), and the fact that some native groups have residents on both sides of the border, and the answer she provided was interesting - that it was less of a problem in Canada, not only because of the smaller prevalence of these kinds of names and logos, but also because the Canadian Aboriginal population was far more socially and politically advanced than their US brethren; thus the former come from a position of relative strength that the latter are yet to achieve.
Matthew Klugman's presentation ‘We Already Hear the Sneerers Talking About the “Football Mania”’: Using the Emergence of a New Phrase as a Historical Window into the Emerging Mania for Football in Britain' was a brilliantly entertaining look into the way that religious and secular institutions attempted to deal with the emergence of mass footballing culture in late 19th century England. While football was played socially and relatively informally for centuries, the emergence of the codified, organised form of football caused a great deal of distress among certain elements of British society. A useful context I think for understanding those concerns is the fear of crowds that governments and religious authorities had at the time, especially if they were not able to control them for their own ends. Manias, too, - not an exact psychological term by any stretch of the imagination, but for an example of the kinds of phenomenon relevant to the discussion, see this link - were never far from the forefront of the Victorian consciousness. Perhaps what troubled the governments and religious authorities most was that the football mania actually endured, and thus the fervour, emotion and sheer waste of time on something so trivial and outright common. Even while football as a spectator sport, despite several peaks and troughs, has become subsumed into the capitalist framework - and after all, wasn't that inevitable as soon as players became professionals, and the spectacle leveraged for profit? - one can see still see the distrust from the authorities for the game, as it relates to the point from Shimizu's keynote address: that in a late-capitalist society where the individual has been socio-physically cleft from his fellow members of society, the football stadium may be the last point of mass democratic dissent; dissent not in a necessarily violent or political manner, but as simple as a contained moment of joyous anarchy.
You can read a version of Klugman's presentation on the Shoot Farken site, which is much better than my ad hoc summary.
I'm sorry to say that Sarah Oxford's presentation, 'The Gender Paradox: Young Women’s Inclusion in the Sport for Development and Peace Movement', is one that has suffered greatly from my delay in reporting back. The presentation was about using sport in developing and/or third world nations, in this case Kenya, to achieve a number of positive humanitarian and development outcomes. Using the example of a project in Kenya promoted at women and girls, Oxford discussed how the stabilising effect of sport, and the routine it can provide, can lead to other positive outcomes, especially for NGOs working in these areas. Thus via such programs, NGOs can provide better access to health and education services, as well as breaking down conservative gender roles. But this is where it gets tricky, because there are all the usual issue of cultural sensitivities that need to be dealt with as well - when does the quest for improving gender equality turn into cultural imperialism?
Final thoughts
I think I must have a mind that's set towards trying to force together narratives out of disparate voices and stories, but I think I got a few things out of this that may point to a few trends.
Firstly, that the way fans react to change is often largely based on their mistaken ideas of the history of their sport - specifically, that the way they've grown up following their sport is the same as it has always been, and that even the fact that following a sporting team at all in organised competitions has a longer history than it actually does (aside from examples like Byzantine chariot racing).
The reaction to those changes then, at least among a certain section of the population, is to go back. When the lay person does this, either by retreating from over commercialised sporting experiences or by wholesale escape into the fantasy of reminiscence, it is often done without remembering all the bad things that existed during those eras. The academic sports historian is also not immune to those tendencies. Indeed, I believe there is a tendency (and I'm certainly not immune to it), to if not create a hagiographic view of the past, than to at least insert a sort of wistful tone to it, smoothing off the rough edges, and creating the sense that much of what was done back then was actually planned, adding a sense of historical prescience via our values to what those people were trying to achieve back then,
Moving from the past towards the future, I'm innately wary of those attempting to future proof their sports, especially from a commercial standpoint. Looking 10, 20 or even 50 years into the future, and trying to plan accordingly seems to those folk to be necessary - and I can understand why - but it also seems incredibly hubristic. Seeing as how often times these projections and plans are based around the success of the top level, one wonders what the consequences are for those groups who fall outside of those commercial imperatives - and what will happen if or when the television funding model, the integral source of funds for most important leagues, changes or collapses?
Within that, the health and well being of athletes has often taken a back seat. In the future, will our treatment of the professional athlete class be seen as an equivalent to slavery and the base gladiatorial contests of Rome? There's also the undercurrent, which is seldom openly acknowledged but always there, that at some point having turned top-flight sport into a commodity primarily about entertainment, that audiences will get bored. And if that should ever come to pass, what happens then? Is the resurgence of the football stadium as a means of collective identity, as opposed to a setting for an individualised and predominantly televised product, a way of saving football from itself?
In that sense, the conference danced around the theme of mediated spaces. The control of space is fundamental to sport - the mastery of a designated environment, and especially in the football codes, is where codified sport starts from. Outside of the field itself, there are the arenas around the fields themselves, where we see the competing demands of economics, capacity, comfort, ownership and expression negotiate some sort of middle ground; then there's the media space, struggling with the consequences of the digital age, as leagues, clubs, players, established media, new media and the man and woman on the street all fight to sway the still developing format one way or another - some of out of fear of losing control, others because they see an opportunity long denied to them of being able to speak back to the machine; the competition between sports for attention in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, as once isolated markets becomes opportunities for bigger and wealthier organisation to expand their colonies.
In many ways, that kind of questioning harks back to essays that I would write as an undergraduate. They would manifest themselves as expressions of doubt and uncertainty, even in the conclusions, where our western argumentative tradition demanded finality and resolution, and a firm position taken within the bounds of academic style. It's been a constant struggle for me to overcome those rhetorical tendencies, and yet this issue of mediated space in sport seems to me to be something that's so fluid at this point in time, that I'm voluntarily drawn back to this old trope of mine.
To finish, a quick thought on the conference topic. Quite how Australians deal with Asia, both within and of sporting contexts is still something that we clearly don't have a good grasp of, except to say perhaps that we don't do it very well. Natural demographic change may mean that this will change naturally of its own volition, but in the mean time one of the things brought up in the opening night's discussion may be worth considering - that by re-framing what we see as our distance from Asia - socially, culturally, even geographically - into something more like proximity; the fact that we are economically and geographically closer to each other than any place else, and that this relative shortness of distance will in time be able to overcome our tendency to be both Euro-centric and stuck in the Anglophone world, despite the historical processes which created our sense of place and culture.
