Glad to be back - South Melbourne 3 Heidelberg United 1

After everything that has happened over the past two years, it was just nice to be back, again. Coming in on the train, I had that sick feeling in the guts which means that I still care; that's a good thing, as I have been reassured by others, because if I didn't care, then the whole thing would be work, and not mangled joy. It was opening day, it was derby day, it was South Melbourne Hellas day.

I am now 16 years into my second South Melbourne Hellas life, the one where I have been able to be the kind of supporter that I was not able to be during the NSL years. In this second Hellas life, I have spent those 16 years largely among the same faces. Some people have left, some new people have come in, and others come in and out. But the core of the group I became attached to - based mostly around the people active on the defunct smfcboard.com, and its still extant replacement smfcfans.com - are still there.

Many of them are now married, with kids who they are bringing to games. Some of them had kids so long ago, that the kids are now the age I was when I started coming back to South. Everyone's a little older, a little tireder, a little more jaded, but also a bit more relaxed. The club's been to hell and not quite back on multiple occasions, the football remains quasi-watchable at the best of times, and the persistent promise of a brighter tomorrow is a running joke that's so old and well-worn that no one even bothers to complain about it anymore; at least not that much. And why should we? Cynicism at the idea that things might get better for us is as much a part of the club as the supporters who have to listen to the promises, as well as the people who have to try and make a better tomorrow happen.

At the bottom of the stairs outside the office entrance, I realised I didn't even have the QR code for Lakeside saved as a favourite in my Services Victoria app. Then picking up my membership, and while wearing a jersey from a few years ago now, I am told by a volunteer that it's time to update to a new jersey. My response to that is that I don't wear Kappa, so that could take awhile. The food was much the same, except for the food trucks outside which included an ice-cream truck, which along with the warm weather made it seem like an NSL revival.

Having only attended one pre-season game in the lead-up to the season opener - not that there were that many games to choose from - I had no idea about form, tactics, or expectations. All I wanted is for the team to try and score goals, which would be something to hang on to after last year's dire setup. It's easy to say you've defended well when you have six or seven players sitting so deep that you have no midfield. But that's not meant to be the South way, and it comes across as even sillier when people are falling over themselves to claim Ange Postecoglou and the pretty attacking football his teams play.

Look, I get that we're a world away from the personnel and training environments that could come close to emulating what Ange is doing, but there's also this: attacking football is more fun, for fans and for players. Conceding the initiative almost from the get-go, and preferring to try and absorb pressure from deep in your own half, is bloody draining. OK, so what was served up on Thursday wasn't necessarily pretty. in part because both teams were still underdone, especially the Bergers.

But my goodness it was exciting to watch us take the game on. Was it ball playing finesse work? No. Was is it an approach which could reliably produce more than a couple of chances a game? Yes. With the exception of a couple of teams which try and play a short passing game, NPL Victoria is still very much a turnover and counter-attack based affair. That's fine. I don't mind. As long as we consistently win the ball from midfield and not so deep that the opponent's goal looks like a mirage on the horizon, good things are more likely to happen.

Instead of bombing it to Harrison Sawyer with no support and no hope, we might this year be able to play both to and away from Sawyer. Andy Brennan put in a couple of decent corners. Max Mikkola can throw the ball a long way. Players being given the licence and setup to have a go means creating more chances, and more chance of luck going your way. Who knows how it will look when we fall behind, or playing against more capable and fitter teams. Who knows where Lirim Elmazi and Josh Wallen will fit into the team. 

But the most important thing was that the first half was enjoyable. We cruised home in the second half to the point where people could later focus on arguing about how large or small the crowd was, and how many people the Tardis space in the corporate areas can fit. We could focus on gimmick chants for winning "six points", and trying to get kids to lead certain chants.

Next game

Away to Bentleigh on Friday night.

2021 AGM date set

A date has been set - finally - for the dual 2021 annual general meetings. On Sunday March 6th at 11:00AM, the South Melbourne Hellas AGM will take place, followed by the South Melbourne FC AGM at 12:00. Both AGMs will of course be in the social club.

What happens if the season is cancelled again

Unfortunately buried deep within Joey Lynch's season preview on the Football Victoria site - I would have have preferred that it be posted in massive letters at the start of the piece - lies the answer to what happens if the season is cancelled again.

However, in the event that COVID does its unwelcome thing and the season is forced to be cancelled for the third-straight year, the premiership and promotion and relegation will all be determined via ladder position on the condition that at least 50% of the league’s fixtures have been played. If all teams have played the same amount of games it’s a pretty easy determination, but in the event that there is an uneven spread then a points per game basis will be used, followed by average goal difference per game, and then average goals for per game. 

So there you go, the protocol that should have existed a year ago and which could have saved us a lot of bother and the need for bespoke solutions, but didn't. 

Show me the money

This bit of news is a little bit out of date now, in that it's from February 1st, but it's worth noting nonetheless. Channel 10 reported back then that Ross Pelligra and the Pelligra Group had made an offer of around $20 million to purchase Adelaide United. 

You may know the Pelligra name from some of the sponsor boards around Lakeside, or the brand's prominent position on the scoreboard during matches. You may even remember the Pelligra name from our most recent A-League bid, even if you'd rather not remember that we made a bid, preferring instead to pretend that you were always in favour of pro-rel and a second division. Me, I always preferred the (hypothetical) drawbridge model; that is, getting in, pulling up the gate, and filling in the moat with crocodiles. But I digress.

Anyway, for that most recent bid of ours, Ross Pelligra and his property development concern were set to be the major financial backers for the entity representing South Melbourne Hellas in the A-League. So, that's one question answered three years down the line - yes, the money was actually there for a South aligned bid. The second question was a bit more current: would the Pelligra purchase of Adelaide United, and the Pelligra Group's wider Adelaide sporting interests, see a diminishing of its sponsorship of South Melbourne? At the moment, that does not appear the case. 

Maybe people can support both the A-League and a former NSL club? Shocking if true. Also kind of icky.

Australia Cup Mk II

No one at South needs to worry about this for a few weeks yet, but just in case you haven't caught up on this little bit of oldish news, the FFA Cup has been renamed to the Australia Cup. This change was likely deemed necessary when Football Federation Australia decided it no longer wanted to be a Federation, and instead wanted to... I don't actually know where I'm going with this, except to say that an unnecessary name change in one department has led to led to a stupid name change in another.