First, I would like to apologise for putting this up so long after the conference actually happened, and for any lapses in memory resulting from both the time that has passed and the indecipherable nature of my note taking. Corrections and additions are most welcome - I've probably especially mucked up my review of Desiree Barron's presentation, which was outstanding.
This is the third of these Victoria University conferences that I've attended, and the fifth or so academic conference I've gone to overall. In some ways then, while not being an out and out veteran of these events, I've been to enough of them to get to know different people, and also move up the scale of seniority even if I haven't presented at most of them, as I didn't here. While I was writing these reviews as a relative novice, the complex networking relationships that needed to be negotiated didn't really occur to me - but as an unofficial quasi-historian (and in this case, de facto official chronicler) of these things now, one has to by necessity tread a little more carefully, avoiding the bluntness that may have characterised some of the previous reviews of these conferences.
(for reference, you can view my reports of the 2010 Worlds of Football conference here, and the 2012 one here.
The overall theme of a conference is usually there only as a guide, and conference programs are notoriously difficult things to set up. While often times you can put together sessions where the different presenters will share much in common, often times the outliers will end up in a hodge podge session, interesting for their diversity and idiosyncrasies, but harder to build a cogent narrative out of. This year's theme, of 'football in the Asian century', only made things more difficult, especially for the often narrowly focused (when they're not suffering from self inflicted tunnel vision) Australian rules people.
The opening night panel session included Satoshi Shimizu of the University of Tsukuba; Jennifer Curtin of the University of Auckland; Matthew Klugman from Victoria University; and Seongsik Cho – Hanyang University.
Much of what Shimizu had to say was covered in his keynote the next day, and thus I've decided not to include his remarks here.
Jennifer Curtin made some strange assumptions about the audience's familiarity with the women's rugby union world cup, and by extension I think with how much Australians knew or cared about rugby union in general. This hampered her presentation somewhat. Her overarching argument that women's sport should be treated more fairly by sponsors and the media is a noble and fair one, but it failed to address the issue of quality. What if women's sport is broadly inferior to men's sport, because women can't run as fast, kick as long, or be as strong as male players? What if the highest level of a men's version of a sport is simply more aesthetically pleasing, or played to such a punishing level of professionalism where the game becomes dull, surely a sort of high watermark for sporting excellence? Framed like this, I think, it doesn't become only an issue about gender inequality - though that surely exists, in terms of support and opportunity for female athletes - but something applicable even in male sports. There are reasons more people in Singapore (for example) follow the EPL rather than their local leagues, and one of those reasons is the playing standard. It's likewise why many people from Western Australia and South Australia, rather than ignore the West Coast Eagles and Adelaide Crows and instead follow their local clubs, instead followed the newly founded de facto state teams to the detriment of long standing local sporting institutions. How women's sport overcomes these non-gender specific institutional barriers is something that also needs to be addressed when discussing the gender imbalance in support and funding of women's sport.
Matthew Klugman's point that professional sports leagues and organisations are now primarily media content providers was one of those things that I really should have already known, but had in my own way never been able to articulate; indeed, it's an issue that I've somehow avoided talking about as a specific phenomenon, rather than as a consequence of other influences. Much of Klugman's point is about the NFL as the market leader in this, going back into the 1970s, but the implications of that philosophy are both apparent for all to see, and yet also simultaneously not yet fully realised. What would happen to these leagues in the event that free to air and/or pay television - a crucial funding source of the massive salaries of the athletes and teams in these competitions - is no longer relevant? What would happen if television remained important, but to the expense of people attending matches to the point where they stopped attending in numbers? Do television audiences also implicitly demand that there be crowds and atmosphere on their screens? Do audiences of different sports react differently to uneven competition, and for those that expect a relatively even playing field, does a lopsided competition decrease interest to the detriment of the 'product? Conversely, does too much interference by the governing body to ensure a level playing field also put people off? And if the European footballing giants managed to create their own league, would their overseas fans jump off the bandwagon if an English giant (say Liverpool), got nowhere near winning the competition for a decade?
At the other end of the scale, if the top tiers are media content providers, what does that make lower tiers? While we can conceive that the lowest tiers of sport will still be mostly about social competitions, there's a middle tier - say, a place like where the NPL clubs are, or the VFL/VFA teams - where the clubs can't be sustained merely by the social aspect; nor are there enough funds to make it something more than a development league. In some ways, this can be extrapolated even to the experience of teams in top leagues who happen to be mid-table also-rans, with next to no hope of ever winning a championship.
Seongsik Cho's discussion on the status of South Korean soccer was interesting, at the very least because despite the increasing official/top-level engagement of Australian soccer with Asia, our knowledge for the most part in terms of the common person is extremely poor. Cho's assertion that South Korean soccer still lagged behind baseball (with the exception of the national soccer team) for example would probably be news to a lot of Australian soccer fans. Cho added that despite club soccer trailing the relevance of baseball, the national soccer team evoked a sense of identity in a way that baseball did not, and that naturalisation of foreign players into the South Korean national team elicited different attitudes - in this case, much more xenophobic/nationalist - in soccer compared to other sports; Cho's assertion being that a foreign born naturalised footballer would be far less acceptable to South Korean society than an equivalent athlete in another sport.
Day 2
Satoshi Shimizu provided the day 2 keynote address, on 'The Transformation of Asian Football Cultures in the Last Two Decades: A View from Urawa, Japan’ Shimizu is a softly spoken academic, but unlike one colleague of mine who boycotted this because he thought he wouldn't be able to understand Shimizu, all it needed was a little bit of patience. Shimizu provided a sprawling presentation, veering from the micro to the macro and back again, but never failing to be less than engaging.
Shumizu's analysis of the stagnation or plateauing of the J-League provided interesting insights not only into the state of Japanese domestic football - which like Korean football, still lags behind baseball, despite Japanese baseball's own long term problems - but also into Japanese society as a whole. In that respect, Urawa and the Urawa Red Diamonds are both an anomaly because of their status as a regional soccer hotbed prior to the establishment of the J-League; but also typical in that elements of the problems Japan is facing as a society, especially as regards to racism, xenophobia and the ageing population.
While the J-League has had occasional spikes in attendances since its establishment in the 1990s, these were mostly linked to the opening of new stadia and the occurrence of big events, the effects of which did not last long. Now the thing that I think people are having difficulty figuring out, is whether this plateauing of support is a strength, in that they are not losing fans, or a weakness, in that the halt of growth signifies the point where eventually the sport will begin to decline. This is of course not a problem unique to Japan; but where other countries may be able to ride out a whole series of peaks and troughs regardless of the short term alarm that may be on display, Japan's significantly demographically aged population offers less hope for renewal.