A handful of people reading this are probably aware that there was already once an Australia Cup for soccer, which ran from 1962-1968. It ran on a sort of Champions League format, in that qualification seemed to be offered not only to champions of the various state federations, but also state cup winners, and teams that finished in the upper echelons of the bigger state leagues. The original Australia Cup was ended due to the high cost of travel, and diminishing fan interest in the tournament - which was probably a reflection of the wider cooling off of interest in local soccer as the effects of the ethnic boom started to peter out.

The FFA Cup trophy was modeled on the Australia Cup trophy, which was named the Henry Seamonds Memorial Trophy in 1963, after the then recent passing of the Australian soccer administrator. You may recall that this trophy was found in a skip outside the Hakoah club in Sydney. After a refurbishment, the original trophy now resides with Caroline Springs George Cross, the 1964 winners of the Cup.Modeling the FFA Cup trophy on the Australia Cup trophy was a clever and respectful nod to the past, without claiming direct continuity. 

This name change though comes across as neither clever nor respectful, just slack. They could've named it after Alex Pongrass. They could've named it after Frank Lowy. They could've even named it after the skip they found the old trophy in.

The PR statements around the name change claim that there was consultation with people, and that everyone seemed to be happy with the name change. Well, they didn't consult me, or the other layabouts involved with Australian soccer history. Frankly, it's just an attempt to hitch a ride on the coattails of a defunct competition that was won by several now dead clubs no one cares about, played under a different format. Instead of doing something new or thoughtful, they did something cheap and lazy, which will muddle statistical compilation and historical narrative as people inevtiable conflate the two competitions. And they'll call it respecting history.

Around the streams

The future of NPL streaming is here, and it's called npl.tv, accessed via the "Cluch" app. Horrible name, who knows where the "t" ended up. Anyway, Cluch seems to be a streaming platform which focuses on a lot of minor sports, as well as second and third tier competitions of otherwise major sports. Four state federations have jumped on board with NPL TV, Football Victoria being one of them.

The service - which you need to register for - is available via a phone app, and also via desktop through the NPL TV website. At the moment it's a free service, and I haven't seen any indication yet of if or when that might change to a paid service. You do have to wonder though at what point someone will actually try and make some money from this. 

The opening weekend hasn't been all smooth sailing for the new service, with reports of crashes, games not even starting, and people struggling to sign up. Having not watched any of the games on a television via Chromecast or some such, I can't vouch for whether the video quality is better (significantly or otherwise) than the YouTube or Facebook streams. I don't know squat about smart TVs and such, so I can't elaborate on how those things will work, except that Apple TV and Android TV applications are in the works

I have a pretty dated Nokia smartphone, with a small screen and not much of a memory cache, but I was surprised at how well the app worked for the most part. There was some minor, occasional buffering, but otherwise I didn't seem to run into some of the problems others were reporting. I was not exactly thrilled however that the phone app seems to redirect to a browser function rather than merely running the stream through the app itself.

The desktop variant is much the same, but here's where I ran into some problems - namely that some streams didn't even seem to be working, as in the case of Avondale vs Bentleigh, including the quite unhelpful message "this video file cannot be played: error code 232011". At least there was a backup YouTube stream for all of this week's games, which I found myself defaulting to in preference to the app and desktop options. In time, once the new app overcomes its teething problems, it is likely that this service will see the end of the Facebook and YouTube streams we have become accustomed to using for the past few season. The Facebook streams are already gone, and the YouTube streams seem to exist mostly as a backup. 

This is a pity, though I do understand the reasoning behind it. No point in making a big song and dance about a new streaming platform, and then having a competing service running against it. Part of NPL TV's reason for existing will be to gather more accurate demographic data about who is watching Australian second tier soccer, likely minus much of the European and Asian gambling fraternity which piggybacked off the more easily accessible Facebook and YouTube streams. It's the kind of data that might prove useful for trying to figure out how to make a possible national second division broadcasting arrangement work.

The NPL TV desktop and app options have a couple of nice features, the best of which is a list of videos of important moments within each game such as goals, shots on goal, corners won, and cards dished out. Of these, the "corners won" feature is clearly the most pointless, but it's nice not to have fling back and forth on a whole match timeline looking for footage of goals. 

Switching to that highlights menu, and especially switching between games, is a pain in the arse. Others have also bemoaned the inability to start watching a game from any given point in time, being forced to watch the game from that moment you log in. After giving both the app and desktop version a run, and despite being pleased with some of the NPL TV add-ons, I still find the YouTube stream easier to use, just because it's so much easier to switch between different simultaneous streams. With so many overlapping matches, I'll likely be sticking to the YouTube option until its no longer available.

Scaffolding news

Viewers may have also noticed that many of the camera angles on the opening round's streams were closer to ground level than is usually the case. I noticed this at first on the stream of the Port Melbourne vs St Albans game yesterday, though I should have also noted that it was the case at some other games I watched, like Dandenong City vs Melbourne Knights.

This is because the kinds of temporary scaffolding many clubs use for camera and commentary positions are no longer covered by Football Victoria's public liability insurance. It's a change in policy which seems to follow in the wake of the tragic death last year of a Queensland man, who was crushed by collapsing media scaffolding while watching his son play.

The only way to change the status of such temporary scaffolding is to convert the relevant temporary structures into permanent ones; or to follow a three step process whereby the third party provider/installer of a temporary structure (which may include a local council) provides a certificate of currency, as well as significant liability insurance of its own.

It makes you wonder about the day in 2014 when South fans put together a temporary gantry out at Werribee. Goodness knows who would have been liable if anything happened to Tim the cameraman on that day.

Final thought

A shame about the minute's silence for Ulysses Kokkinos. Hell of a time for the PA system to go awry. So it goes.

During this pandemic, I demand entertainment! Failing that, some sort of distraction will do.

You ask me here to have lunch, tell me you slept with Elaine, then say you're not in the mood for details. Now you listen to me, I want details and I want them right now! I don't have a job! I have no place to go! You're not in the mood? Well, you get in the mood!

During the week there was news that Mike Charlesworth, the current owner of the Central Coast Mariners A-League licence, had decided to put up said licence for sale. With the Newcastle Jets licence also up for sale, that makes two A-League licences currently on the market, both from the competition's two least valuable audience pools.

In the not too distant past, the potential sale of the sale of the Mariners licence (the Jets one would be harder to budge for various reasons) would've had South Melbourne Hellas committee folk laying siege to the A-League gates - exciting those among our fan-base who look forward to getting back into the big leagues; annoying those of our fans who want nothing to do with a competition which would compromise the (supposed or inferred) integrity of the club; and unnecessarily upsetting certain types who juggle the not-at-all contradictory beliefs that South Melbourne shouldn't be in the A-League, South Melbourne couldn't be in the A-League, and that if South were somehow to get into the A-League, it would instantly destroy not just a competition which is both healthier, more popular and more robust than than any national soccer league Australia has ever had, but also see Australian soccer collapse in on itself like a Cthulhu-esque horror being slayed in a Conan novel.

I mean, I've added a bit of extra mayo to the scenario for comic effect, but you know how these things usually go.

So after so many bid and takeover disappointments, when an A-League licence comes up for sale with a sketchily reputed price-tag of $4 million - well below the cost of a licence paid by those consortia which won the two most recent expansion slots - where is South Melbourne? As it turns out, nowhere. But why? What has changed? Well, clearly a lot has changed in Australian soccer in very recent times, and there are more changes set to come. There's the gradual shifting of the A-League season to winter, though for how long remains unclear. There's a revamped, stopgap television deal, effectively making the A-League a casual employee of Fox Sports. There's the people still trying to figure out a method and timeline for FFA to offload the comp to the owners of the A-League franchise licences. There's mooted overhauls of transfer systems and salary caps and salary floors. There's also the "depending on your viewpoint" of the either "perennially stalled and always improbable" or "the measure twice cut once to get it right" National Second Division.

Oh, and this whole pandemic thing, too, of course, whose end I'm sure is just around the corner.

For the official word, Joey Lynch managed to get direct quotes from our president Nick Maikousis - published in an article the club was happy to quote from and link to, rather than publish its own press release. Those few sentences suggest two things have happened from a South point of view, one minor, and one major. First, the relatively minor one - that more or less because of all the uncertainty noted above, plus the unknown about whether FFA (or whoever's in charge of the A-League now) would even allow the licence to be moved from Gosford, or even out of New South Wales, or any further than Canberra.

I mean, even if the FFA or A-League were to allow relocation of the Mariners licence, could you really see it being allowed to be moved to Melbourne, where we've just had a third team added that no one seems to particularly care about (yet) outside matters relating to housing developments and public amenities in Melbourne's west suburban sprawl? Less convincing is the argument about whether South Melbourne could afford to relocate the Mariners licence - as if the licence was anything more than a piece of paper saying "you are in the A-League"; it's not like we'd have to take the Mariners' stuff with us - this isn't moving the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of the night.

The more important thing though is that we have now well and truly hitched our wagon to the National Second Division train. Now you all know what I think about the NSD - that my now largely private derision for the concept is based upon ill-conceived ideas like: "show me the money"; "your views of promotion-relegation are ahistorical and don't allow for valid exceptions"; and "this is just a brilliant fifth column manoeuvre to undermine the A-League by being concerned for its welfare, all while taking advantage of the circumstance (in Australian soccer history terms) of a comparatively popular and stable competition, which nevertheless suffers the notable weakness of its poor public perception of success, value, and viability". 

But that's just me, the classic example of an over-read and under (real-world) educated contrarian nobody. Now who knows what the road to Damascus moment was for the people currently running South Melbourne, or even if this new found faith in the "global football standard" will stick, because we're not exactly the most dependable people in a crisis. Still, little moments like this help pass the time, because it's not like there's much else to do.

#itstime artefact Wednesday - #SMFC4ALEAGUE t-shirt

Time has stopped. Time no longer exists. There is no A-League. There is no South Melbourne Hellas. There is no soccer. We exist in the collective individualised state of attempting to engage with the twin voids of chronology and meaning. All we have left is the remembrance of time, and the events which occurred back when things still used to occur. I bought this t-shirt late last year at the Savers outlet in Footscray, for the princely sum of $3.49. I don't remember what the club was charging for these shirts. Not being convinced of the merits of the South Melbourne bid, or the legitimacy of the A-League bid process as a whole - and because I am preternaturally too cool for school - I didn't buy a shirt from the club when I had the chance. We could wonder which of our fans had bought one of these shirts and then lost all hope and abandoned the club after our most recent A-League bid failed. More likely, the shirt belonged to a former casual employee, volunteer, or sundry associate of the club, who would have no reason for keeping this shirt. For those of us still here, it's not an item that's going to end up in the poolroom, but there wasn't much choice for me when I saw it on the racks.

Not that any of that matters

So, no A-League for South Melbourne.

Look, I'm not going to say "I told you so", mostly because I didn't tell anyone so, and we should all know by now that no one equivocates on South Melbourne Hellas matters more than me. That it was a long-shot would've been obvious to anyone who's followed the South Melbourne exodus saga these past 14 years, but exactly how long those odds were could only be tested by putting forward a bid. You've got to be in it to win it, otherwise people will always ask why you didn't even try. But there are at least a couple of journalists floating the idea that South was never even close to being seriously considered by FFA, which of course makes one think in a conspirational way.

In 2004, thanks to being in administration we were in no position to put our hand up to even try to apply for the inaugural A-League Melbourne licence. Since then there has been the Southern Cross bid, attempted buy-outs of Melbourne Heart, Central Coast Mariners, and Wellington Phoenix, and now this attempt to get in under our own name under our own steam, with some outside investment help. The funniest thing though is that each time we play the game, FFA gets something out of it. They get to push up a licence fee, force a minority shareholder to go the whole hog, or put pressure on an existing franchise that they don't really want to sort itself out. They can put forward the illusion of a contest, a fair process, or engagement with 'old soccer'. So we play the game, because we feel that we must, but it's not our game.

So we're still left out in the cold. Only the people directly involved with the bid know how good it actually was. Most South supporters are left to do as they always do, which is speculate based on what limited information we've been made privy to, and then filter that through our preexisting prejudices.

Speaking with one former board member way back when about our chances in this bidding round, they acknowledged that the real value lay in information gathering. That pragmatism wasn't something reflected in the way the bid was presented to the public or to the broader South Melbourne family, but maybe this reconnaissance can be taken to the next bid, or perhaps more realistically, to the push for the second division and promotion relegation. Granted, I'm not a believer in the viability of promotion and relegation in Australian soccer (though I'm more cautious on a standalone second division, a discussion for another day) but there are people who do believe in those ideas. Considering the effort put in to this bid - an effort more than a few South fans consider was expended to the detriment of the core business of the club - it would seem negligent to cast aside the value of that information and experience.