That in a heavily self-controlled social polity like Japan, where displays of personal expression and deference to hierarchy are paramount (at least in daylight hours; at night things are often different), it's important to note that the football stadium is perhaps the last regular, organised democratic intermediary space in a late-capitalist society. Behaviour which would clearly not be acceptable in everyday society, especially if conducted within the guise of a large mob, all of sudden has a space allocated weekly for people to vent all sorts of frustrations.
Finally, I was intrigued and largely unaware of Japan's attempts to promote its domestic football throughout South-East Asia. In this case, it must compete against several different factors. Firstly, the popularity and reach of the EPL, La Liga and the UEFA Champions League. Secondly, disinterest from potential markets in Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore for their own leagues, let alone a Japanese league. Thirdly, not even taking into account the fact of the bitter historical prejudices which still exist, the potential influence of a more assertive or aggressive Japan in alienating potential support away from the J-League.
Hunter Fujak's presentation (with Stephen Frawley, who was absent) ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ A Longitudinal Analysis of Football Attendances and the Australian Population' was a great example of both the necessity and the pitfalls of trying to see into the future of Australians' interest in the different football codes. Readers of this blog will almost certainly know that I'm wary of statistics at the best of the times, especially as they get extrapolated from small samples towards building up a bigger picture - regardless of the mathematical models which can demonstrate how it's a perfectly legitimate way to measure things. Still, there will always be that bit of me, and I think many others who will always feel an instinctive reticence to give in to mathematics while we still trust that oh so much more reliable judge of data, the gut feeling. Fujak's presentation was completely the right kind of provocative, entirely evidence and methodology based, but still leaving enough room for people to be able to point out the possible blindspots and assumptions made. Whether Fujak has accounted for changing media landscapes I don't know, but the perceptive analysis - already being seen in the EPL for example - first, that the average age of season ticket holders is likely to get older; and second, that relative to population size, Australian football crowds are at a much smaller percentage of the population than they used to be, should be of some concern to all of football's governing bodies. The question that follows on from that is this - have we hit peak football?
When the title of your paper is 'The Demise of the Australian National Soccer League, 2000-2004', you've by necessity set up a powder keg just waiting to go off; but even by that hyperbolic assertion, I don't think young researcher Goce Risteski could have quite anticipated the response that his presentation would receive. First things first - you have to admire the chutzpah of Ristevski in trying to cover such a huge topic in the 20 minutes allotted to most of the presenters. Unfortunately, Ristevski's relatively shallow analysis of the financial mess waiting to happen that was Carlton (and its ripple effect across the league), or the Despotosvki incident - in other words money, ethnicity and violence - was met with incredulity by certain members of the audience. Chief among these was Roy Hay, who delivered a brutal assessment of the presentation: 'You've set the course of Australian soccer research back 20 years'. Thankfully another soccer academic, Mike Pierce, came to Ristevski's defence, telling him to ignore Hay and his pet theory about the issue of the governance structure in Australian soccer being the key impediment to the long term success of the sport, and to keep pursuing the angles he wanted to. Later on, I was informed that Hay had apologised to Ristevski for the blunt manner of his criticism. My problem with Ristevski's paper was more straightforward - I simply felt that it offered almost nothing new to a topic that has been raked over countless times by journalists, academics and public servants alike. That's not to say there aren't new angles worth pursuing - the individual histories of the clubs and major parties involved in the transitional period; comparisons to the way that suburban NSL teams often had similar problems to suburban rugby league, Australian Rules and basketball teams, similarities often obscured by the obsession with Australian soccer's ethnic question; and the effects on those supporter groups who have stayed loyal to their former NSL clubs, while their then fellow supporters moved on. These are questions which seek to tackle specific cultural, sociological and historical issues, rather than a broad and generic overview of history that has more or less been settled.
Matt Harvey's 'Rebels with a Cause: The Melbourne Rebels – Rugby in the Heartland of the AFL', while entertaining due to Harvey's half serious, half parodic presentation style, in the guise of the boorishly insular and ignorant Victorian sports fan for whom little other than footy exists, was not even borderline academic, and there's really no way of getting around that fact. Harvey's assorted musings on why the Rebels even came to exist, jokes about nomenclature and the kinds of people that the team attracts in Melbourne, were all undone not only by the lack of evidence and academic rigour on show, but even by the simple fact that Harvey had not even been to a single Rebels game. On the plus side, it did a good job of alleviating the tension in the room.
Jorge Knijnik's 'They Will Never Understand Us: An Ethnographic Study of the Western Sydney Ultras Fandom Culture' is the kind of paper I would naturally be suspicious of, it being about ultras, the A-League and people who I perceive to have an incredible sense of self-regard. For better or worse, I wasn't won over by Knijnik's method; maybe I have an innate distrust of the kind of immersive anthropology he's involved in, especially as he is also a supporter of the Wanderers and someone who stands within the RBB not only as an academic, but also as a fan; and I say this as someone who covers similar territory in terms of writing about South Melbourne and the behaviour of certain supporters, albeit not with the same official academic lens. Not having much of a background in anthropology - a few years ago I did one semester's worth of an honours unit looking at a range of theoretical problems; I was forced into a PhD unit looking at ethics in research; and I've seen all of Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, which deal substantially with the problems of anthropology - makes my judgement less than useful here.
At times I was concerned with the way Knijnik seemed to portray the RBB as a far more homogenous group than it probably is; while his emphasis on the way a group like the RBB, as part of the broader Wanderers' philosophy (or marketing strategy) promoted inclusiveness, improved socialisation and harmony between different ethnic groups, I wanted more on what the different groups within the RBB were, and how they related to each other; who's the boss, and how are cases of violent incidents both within and outside of the ground dealt with? How and via who are relations with police, the club, the FFA and the media organised? Is everyone who stands with the RBB equal, or are some supporters more equal than others? Does the group dynamic of the RBB imply a sense of obligation rather than one of spontaneous chanting?