Then again, there's also an argument being made that the expansion course taken by FFA this week makes promotion and relegation less likely to happen in the short term. I have said that part of the reason that FFA decided to take up the expansion course was due to the pressure which came from outside the A-League, namely the Association of Australian Football Clubs, who managed to bring matters to a head. Part of the game then became who would be able to shape Australian soccer in their own image fastest. While all reports suggest that the AAFC are still aiming for a 2020 start to their national second tier competition, FFA's particular choices in expansion are designed to further entrench the existing ownership and operating model. And while there will be changes to the latter when the A-League achieves its independence from FFA next year, it's basically more of the same of what's 'worked' lately for FFA: growth corridors, lots of cash, rejection of small markets.

To be fair, FFA had a difficult choice to make under difficult circumstances, albeit some of those difficult circumstances were of their own making. They have a league that has the feeling of stagnation, disgruntled licence holders who have lost millions propping up their teams and the league, and a television audience that seems all but maxed out. They don't want to expand, because they cannot afford to; yet they cannot afford to not expand. Under pressure from fans, extant licence holders, player unions, broadcasters, and myriad other groups, FFA were offered a dozen or so choices for expansion, all flawed in one way or another, all encompassing some degree of risk.

It was fairly obvious that in the context of Australian soccer's culture wars, our bid was a risky proposition for FFA. Not much has changed on that front for more than decade. But on another front, picking South would've been a conservative, risk-averse decision for FFA to make. An imperfect but nevertheless extant stadium; a supporter base with finite potential for broad engagement and growth, but nevertheless a supporter base that was somewhat tangible; the inclusion of a club that offered something familiar, and yet with also enough of a point of difference so as to add something new to the A-League.

But if people think that the two successful bids - Western Melbourne Group, and MacArthur South-West Sydney - are absurd, illogical choices, destined to fail - let us never forget that famous old mantra which haunts the rhetoric of the 'bitters' even more so than "No South, No A.P.L.", that being "three years tops". The goalposts for the A-League's imminent demise keep moving, but the league keeps going. And maybe these new teams will succeed, proving everyone on our side of the fence wrong again.

Only a few will ever know for sure why the South bid was rejected, and the circumstances in which that happened. At some point our bid team will be briefed by FFA on the process; maybe FFA will tell the truth, or only a part of it. It could just be a case of, in the words of the AAFC on their own second tier model, "what may be good for football may not be good for your club". I doubt that we pleb supporters will ever find out the reasons, which means that rampant rumour-mongering will continue much as it already has during the process. Let us not forget the refrain from some people that Team 11 had it in the bag, that Southern Expansion's largesse would see them through despite their absurdity of their three home ground bid, or that Brisbane City would get it for Queensland derby-metric purposes.

More than every other failed attempt to re-join the top-flight, this failure sees South Melbourne at a significant crossroads. Ideologically, does the club at last abandon its plans to work within the system for its own progress? If so, does it throw its weight more openly and wholeheartedly towards the second division and promotion-relegation push? Structurally, what does the next board of South Melbourne look like? With long-serving president Leo Athanasakis set to retire from the board and the presidency - and under whose leadership this return to the top-flight strategy has been enacted - will his successor make a clean break with this approach?

And will A-League bid chairman and Hellas board member Bill Papastergiadis stick around? Initially brought in to sort out the contractual mess with regards to our leases at Lakeside, Bill stuck around to try and achieve something many of us dream of even while we doubt its plausibility. It's required non-stop politicking, but now that that's over, what is his role?

The reaction from South fans on social media has been a mix of disappointment and anger, with more than a dash of the sort of squawking, entitled petulance that's straight out of 2004/05 era TWGF. In its naked, shameless display of raw emotion, much of that outpouring of grief has been hard to look at directly; it has a pathetic quality, both in the sense that one might feel pity and sympathy, but equally in the alternative definition of something miserably inadequate. It hasn't been helped by our failure resulting in all the anti-South trolls coming out to play.

Remember that four of the other bids in the final six didn't even exist as actual teams, being scarcely more than concepts no-one really asked for. Their existence was entirely conditional on winning an A-League licence - and thus the only 'fans' making serious arguments online for or against something were either 'neutrals', or Canberrans and South fans. And the vociferous nature of some of our fans on social media, along with the PR stunts and boasting of our own bid leader, made us an easy target for ridicule and scorn.

(and as I and others have previously noted, there's a certain irony in South board members imploring our supporters to not embarrass the club with poor behaviour during games this year, when the bid team's antics arguably did as much if not more harm to our reputation, and the behaviour of some of our fans on social media made us look simultaneously arrogant and desperate)

But if nothing else, FFA's decision at least put to bed the value of those clickbait internet polls which benefited only the ad revenues of those news agencies running the surveys, showing the importance of Australian soccer's social media argle-bargle to the game's decision makers being close to zero. As I noted two years ago:

The discussions around the future of Australian soccer which take place online are very niche discussions. Within those discussions there even more niche discussions, which while promoted with quantifiable passion, make no ripple whatsoever on the greater whole of Australian soccer. Promotion/relegation, second division, NCIP, the NYL - like those people who keep making petitions to bring back Toobs or the KFC tower burger - their enthusiasm and its attendant clamour more often than not obscure the fact that there are not actually very many of them: it's just that they're louder.

The episode on Facebook with the Greek Orthodox priest from Moonee Ponds was the most farcical point, encapsulating the most crucial problem of this saga - and not just the last two years, but the past 15. We go back to a bit from an older post:

In time the greatest betrayal of the ethnic clubs, if one can use such a provocative term, comes not from their own or the governing bodies' incompetences, nor the disinterest of the general public who had no obligation to follow them, but from those younger supporters who turned their back on their fathers’ clubs.

It's not just the young people of course. The broader point is that if we actually had the support we claimed to have - or that we used to have - we probably wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. If we had 2,000 people turning up to games instead of 200, the quality and vitality of our optics and our metrics would all be harder to ignore, or to treat as a fabrication.

It's worth revisiting this point for an interesting micro-phenomenon which has taken place during the immediate aftermath of this failed A-League bid. There have been current and/or latent South people vowing to give up their A-League season tickets and come back to South. This sounds grand, magnificent, like the beginning of a movement which could make Hellas great again. Even more appealingly, it's a positive move, not just more useless complaining, but actually doing something for the betterment of South Melbourne.

Except human history is littered with short bursts of mass penance after a disaster, most of which never lasts. I'm reminded of Agathias' comments on part of the aftermath of the devastating Constantinople earthquake of 557,

Agathias also claimed there was a short-lived effect on the attitude of the population: the wealthy were motivated to charity, doubters were motivated to pray, and the vicious were motivated to virtue, all in an apparent effort of propitiation. Agathias reports that soon enough everyone lapsed into their former attitudes.

So while we all hope that people come back to South, and stick with South, the reality is that the numbers will likely be small, and most of those returnees unlikely to be permanent. It's going to be a massive challenge for the club to appeal to people to come and support it, or to continue to support it, when so much hope was invested in the A-League bid and the promise of a brighter tomorrow, and soon. Instead we're back to another season of NPL, our 60th anniversary season set to be spent crossing from industrial back-block to fringe suburban paddock, alternating that with our presence at a boutique stadium which we are destined never to fill again, except on very special occasions.

As the dust settles on this latest attempt at regaining our former glory,  these are the things that matter.

Not the final word on this expansion business

Yesterday while I was cruising around the western suburbs with a mate, I deigned to check Twitter on the off-chance that something interesting might have come up in my feed, and I saw this:

@PaulMavroudis is very quiet on here, stop pretending to play it cool I know your stomach is tied up in knots right now just like mine.

— Wise One (@pavlaki1969) December 11, 2018

It's a fair supposition to make, but sadly for the interlocutor, a mistaken one. I have been calm, I am perfectly calm, and I will be calm - probably - no matter the result of today's decision on expansion by FFA, and even if the decision is only announced tomorrow. My emotional investment in this matter, though it has gone through natural variations in mood, has mostly remained in the same spot since whenever this latest iteration of A-League expansion began: in appreciation of the process as a superlative example of high farce. 

That being said, I acknowledge that this is perhaps a minority view - anecdotally at least, South's extant supporters are either very much for, or very much against the South A-League bid succeeding, for all sorts of legitimate and arcane reasons. If I have been seen to project a certain aloofness on the matter, it's perhaps only because everyone else has been so emotionally invested in the result. That, and I have become exhausted by the nonsense surrounding the process, especially as it sat alongside our worst season in at least a decade, perhaps worst season in 40 years.

(And if nothing else, such dithering, meandering, quasi-thoughtful analysis should be the final proof that this blog's main writer is only the voice of a singular Hellas fan, and not a de facto spokesperson for our seething masses.)

To be fair, FFA - and a good number of the A-League teams - have been dragged kicking and screaming even to this point. They need to expand, but they cannot afford to expand; worse, they cannot afford not-to-expand, in an ever more congested sporting market which demands they expand. It is a competition which has the feeling of staleness and which is being asked to add new blood, which will probably only end up alleviating the issue of stagnancy for a couple of years at best; and that's under an operating model that everyone thinks is broken.

Neither do the current licence holders really want teams that would infringe upon their territory, even if evidence - in the form of the Western Sydney Wanderers - suggests it could strengthen club identities and brands. Out of the six remaining bids, only Canberra would unequivocally avoid cannibalising an existing franchise's fan base, so there will be at least one successful bidder - assuming that FFA don't a Honey Badger - that will take away supporters from an existing team.

The likelihood however of a Canberra is low, because of course it is a small television market and Fox Sports - they who fund the league, or at least fund the capacity for A-League licence holders to make manageable losses on their investment - want more derbies in our two biggest cities, they being Sydney and Melbourne. Of course, Fox Sports probably won't fund this pending expansion by providing extra funds for the extra content likely to come about from expansion, and thus we have FFA and assorted related entities making noises about giving the prize away to the highest bidder.

As for ourselves, I'm not going to argue that the ethnic angle isn't a factor in both private decision making and public agendas. What I will say though is too many South fans make too much of that issue, ignoring our bid's genuine weaknesses. These include flimsy attempts at claiming territory, when our historical and latent support (if the latter still exists), is spread throughout Melbourne - and it is spread throughout Melbourne in part because that's how Melbourne sport works, but also because Greeks are spread throughout Melbourne, but that's not a fact that people want to amplify.

And as much as Lakeside Stadium actually exists, unlike the stadium offerings of our local bid rivals, it will also need work to bring it up to scratch. Putting aside the issue of the running track, at present Lakeside seats just 5,500 patrons, and has what might be called at best unconventional corporate and media facilities. It is unavailable for large stretches of February and March because of athletics events and the grand prix. The playing surface is routinely affected by athletics events.

Contrary to the South bid team's PR, a South A-League franchise would by necessity cannibalise supporters from the two existing Melbourne A-League teams; of course the hope is also that our latent supporter base which has kept away from both us and the A-League would come out of hiding, and that some curious neutrals would take the Hellas plunge. Maybe there's some hard core market research the bid team has done in this area that none of us are privy to.

There could also be concerns around liquidity and the proposed ownership model, which runs counter to the way A-League teams have come to be set up. But that's not to diminish the South bid's perceived strengths, among them extant women's and youth teams, an extant stadium, and an extant (even if comestible with regards to its size and loyalty) supporter base. But the duty of South fans for the sake of the club is to be truthful, even if they can't be objective, though I acknowledge that pushing such a line is a Sisyphean task.

But none of the extant bids is a slam dunk. They each have some combination of significant financial, demographic, infrastructural, and conceptual problems, and if I were to put on my South Melbourne Hellas conspiracy hat - and the club really should make such a cap available at our merch stand - the reason this process has dragged out so long is entirely plausible - that however lacking in certain aspects a South bid may be, FFA knows in its heart of hearts that a flawed South bid is still far ahead of at least four of the other bids, and thus they must delay the process until such time as some other solution can be found.

And if one thinks this can't or wouldn't happen, look at the way South's attempt to buy out the Mariners licence looked like it was leveraged by FFA to push Mike Charlesworth to buy out the whole of that franchise. This was back in the days when I would make bold and reckless pronouncements such as:

My ultimate position, for future reference 

• a member run and owned club 

• called South Melbourne 

• playing in blue and white 

• with all games in Melbourne 

• with approval granted for entry by the members

which in retrospect also contains a lot of room for weaseling out of these promises should anything which deviates from such a model actually manage to get up.

But when I'm in a less conspiracy mongering frame of mind, knowing so little about what is actually being offered by our club, in addition to the parlous administrative state of FFA and the A-League, I can't really offer my support for a South A-League bid, nor can I really argue against it. So much of what's been going on exists in the world of behind doors politicking or, even worse, in the cesspool revealed when one searches for @smfc in Twitter. 