On a more positive front, considering my persistent criticism of the way that various presenters at this conference have often (whether intentionally or not) conflated the experience of one city or state as being equivalent to a national experience, it was good to get a perspective on Sydney that acknowledged the fact it's at the very least two different cities, if not three or four. Of course a topic on the Wanderers makes this so much easier, the Wanderers and their supporters perennially reinforcing their otherness or apartness from what they perceive Sydney proper and by extension Sydney FC to be, by emphasising real and/or imagined differences and fissures. Loyal vs fickle; multicultural vs cosmopolitan; workers vs the upper class; born of the people as opposed to being funded and operated as a rich man's plaything; standing for something specific and tangible, both communally and geographically, as opposed to something far less tangible. How valid any of these binaries are is something certainly worthy of discussion, even if it in some ways falls outside the what Knijnik is looking at.
To hear Knijnik in his own words, visit Brogan Renshaw's Behind the Game podcast series, where Renshaw interviews Knijnik about this and other topics, including Brazilian football.
The interesting part of the research was the attempt by some members of PSIM to start detailing the history of the club. Media coverage of the sport has been poor, but the internet age allows for the possibility of fans taking matters into their own hands. In a country where local football seems to exist outside the bounds of polite bourgeois society (who are more interested in the fortunes of foreign leagues, especially nowadays the EPL) - the government itself has little to no interest in fixing the endemic corruption in the game, and occasional national team success in the ASEAN tournaments is viewed as the pinnacle for Indonesian soccer - it's almost inevitable that a grassroots effort in recording the history is the only way it's going to happen. Whether this will translate to something will move across to other clubs, I'm not sure, as the supporters of Indonesian clubs often have fierce and violent rivalries with each other.
You can see an unrelated post of Fuller's on Shoot Farken on match tickets as memorabilia, and in this case as mnemonic artefact of the 2015 Asian Cup.
Tony Ward's paper - whose title escapes me, as like nearly everything else, the conference programme booklet is packed away in some box as I prepare to move houses - focused on the long term (20 years or so I think) analysis of the popularity of various football codes as conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The data seems to show that the AFL does a good job of maintaining fans throughout the years/various age groups; the NRL not so much, losing fans over time (whether this is terminal, and not part of a cycle, was not clear). One crucial point of difference between the two codes is that in the AFL, women continue to patronise the competition at every age, while in the NRL women's attendance drops away significantly after their early 20s. Likewise, when looking at the two competitions, and their principle cities, Melburnians were more likely to attend other sports in addition to Australian Rules, whereas for Sydneysiders, Ward's analysis seemed to suggest that they tended to exchange sports and sporting allegiances rather than add to their collection. Sadly, due to government cutbacks, this kind of data will no longer be collected.
Ian Syson's 'Losing Contact: Soccer's Place in Post-World War I Melbourne', continued on with his recent efforts in researching the effects of World War I on Victorian soccer culture. This paper focused on the relationship between soccer and Australian Rules in the 1920s through to the 1930s, which starts off well but soon deteriorates as the Victorian Football League in particular becomes more insular and xenophobic. Syson demonstrated that in some cases in the early 1920s, Australian Rules bodies and journalists were more sympathetic, even cooperative, with regards to soccer. By the late 1920s however, the VFL had turned the other way, belittling soccer and pressuring its clubs (and the relevant venue managers) to no longer allow soccer to use their facilities. While the downturn in soccer's fortune's in Melbourne in the late 1920s and early 1930s were partly self-inflicted - a disastrous split destroyed the growth of the game at the time it should have been solidifying its recent growth - the onset of the Depression, and the fact that few enclosed grounds were available to them for big games also took its toll. How much soccer was hurt by its inability to secure its own enclosed ground and some sort of headquarters, was perhaps only properly realised in the 1950s, when the code managed to secure Olympic Park as its premier venue.
Day 3
Jennifer Curtin's keynote address kicked off day 3, looking at the complicated history of women's involvement with rugby union in New Zealand, including anti-apartheid protests, their involvement as players, and as supporters of men's rugby. It seemed to be the case that while rugby union in New Zealand is clearly the dominant sport, it also contains an element in its make up that elevates it above the station of other sports that may have an equivalent level of dedication - and that element is that rugby union has been at the centre of key moments of New Zealand civic history.
Rugby in New Zealand is an essential element of Pakeha (white European) identity, male identity and national identity. Women's participation in this culture though has often been sidelined by patriarchal imperatives, whereby women becomes invisible participants in the culture. Because of this, women were discouraged from playing rugby, and instead funnelled towards netball. Thus women choosing to play rugby despite the cultural and structural impediments is unavoidably a political act. Women were accepted as supporters of men's rugby - as spectators and someone to do the laundry, but discouraged from playing. What was interesting about this is that Curtin seemed to suggest that gender stereotypes were more prevalent in the Pakeha culture than in the Maori culture.
The net effect of all this though is that many women in New Zealand who have an interest in rugby have a love-hate relationship with the game. This perhaps reached its peak during the controversial Springbok tours of the 1980s. Feminist groups who were involved with anti-Springbok tour protests were often described as being anti-rugby, and by extension anti-male and anti-New Zealand. For those involved with the protests, it was a difficult tag to shake off. Any attempt at contravening the conservative 'invisible' roles allocated to them makes visible, shocking the patriarchal rugby world.
That these kinds of issues are manifest across the world when it comes to women's participation in sport is not surprising in the slightest - what this keynote showed however is how much more clearly the obstacles facing women in sport are via the example of New Zealand, a country with a small population and particular focus on this one game, with all that extra cultural and imperial baggage attached.
Tim Hogan's presentation, 'Reading the Game: Documenting the Text and Art of Australian Rules Football', saw Hogan discussing his continuing work of cataloguing Australian Rules football material, including various literature, and even songs, but also looking onwards to choosing websites to preserve. Quite how the selection process works for that, should a website exist outside the parameters of the Wayback Machine project, I don't know. While I'm aware of some efforts in Australia to preserve different websites of note, their publicity departments could do with a bit of a kick in the pants.
Trevor Ruddell's 'A Future for Footy Books?' looked at the history of Australian Rules books, especially the increase in production, and what the future may hold for that genre. Prior to the 1980s, there were few books looking at Australian Rules. Since then there has been substantial growth in that market, but there are also potential problems related to both the status of the book industry but also the status of Australian Rules. Australian Rules, having probably already reached its peak spectator/audience/interest level, has basically nowhere else to go; thus it relies a lot more than say soccer or cricket on being able to exploit the audience it has. With the larger and wealthier clubs (especially in Melbourne) also looking to cash in on this area, often with elaborate and expensive coffee books, what are the chances that eventually the target markets will suffer from merchandise fatigue? I also wonder how many of these kinds of books are bought and treated more as an ornament than actually read? And how much of these histories are an attempt to mask the fact that the clubs are largely bland copies of each other nowadays?