At this moment, for me the South bid exists solely in the abstract or under a conditional framework, which is true I suppose for every bid - the only difference being that unlike the rest of the bid hopefuls, should we fail to secure a licence we'll kick on for another season at state level as has been the case since 2005. It's not ideal, but I'd argue that it's better than nothing.

But if one were forced to choose to support a South Melbourne related A-League bid being selected over any of the alternatives, I would do so for the following reason - to see if any of those people who claimed that they would stop supporting the A-League if South Melbourne (or any ethnic team) were allowed in, would actually follow through on that threat.

Of course, there are also the matters of Wellington Phoenix and their death row existence, as well the second division and promotion-relegation hullabaloo to consider, but it's not like that any of matters.

So very tired

As the A-League expansion licence process enters what I hope is - one way or another - its actual true ending point on Wednesday, we've been made to endure one last media flurry from the bid team. Where probably many of us are exhausted by the whole business, Bill Papastergiadis, South board member and SMFC for A-League bid chief, has been sprinting to the end of the process.

Last week began with an attempt to claim the 'south-east' as our natural territory, what I hope is more of a cheap PR move than a genuine belief that we actually have any popularity in those suburbs outside of extant and/or latent Hellas fans. Then came the 'revelation' that we have the support of what was it, a touch under 50 Melbourne clubs? Then a bit where Ange Postecoglou does his filial duty. 

And there was the big one, at least for those of us wondering who was going to pay for all of this should the bid be successful, with property developer Ross Pelligra revealed as the money-man that would add the necessary liquidity to make it all happen. What Pelligra's ultimate motivations are, and why he would spend a millions on a facility that's owned by the government, I haven't the foggiest.

In the meantime, those of us with slightly longer memories will wonder whatever happened to major sponsor Luvarc and/or Luisa Chen, who seemed attached to the bid in early publicity, but which have since disappeared.

And some will say, and have said, why haven't we heard of any of these initiatives before now? If one assumes that these late stage media interventions will make a difference, I suppose it could be said that keeping our powder dry might be worthwhile. For those unconvinced by that possibility, I guess we'll wait to see the outcome of all these efforts, and remain unconvinced one way or another.

Outside of us, the bid process has maintained high grade levels of farce, which need little elaboration - bids without stadiums, waiting for government handouts; bids without stadiums, vowing to build their own, along with one assumes government handouts to build supporting infrastructure; bids with stadiums, waiting for government handouts to make them better. And that's just in Melbourne!

Across several if not most of the remaining bids, there is no obvious signs that the public these bids will rely upon are in any way interested in what they have to offer. Now there are threats by some that if they don't get in now, they will never try again. You have a league under new management that knows it must expand or stagnate further, while also contending that expansion must not infringe upon the supporter bases of existing franchises, while only one of the remaining bidders exists outside the current licence holders.

And outside of what actually matters in the decision making process, burner accounts battle across social media. But if we hold on a for a couple more days, we'll finally be at peace...

Για την Ελλάδα, ρε γαμώτο! Or not! And Britain too, I think! I'm not sure

I'm starting this piece by way of one of my standard unnecessary preambles. Earlier this week I was at my day job, attending one of the daily stand-up meetings that management is using to tell us how great their latest project is. 

To help prove how important and interesting this new endeavour is, one member of management referred to a PowerPoint slide linking to positive news articles (I assume positive, because why else would management link to them otherwise), not caring that they were behind a Murdoch paywall, and probably not caring or perhaps even oblivious to the fact that a room half-full of humanities academics is probably the last group of people likely to be taken in by such obvious PR guff passing as journalism.

I begin with that pointless anecdote if only to ask the question of whether we as South fans could do with looking at the news we consume with a bit more caution and a detached critical eye, rather than interpreting even the slightest ambivalence about our A-League bid as a call to furious arms.

To wit, a situation was created by what was and is a rather straightforward article of little consequence about A-League expansion; a summary of what to the jaded and the unbiased alike are the obviously lesser hopes of the Canberra and South Melbourne A-League bids in securing one of the two expansion licences on offer. It was an article written by Michael Lynch, The Age's chief soccer reporter, and someone I've posted my occasional criticism of during the past eleven years on here, and before that, too. And if I'm being honest and fair, Lynch is someone whose forté is beat writing rather than dense or lyrical analytical pieces.

That's not a crime, but it does acknowledge a historic structural issue in the relationship between Australian soccer and the media. Australian soccer has been and remains an also-ran insofar as its treatment goes in the mainstream written press. It might not be a palatable fact, but it is true. And even as that relationship goes through peaks and troughs, each daily newspaper tends to end up with one and only decicated soccer writer, who is expected to cover all angles of every issue, even as the space allotted to them to do so is limited, and even as they are expected to be all things to all people - beat reporter, political analyst, on-field tactician, and quasi-historian.

These days you can add click-bait writer to those functions, a less than appealing idea for any news writer with a semblance of self-respect, but utterly necessary when newspaper revenues are in such steep decline.

(And incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I took out a digital subscription to The Age - yes there are noble sentiments in this somewhere about being part of the solution rather than the problem, but it's also for the chance to be smug and note that as a subscriber, the concept of the click-bait reader is marginally less applicable to me because of the $4.?? I allocate to this weekly expenditure.)

In the article, Lynch points out that Canberra and South are perceived - both in the public sphere, and within the behind-closed-doors decision making sphere - as being the obvious outsiders compared to the other four remaining bids. Lynch rightly asks the question about Canberra's previous poor history of soccer at a national level - both on and off the field - and the feedback he has received from current Canberra soccer followers that times have changed, especially with the nature of the city itself. Lynch compares Canberra's difficulties of being a regional centre (and thus having doubts about its ability to raise sufficient sponsorship, as well as getting a new stadium), with South's troubles of being perceived as an ethnic/old soccer throwback with limited broad appeal.

Now, Lynch is clearly not saying that he himself thinks South should be excluded from an expanded A-League because of 'ethnicity'; only that, rightly or wrongly, such perceptions exist, and that they will be a factor in the decision making process. While singling out ethnicity as a drawback factor for us, along with Canberra's tainted 1990s national league history, Lynch puts these issues into the perspective of representing:

... interesting arguments about the history, diversity and geography of the game in this country. 