Having gone through parts of the Victoria University PhD system with Julian Ross, I was looking forward to seeing what stage he'd reached with his work via his presentation. 'Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer and John Newman: A Content Analysis of Football Life, 1967-1976'. Ross overall project is looking into a biography of Sam Newman, putting forward the interesting notion that the Sam Newman persona has little to do with the private John Newman, and another persona which Ross claims to exist alongside those two. I'm interested to see how this comes about, in part because I come from a literary background, including having done some work on the auto-biography - inherently relevant here as Newman has carefully gone about cultivating two very different characters, keeping them as separate as possible - while Ross comes from outside the literary tradition. The relationship of Graham 'Polly' Farmer then, Newman's footballing mentor and immediate predecessor as number one ruckman at Geelong, seems to be a pivotal part of the picture that Ross will have to cover. Unfortunately, Ross' presentation covered little of what the title suggested it would, instead becoming mostly a digression into some of the specialist football newspapers and magazines of the time, that existed outside of the mainstream newspapers media, and very little on the relationship between Farmer and Newman. A missed opportunity.
 |
| An example from the marketing campaign seeking to put pressure on the Washington Redskins to change their name and logo. |
Barron also highlighted a crucial element that has been overlooked. Yes, the logos and names are racist, and would be completely unacceptable if it depicted other ethnic groups in such a way. But the issue is also one of sovereignty. These images challenge the right of Native Americans to control their own imagery and cultural property, a problem which extends into all areas of their lives. Barron discussed how American high schools have begun to gradually change their logos and names where they cause offence, but the big money in the big leagues - and the supporters of these teams - are resisting hard. The solution Barron argues, especially in cases where Native American groups and their non-Native counterparts seek to work out a middle path, need to be seen as authentic and meaningful to both groups. In a later discussion after her presentation, I asked Barron about what the situation was in Canada, where some similar names and logos exist (though not nearly to the extent of the US), and the fact that some native groups have residents on both sides of the border, and the answer she provided was interesting - that it was less of a problem in Canada, not only because of the smaller prevalence of these kinds of names and logos, but also because the Canadian Aboriginal population was far more socially and politically advanced than their US brethren; thus the former come from a position of relative strength that the latter are yet to achieve.
Matthew Klugman's presentation ‘We Already Hear the Sneerers Talking About the “Football Mania”’: Using the Emergence of a New Phrase as a Historical Window into the Emerging Mania for Football in Britain' was a brilliantly entertaining look into the way that religious and secular institutions attempted to deal with the emergence of mass footballing culture in late 19th century England. While football was played socially and relatively informally for centuries, the emergence of the codified, organised form of football caused a great deal of distress among certain elements of British society. A useful context I think for understanding those concerns is the fear of crowds that governments and religious authorities had at the time, especially if they were not able to control them for their own ends. Manias, too, - not an exact psychological term by any stretch of the imagination, but for an example of the kinds of phenomenon relevant to the discussion, see this link - were never far from the forefront of the Victorian consciousness. Perhaps what troubled the governments and religious authorities most was that the football mania actually endured, and thus the fervour, emotion and sheer waste of time on something so trivial and outright common. Even while football as a spectator sport, despite several peaks and troughs, has become subsumed into the capitalist framework - and after all, wasn't that inevitable as soon as players became professionals, and the spectacle leveraged for profit? - one can see still see the distrust from the authorities for the game, as it relates to the point from Shimizu's keynote address: that in a late-capitalist society where the individual has been socio-physically cleft from his fellow members of society, the football stadium may be the last point of mass democratic dissent; dissent not in a necessarily violent or political manner, but as simple as a contained moment of joyous anarchy.
You can read a version of Klugman's presentation on the Shoot Farken site, which is much better than my ad hoc summary.
I'm sorry to say that Sarah Oxford's presentation, 'The Gender Paradox: Young Women’s Inclusion in the Sport for Development and Peace Movement', is one that has suffered greatly from my delay in reporting back. The presentation was about using sport in developing and/or third world nations, in this case Kenya, to achieve a number of positive humanitarian and development outcomes. Using the example of a project in Kenya promoted at women and girls, Oxford discussed how the stabilising effect of sport, and the routine it can provide, can lead to other positive outcomes, especially for NGOs working in these areas. Thus via such programs, NGOs can provide better access to health and education services, as well as breaking down conservative gender roles. But this is where it gets tricky, because there are all the usual issue of cultural sensitivities that need to be dealt with as well - when does the quest for improving gender equality turn into cultural imperialism?
Final thoughts
I think I must have a mind that's set towards trying to force together narratives out of disparate voices and stories, but I think I got a few things out of this that may point to a few trends.
Firstly, that the way fans react to change is often largely based on their mistaken ideas of the history of their sport - specifically, that the way they've grown up following their sport is the same as it has always been, and that even the fact that following a sporting team at all in organised competitions has a longer history than it actually does (aside from examples like Byzantine chariot racing).
The reaction to those changes then, at least among a certain section of the population, is to go back. When the lay person does this, either by retreating from over commercialised sporting experiences or by wholesale escape into the fantasy of reminiscence, it is often done without remembering all the bad things that existed during those eras. The academic sports historian is also not immune to those tendencies. Indeed, I believe there is a tendency (and I'm certainly not immune to it), to if not create a hagiographic view of the past, than to at least insert a sort of wistful tone to it, smoothing off the rough edges, and creating the sense that much of what was done back then was actually planned, adding a sense of historical prescience via our values to what those people were trying to achieve back then,
Moving from the past towards the future, I'm innately wary of those attempting to future proof their sports, especially from a commercial standpoint. Looking 10, 20 or even 50 years into the future, and trying to plan accordingly seems to those folk to be necessary - and I can understand why - but it also seems incredibly hubristic. Seeing as how often times these projections and plans are based around the success of the top level, one wonders what the consequences are for those groups who fall outside of those commercial imperatives - and what will happen if or when the television funding model, the integral source of funds for most important leagues, changes or collapses?