These are arguments which Lynch doesn't expand upon on this article. Like I said, it's neither his speciality, nor do the constraints of time, space, and editorial line allow for something more effusive on what multiculturalism actually means in Australian society, and the way in which Jim Cairns' dream of a pluralist Australian multiculturalism persisted beyond his term in government most notably via deliberately and inadvertently insular ethnic soccer clubs. In short, history can be a launching pad, but it can also be an albatross, and if you want to read something with more expansive intellectual heft on these issues, read Joe Gorman's book rather than a quick semi-throwaway article designed as much to leverage your anger as your sense of reason.

Now Canberra fans seem to be able to handle this casual dismissal of their A-League chances better than South fans. Not having a race issue attached to that exclusion certainly makes things less emotive, but we should also note that as far as controlling their tempers online goes, South fans have been garbage at it since they first got access to the internet. I say that as someone who when they were 16 years old would use school computers to act like the prototypical uncouth online Hellas knob. Things have only gotten worse in the ensuing years, as the experience of exponentially increasing irrelevance combined with the faintest whiff of hope from FFA's Pandora's Box sends fully grown men into a collective apoplectic rage whenever someone considers South to not exactly be a prime candidate for A-League expansion.

And thus Lynch's Twitter feed went into (relative) overdrive with people wanting to hammer him and correct him. The response from Lynch to that, er, 'feedback' is made up of several tweets amalgamated by me.

So I cop the usual vitriol from the usual suspects for writing a piece about South Melbourne and Canberra's A League bid and why they are up against it for different reasons. Now the South fans claim I am racist for mentioning in the piece that they are a club formed by Melbourne Greek immigrant community. I point out the club's history, tradition and great success, and say that is both a strength and a weakness in the current FFA environment as they are battling to counter the prejudice they are a ''Greek'' club. Both are statements of fact, both are material parts of any discussion of South's candidacy. South have strong points to their bid - the fact they exist and have a lease on a ground already being one - which I also pointed out. But it seems to me that their own fans want to discount their own heritage. Do they?

Hardly ironically, Lynch's article predicted such blowback:

It is not dissimilar to the arguments that South fans – often the most vociferous, if at times intemperate – make on social media when the plausibility of their bid is questioned.

But somehow being accused of being a racist by the very same people he described as borderline nutbags surprises him. Irony dies in the deep dark internet sea. It's not like he's the first journalist either in recent times to cop that kind of abuse merely for reporting what he hears that the public is not privy to. Recently hired Sydney Morning Herald soccer writer Vince Rugari has also copped his share of social media hate from some South fans for making similar observations about South's outsider status, with those South fans being unable to grasp the idea of confidential sources, much as the same people will willingly accept obtuse answers and impossible to verify information from South Melbourne board members.

No surprises though about who one of the ringleaders of the anti-Lynch lynch-mob was, a fact one can surmise by several "tweet not available" notices (because I'm blocked by him), but disappointing if not surprising that several other South fans chose to follow that particular lemming over the edge of the cliff. To be fair though, there was a higher than usual dose of bewilderment from South fans as well, wondering what all the fuss about Lynch's article was.

Of course our lovable larrikin soon-to-be former prez Leo Athanasakis also jumped in with his own 'facts'.

Fact:
SMFC formed in 1959
Merger of 3 Clubs
South M United - British Club dating back to 1882 playing in Albert Park.
Hellenic & Yarra formed by Greek migrants.
Our British heritage seems conveniently ignored or not even acknowledged as fact by people who should know better.

— Leo Athanasakis (@LAthanasakis) December 1, 2018

Facts which are anything but of course, and which are easily debunked only if you actually know what you're talking about on these matters. Unfortunately such knowledge is limited to a mere handful of people, most of whom have nothing to do with Twitter or social media and even when they do, they are rightly reluctant to wrestle with metaphorical pigs.

[And while no doubt well intentioned, the other bloke who said it was a four-way merger including a Jewish club is also peddling half-truths at best - because let's be honest, the 1980s merger with what was left of Hakoah was little more than a takeover by South which probably mostly served to secure us a few more grounds in the Middle Park area. And I'd love to be corrected but it was my understanding that the Hamilton (named after either former South Melbourne United and founding South Melbourne Hellas committeemen Des or Bill Hamilton, or perhaps even both) award for club best and fairest was actually a supporters group initiative, not an official award from the club.]

For starters, the 1959 date - which South Melbourne FC uses as its foundation date - is the birth of the Hellas club, which was a merger of the struggling (and still very young) Greek-Australian Hellenic and Yarra Park clubs. The new entity they formed, Hellas, amalgamated with South Melbourne United, an Anglo-Celtic Australian club (what you might also term an Australian club, for lack of a better term, to describe a club founded by non-migrants), at some point in early 1960, ostensibly to get access to Middle Park, the home ground of South Melbourne United (and also Melbourne Hakoah).

To make the merger more palatable to the supporters of the small United club, the Greeks of Hellas throw a few bones United's way. They add 'South Melbourne' to the front of the Hellas name, inadvertently making the thing sound more poetic while also being unusual in being an ethnic club in early 1960s Melbourne with a ready-made and self-selected and unforced district name. They keep United's white jersey with a red vee. And they allow some committeemen from United to be on the new South Melbourne Hellas committee.

It's an arrangement which lasts a mere half decade or so. Soon enough non-Greek committeemen are a thing of the past, United's red vee is gone, and all pretence that this club represents anything in the South Melbourne area apart from the Greek migrants who live there is over. Since that time, in its glory days the club had mostly been content to gloss over that early history and the Anglo connection. This is not a judgement call - whether what happened is right or wrong is for someone else to mull over - but it is an acknowledgement of what actually happened.

Later, toward the end of the NSL era there were the beginnings of attempts to recognise that early history, though I always get the vibe that it was a minority of forward thinkers rather than staunch traditionalists responsible for those efforts. As the club found itself in the (now seemingly without end) rut of being simultaneously abandoned by the Greek-Australian community (its core supporter constituency) and alienated from its identity of being a big fish in a small pond (which had begun to attract its share of non-Greeks, but not quickly enough to form a critical mass at the critical moment), one of the flailing measures taken to recalibrate the club's identity saw some people engage in bumbling and not entirely intellectually honest attempts to leverage elements of the club's history (and parts of pre-South Melbourne Hellas history) that had been neglected (and sometimes derided) for decades.

This led to some people trying to link South Melbourne Hellas directly to the very earliest soccer clubs with the name South Melbourne, as part of an attempt to claim something that is not ours to claim. As I have noted in several places, at best South Melbourne Hellas can lay claim to being the most important club in the South Melbourne/Albert Park/Middle Park precinct; at a stretch it can perhaps lay claim to being the most notable current custodian of a local soccer culture going back to 1884.