Within that, the health and well being of athletes has often taken a back seat. In the future, will our treatment of the professional athlete class be seen as an equivalent to slavery and the base gladiatorial contests of Rome? There's also the undercurrent, which is seldom openly acknowledged but always there, that at some point having turned top-flight sport into a commodity primarily about entertainment, that audiences will get bored. And if that should ever come to pass, what happens then? Is the resurgence of the football stadium as a means of collective identity, as opposed to a setting for an individualised and predominantly televised product, a way of saving football from itself?
In many ways, that kind of questioning harks back to essays that I would write as an undergraduate. They would manifest themselves as expressions of doubt and uncertainty, even in the conclusions, where our western argumentative tradition demanded finality and resolution, and a firm position taken within the bounds of academic style. It's been a constant struggle for me to overcome those rhetorical tendencies, and yet this issue of mediated space in sport seems to me to be something that's so fluid at this point in time, that I'm voluntarily drawn back to this old trope of mine.
To finish, a quick thought on the conference topic. Quite how Australians deal with Asia, both within and of sporting contexts is still something that we clearly don't have a good grasp of, except to say perhaps that we don't do it very well. Natural demographic change may mean that this will change naturally of its own volition, but in the mean time one of the things brought up in the opening night's discussion may be worth considering - that by re-framing what we see as our distance from Asia - socially, culturally, even geographically - into something more like proximity; the fact that we are economically and geographically closer to each other than any place else, and that this relative shortness of distance will in time be able to overcome our tendency to be both Euro-centric and stuck in the Anglophone world, despite the historical processes which created our sense of place and culture.
Tuesday, 15 July 2014
To put it briefly - South Melbourne 2 Hume City 0
Arriving back in Melbourne at just after midday after having attended an academic conference in Sydney, and having seen the family - or at least portions thereof - I was pleased to be able to be able to get to Lakeside in the evening to see my one day a week family. Too bad not many of them were there, a pretty low crowd emphasised by one South fan tapping me on the shoulder at halftime I think it was, in order to point out that he'd counted the crowd, and that it was not good.
Maybe these five o'clock starts are getting to people? I used to be of the firm opinion that it didn't really bother me which of Friday night, Saturday or any of the possible Sunday times we played it, but I'm over the 5:00pm kickoff time. The weather is crappier, the crowd less enthusiastic, and by the time I get home it gets late for dinner.
While we shouldn't kid ourselves with hyperbolic statements, such as we got better crowds in previous recent seasons - we didn't, really - or that the lack of a social club is keeping people away - it's a disincentive, but it's not like people were super keen on the old social club, especially after a loss, and before the games, forget about it.
The game itself saw another week in which we stuttered around at the beginning, before eventually working our way into a position where we looked good going forward, and not reliant on minimal chances to score. We had nine corners alone in the first half which is a great sign, even if we regressed to short corners. Jamie Reed had our best chance, when a cross fell to him at the back post, but he seemed surprised by that fact and his first touch was atrocious, going straight to the goalkeeper.
At the other end of the field it wasn't quite as pretty. Hume hit the woodwork twice and our defence, under instruction to hold on to the ball, didn't always look comfortable doing it. In my opinion, Michael Eagar in particular looks wonky when doing this, though James Musa and Shaun Timmins aren't that far behind. Tim Mala on the other is playing with real confidence even managing to get some overlapping runs going.
In the first half we were helped by Hume's players getting an injury or two, especially probably their best player after the already out for the season Nick Hegarty, that being Shane Rexhepi. Hume's keeper Oldfield also did his best to help is out, by cleaning up his teammates on several occasions when he came out for the ball.
For awhile there it didn't look like we'd score, but one must never forget the poor finisher's friend, the own goal. We got one of those against the Bergers not too far back to settle the nerves, and it happened again here, a cross bundled into his own net by Erdogan this time.
Epifano's goal to seal it was much better as several people have already noted. Coming from the best move of the game, with some nice one-two work and a beautiful finish into the top corner, it just about iced the game, and kept the chasing pack at arms length for another week.
So, still six points ahead of Oakleigh who are habitually crushing teams now, making goal difference a real problem for us. Not that anyone should dare to get ahead of themselves, but there's nine games to go, so the finish line is starting to get within sight. Just got this niggling feeling that we'll get overrun, but with a bit of luck and skill, hopefully we can get over the line.
Next game
The obviously much improved Melbourne Knights, in the last of our extended stretch of home games. After that, Northcote, Bentleigh and Pascoe Vale away. Not getting any easier.
Scoreboard
What happened to the clock continuing on into injury after the ninety minutes? It just stopped at 90:00 like it usually does. Please bring the injury time count back.
Shoot Farken world cup reports
Pleased to say that I made it to the end in one piece.
Final thought
It's good to be back in a town with an ugly bridge and a port full of red cranes.
Maybe these five o'clock starts are getting to people? I used to be of the firm opinion that it didn't really bother me which of Friday night, Saturday or any of the possible Sunday times we played it, but I'm over the 5:00pm kickoff time. The weather is crappier, the crowd less enthusiastic, and by the time I get home it gets late for dinner.
While we shouldn't kid ourselves with hyperbolic statements, such as we got better crowds in previous recent seasons - we didn't, really - or that the lack of a social club is keeping people away - it's a disincentive, but it's not like people were super keen on the old social club, especially after a loss, and before the games, forget about it.
The game itself saw another week in which we stuttered around at the beginning, before eventually working our way into a position where we looked good going forward, and not reliant on minimal chances to score. We had nine corners alone in the first half which is a great sign, even if we regressed to short corners. Jamie Reed had our best chance, when a cross fell to him at the back post, but he seemed surprised by that fact and his first touch was atrocious, going straight to the goalkeeper.
At the other end of the field it wasn't quite as pretty. Hume hit the woodwork twice and our defence, under instruction to hold on to the ball, didn't always look comfortable doing it. In my opinion, Michael Eagar in particular looks wonky when doing this, though James Musa and Shaun Timmins aren't that far behind. Tim Mala on the other is playing with real confidence even managing to get some overlapping runs going.
In the first half we were helped by Hume's players getting an injury or two, especially probably their best player after the already out for the season Nick Hegarty, that being Shane Rexhepi. Hume's keeper Oldfield also did his best to help is out, by cleaning up his teammates on several occasions when he came out for the ball.
For awhile there it didn't look like we'd score, but one must never forget the poor finisher's friend, the own goal. We got one of those against the Bergers not too far back to settle the nerves, and it happened again here, a cross bundled into his own net by Erdogan this time.
Epifano's goal to seal it was much better as several people have already noted. Coming from the best move of the game, with some nice one-two work and a beautiful finish into the top corner, it just about iced the game, and kept the chasing pack at arms length for another week.
So, still six points ahead of Oakleigh who are habitually crushing teams now, making goal difference a real problem for us. Not that anyone should dare to get ahead of themselves, but there's nine games to go, so the finish line is starting to get within sight. Just got this niggling feeling that we'll get overrun, but with a bit of luck and skill, hopefully we can get over the line.
Next game
The obviously much improved Melbourne Knights, in the last of our extended stretch of home games. After that, Northcote, Bentleigh and Pascoe Vale away. Not getting any easier.
Scoreboard
What happened to the clock continuing on into injury after the ninety minutes? It just stopped at 90:00 like it usually does. Please bring the injury time count back.
Shoot Farken world cup reports
Pleased to say that I made it to the end in one piece.
- Argentina vs Belgium, Netherlands vs Costa Rica
- Brazil vs Germany, Netherlands vs Argentina
- Brazil vs Netherlands, Germany vs Argentina
It's good to be back in a town with an ugly bridge and a port full of red cranes.
Monday, 7 July 2014
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.
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.
Meanwhile, over on the MelbourneHeart 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.
Final thought
As Cuddles noted to me the other day, 'no wonder no one's coming to games anymore, everyone's busy porking birds'.
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.
Meanwhile, over on the Melbourne
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'.
Monday, 30 June 2014
Just enjoy the fact that we're still on top - South Melbourne 2 Port Melbourne 1
Ten minutes in Zois Galanopoulos - was he on our books at one stage? Maybe just a youth player or prospective recruit - took advantage of a counter attack opportunity from yet another defensive cock up and scored past the hesitant Jason Saldaris. Perhaps out of embarrassment (OK, more likely a technical malfunction), we did not put his name up on the scoreboard.
Speaking of the scoreboard, it looked like it had some dead pixels. Either that, or some water had managed to seep in through part of the protective layering. I don't know, I'm not au fait with these things.
Anyway, it looked like it was going to be another one of those days, but we managed to get the equaliser within a couple of minutes, with excellent lead up play leading to a Milos Lujic goal. Then the game descended into a slow and methodical slog, with Port sitting back trying hit us on the counter and us trying to not get done on the counter. Late on in the first half Iqi Jawadi got fouled, apparently inside the box but there's at least one Hellas person who says that it wasn't, and we got the penalty and then came the jitters as Jamie Reed stepped up to take it, with memories of his squandered spot kick from a couple of weeks ago against Goulburn Valley Suns still fresh in the mind.
Thankfully he actually scored the goal, and we went into halftime leading the game. The most remarkable thing of the match then happened, and we started turning it on a little bit, and truly, we should have absolutely buried them. The fact that we didn't, and instead being forced into having to endure a seemingly never ending half hour of not being able to get the ball, but also Port not being able to do anything with all that possession (but maybe all it would take would be one stupid moment) will really stump the armchair football psychologists out there. Is this win reflective of a hard fought, grinding back to business kind of mentality, which would either set us in good stead for a tough game against Green Gully, or was it just more evidence of a team which has lost its way, forgetting how to move in for the kill? Had we won by 4-1 instead, would that have seen as us getting our mojo back with the Knights game being an unfortunate albeit costly statistical outlier, or would it see us get cocky and get likely to be smashed to pieces by a mentally tougher Gully side?
I suppose that's for the retrospective analysts out there to figure out, once any one of those things actually happens. In the meantime new signing Shaun Timmins made his South debut - he had been due to play against the Knights in the midweek cup clash, but his transfer was reputedly held up for purportedly stupid reasons - replacing Brad Norton. I didn't think Timmins put in a better show than what Norton would have, but it's only been one game. Stephen Hatzikostas also started, in place of Tyson Holmes. For some reason I now expect this to be a regular occurrence, as Norton and Holmes were the two remaining players who were with South at the start of the 2013 season, and Chris Taylor is probably keen to move on from the horror of that era, even though there were some good times oif people care to remember them.
While of course the response of the fans to any change in our style of play will cross into the absurd - even if it's only because we care so much, while mostly understanding so little - there is serious confusion as to what's going on out there at the moment. It looks like we're halfway through the process of transforming ourselves into something new - not necessarily better or worse, but different nonetheless, as we begin to play a short passing game, spreading it around the back, including noticeably giving Saldaris plenty of touches of the ball, instead of doing what we did on Friday and keeping it away from him as if he had girl germs, eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww - and looking for gaps in the opposition defence rather than trying to take them on and get them on the back foot.
It was the first time in three attempts that we had beaten Port at Lakeside, following the 2012 and 2013 disasters. It was also the first time - last year's Dockerty Cup quarter final against Preston excepted - that we had come back to win a game after conceding the first goal since we beat Richmond 3-2 at Lakeside last year. In addition to that, Heidelberg managed to hold Oakleigh to a 1-1 draw despite being down to ten men for 65 minutes. So now we're back out to a six point lead at the top of the table. Don't ask me how long that will last, but right at this moment I'd sure as hell rather be where we are rather than where Oakleigh is.
Next week
Green Gully at home, who are in an oldschool Green Gully frame of mind at the moment.
Maybe you can explain it to me, part 1
So, we have Jamie Reed, James Musa, and now Shaun Timmins as potential visa players. Which one isn't and what excuse have we used to work our way around this problem?
Maybe you can explain it to me, part 2
Each NPL squad is meant to have a maximum of twenty players in its senior squad. So far we've signed Steven Hatzikostas, Shaun Timmins and Dion Kirk. We've let go Graham Hockless and Slaven Vramesevic. That doesn't add up. Unless weve got Kirk solely in the under 20s squad, and planning to play him only the allowed a maximum of five times in the league, without the n ebing forced to add him to the senior list.
Beanies!
Back in stock. I bought one.
Cool story, bro! department
While I was getting a haircut the other day, 1984 NSL championship winner, South Melbourne Hellas legend and current Doxa Yarraville coach Charlie Egan stopped in for chat. My barber (and also the current/former first aid dude at Yarravile), who I've been seeing for over 25 yeas and knows I'm a Hellas fan had the nerve to ask me if I knew who Egan was. True story.
What's going on back there?
The function centre was booked out for a Jewish wedding(?), and a smattering of that event's patrons wandered out onto the balcony to watch our game. Too bad there wasn't a bigger crowd on our part - we could have had a better chance of getting some more noise into their wedding video.
More Shoot Farken write ups
Continuing off where we left last week, here are some more of these
Welcome to the future
The day was windy and cold, the teams mid-table and mediocre, the reserves match borderline unwatchable. But at least there was this:
At @AEPAOK vs Western Suburbs, where the main point of interest today is the installation of a new big screen TV. pic.twitter.com/ZIaxk6AVk8
— Paul Mavroudis (@PaulMavroudis) June 28, 2014
It's been a long time since I've seen so many people in that social club. Suburbs won the seniors match 3-2.Final thought
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What laws can the senators make now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. He has even prepared a scroll to give him, replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. |
Waiting for the Barbarians, by CP Cavafy
Monday, 23 June 2014
Hellas eases past Alexander - South Melbourne 3 Heidelberg United 0
That was the day's first surprise. The second was to do with the food van - see below. The third was Jamie Reed being dropped from the starting eleven and being replaced by Leigh Minopoulos. Was it due to Reed's drop off in form or the desire to keep him fresh for Wednesday night's crucial Dockerty Cup quarter final/FFA Cup qualifier against the Knights? The latter seems less likely, as this match against Heidelberg was hardly short of importance - a derby fixture, first vs third, and an opponent with a long unbeaten run, I think stretching back ten games.
We didn't start off too crash hot, and were a little lucky to clear our lines from the first minute. Not long after though, Steven Pace bundled a cross into his own net and we were away. Then Matthew Theodore score from shot from outside the box, uncannily resembling his goal against the same mob all the way back in round 1. Milos Lujic more or less iced the game just before the half hour mark, when he tucked away a sizzling Brad Norton cross. An easy chance just before half time to make it four though was struck against the post.
The second half was mostly a mess to be honest. Heidelberg soldiered on, but couldn't do much with the few clear cut opportunities they had. They had one moment though that may have altered the game, had the referee awarded the goal - Jason Saldaris was caught off his line, and a long bomb over him saw him scrambling to stop the goal with a pretty clumsy effort. The Bergers fans thought it was over the line, but it wasn't given, with the linesman understandably nowhere near the speculative shot to make a judgment call. Does anyone have a spare $400,000k to install goal line technology at Lakeside?
It wasn't Saldaris' first nervy moment in the game either. In the first half he had delayed taking a clearing kick and ended up being forced to dribble around a Heidelberg player; later, the ball was either dislodged from his arms as he went to kick or throw the ball. The defence, too, is increasingly appearing to not want to risk passing the ball back to him. It's a tricky situation, as the team is top of the table, and none of the goals that we conceded in the Oakleigh or Goulburn Valley games were down to Saldaris mistakes. Does Chris Taylor wait for Saldaris to sharpen up? Does he make the call early? Or does he wait for the first critical mistake before something happens?
 |
| Matthew Theodore shoots and scores from the edge of the box. Photo: Cindy Nitsos. |
Reed in particular could have done with a bit of a longer run, because he seemed keen to get on the scoresheet and may well have done so had he had a little more time. As it was, he still had some good opportunities to get his name in lights, but he squandered those chances - it's not quite working out for him at the moment, but he looked dangerous running directly at the Heidelberg defence.
So, our four point lead at the top is maintained, and we put eleven points between ourselves and the third placed Bergers. Not quite back on track yet - one game does not equal a trend - but there were good signs out there yesterday that we're heading in the right direction again. Can you believe that's our fifth win in a row against the Bergers? Things going back to normal on that front after the horror that was 2007-2011.
Next week
The struggling Port Melbourne at home. But before that, apparently our biggest game in ten years, a Dockerty Cup quarter final on Wednesday night at home against the recovering Melbourne Knights, with the winner going through not only to the Dockerty Cup semi-finals, but also qualifying for the FFA Cup.
My assumption is that as per usual, your South membership will not get you entry into this game, but check with the club.
Chant of the day
Let's go, to the social club!
Necessary steps in the initiation of a newly found South fan
No. 34: Explaining the colourful history of the relationship between South Melbourne and John Markovski.
Lakeside Food Truck 2: Son of Lakeside Food Truck
I must have been that dazed and disoriented by watching the world cup that I didn't even realise that a food truck had returned to Lakeside until someone mentioned it to me halfway through the under 20s game. It looks like basically the same people and set up, with the same edible but overpriced food, which to mind is still better than the Chiko rolls available at the canteen opposite, even if they're only $2,80 each.
Me on Shoot Farken, talking about the World Cup
I've been tinkering with some World Cup match reviews which I was originally going to publish on here, but which have graciously been taken up by the good people at Shoot Farken, It's kinda in the style of this blog, albeit a little bit more stream of consciousness and pop-culture influenced, hopefully landing somewhere between Robert Christgau and Anthony Carew, which will mean nothing to the vast majority of you, but for those that do I think it's an interesting kind of comparison even if and when I fail.
Click on the links below for the stuff that's been released so far, and keep an eye on my Twitter feed for when new editions come out.
- Brazil vs Croatia, Spain vs Netherlands
- Chile vs Australia, Uruguay vs Costa Rica, England vs Italy
- Côte d’Ivoire vs Japan, France vs Honduras, Argentina vs Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Germany vs Portugal, Iran vs Nigeria, Ghana vs USA
- Brazil vs Mexico, Russia vs South Korea, Australia vs The Netherlands
- Spain vs Chile, Cameroon vs Croatia, Uruguay vs England, Japan vs Greece
- Italy vs Costa Rica, France vs Switzerland, Honduras vs Ecuador
Around the grounds
You're frozen, when your heart's not open
Headed out to Paisley Park for the first time in a few weeks to see Altona East take on the much improved Preston. Preston were the better side by far in the first half, even if they needed one of the dodgiest penalties I've ever seen to take the lead. East's keeper reached a disputed ball on the edge of penalty area first, knocked it out for a throw in, before the Preston player collided with him. Nevertheless East were ordinary, unable to get a shot on goal until about 75 minutes in. After that, they had the bulk of the play, but seldom troubled the Preston keeper, and the game finished 1-0 to the visitors. It got bloody cold as well - Altona Magic side of Paisley Park cold. Feet different thaw out for about an hour after the game, which probably serves me right for wearing canvas shoes.
Now I can finally watch SMFC TV again
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)