But since we know of no formal connections between the 1884 South Melbourne club to the South Melbourne club which was almost formed to play after soccer was reformed in Melbourne in the early 1900s, and certainly no known connection to the 1920s/30s South Melbourne, can we really claim a legacy that fragmented and uncertain? Never mind also that the 1920s/30s South Melbourne was a totally different club to the Middle Park Schoolboys junior club which eventually became South Melbourne United in the mid 1930s (with United thus being more aptly classed as an Anglo-Celtic Australian club than as a British club).

These are, in the greater scheme of things, annoying and pedantic points of history, wielded here by me not to show how smart I am - because at any rate, most of the work in this area has been done by others - but rather as an illustration of how utterly stupid discussions of history are, especially when they are made by people who have no respect for something they claim they have respect for while also claiming that others have no respect for that same history. In other words, as much as I'm drawn to the facts of what happened pre-1959, these bits of trivia become less important in a situation like this than the reasons and manner in which they are deployed -  too often in a shallow way to score cheap political points, ironically mostly in an environment where most supporters of Australian soccer see history as neither burden nor blessing, if they think about it at all.

Not that any of that matters, of course.

Generic car engine sputtering into life noises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a little kid waiting for Santa, but much better

So, tomorrow's the big day. Or at least it's meant to be.

It's the day where FFA finally, probably, maybe announces who has won the coveted A-League expansion spots, and we South fans can finally get on with our lives when it's made official that the Team 11/Dandenong bid is FFA's preferred Melbourne bidder.

Then one or both of the political parties vying for election in November's state election can announce as policy the building of a stadium next to Dandenong railway station.

As for me, I'm mostly looking forward to this entire thing being over so there can be one less plausible reason or excuse for the club to be practicing social media radio silence.

It's a slightly perplexing thing though - the club has 10,000 Twitter followers, and 60,000 or so Facebook followers, and yet very few of them seem to care about the club's lack of announcements on signings, the coach, or anything to do with the club's day-to-day operations.

Almost as if those people didn't actually exist, at least not in the conventional sense, but that's another matter entirely.

The latest from the off-season procrastination corner

Judging by the deafening silence from official sources regarding almost all things South Melbourne, I have to say that everything must be going really well, and I have no interest in hearing otherwise. I've got my hands over my ears, I'm singing "lalalalalalalalala", and all I can see is you people's mouths going up and down, your tongues twirling and teeth shifting from side to side, and your hands gesturing wildly in some vain attempt to get my attention, I assume in a vain effort to tell me that, actually, we're all doomed.

Well, I'm not having it. Everything is going to be fine. Relax ρε, etc. And even if our 2019 season - our 60th anniversary season - is a bigger failure than 2018, well, so what? As the middle-aged Clarendon Corner kids like to say, "we had a good run", and isn't that true?

I can see already that what's left of the regular South of the Border audience might be a bit suss about this new-found positivity, and I sympathise. But maybe I should try being big-hearted and open-minded about things, and just let the universe do as it pleases. To that end, rather than scoffing at every transfer rumour, I'm going to choose life and believe everything posted on soccer-forum and at least half of what gets posted on the current iteration of the South forum, especially the stuff that contradicts the other stuff. I could be cautious, but since when that has that got me anywhere?

Months ago we had a big info session about our A-League bid, one of whose elements included the promise and/or threat that there would be more information released to the general public, and yet here we are months later, with almost no new information about the bid. Some of that delay has to be put down to a rare case of South's board exercising some proper restraint, what with us being in danger of relegation for a good chunk of that part of the year; but even after that pitfall was avoided we have still heard diddly squat, other than to note that we had indeed submitted our bid.

Not that of any of this matters anyway, but assuming that the whole expansion process isn't effectively delayed for another year because of the changes in the FFA Congress and the A-League licence holders getting their dirty mitts on the mechanics of expansion, do we - or rather our anonymous financial partners - even have the $15 million now rumoured to be the asking price for a licence fee? And who are these mystery bottomless pits of money? Is it the Chinese, who will eventually be forced to bow out by the Communist Party? is it Harry Stamoulis, formerly of the Tasmanian A-League bid, former Victory shareholder, and former possible maybe South fan? Anyway, all the leading journalist boffins have said that we're not anywhere near the frontrunners for one of the two available licences, so what does it matter, except now we have other anonymous self-declared insiders blathering away on social media that we're actually in a good spot, and it is other groups which have failed to impress, and you can apparently take to the bank.

Speaking of money, I look at the absurd wages and sign-on fee figures being bandied about for the NPL next year, and I just have to laugh, before remembering that we have to believe that all of it is true. Like Altona Magic offering $40k a sign on fee and $1.5k a week for the nonce formerly known as the People's Champ, and I call him nonce for obvious reasons (boo hiss etc) but what if he is going to get that money? Who's the fool then? Certainly not him unless he fails to declare it on his taxes and the tax man comes calling, but how likely is that to happen anyway? Victorian semi-professional soccer players are all very diligent in declaring their earnings from football, especially the stuff that they get in brown paper bags out in the carpark every second Thursday after training.

And look, if clubs are dumb enough to hand out that kind of cash, then who's fault is it if players take it? Players are only human after all. But when most places have two men and a dog following them, are they even actually clubs any more? Because let's be honest, the vast majority of the time it's not clubs funding the players wage arms race, it's money-men and the occasional money-woman, for purposes that are best known to them and their accountants. Now every level-headed person knows that soccer is a bad investment, and our local leagues are an especially pertinent example of that. And yet we here are, with wages and the like still escalating, even as people still cry "but the prize money for winning the championship is stuff-all!", as if the people chucking in the money don't know this, or that even most successful FFA Cup runs are largely a bust.

But like I said, here we are, where tens of thousands are squandered each week by clubs in order to win games played in front of nobody. Now if there were crowds and media attention and sponsors to be impressed, I'd understand, but there aren't, and because I don't understand and because I have no money, I probably never will understand. That's OK, understanding is overrated anyway. I've tried ignorance, half-ignorance, half-knowing, and with full-knowing being out of the question, I've come to understand that as far as these matters go, ignorance is best.

Back to us for a moment though. Last week or thereabouts the whole South world was abuzz with the news that Johnny A hadn't quite said yes but also hadn't quite said no to us, and therefore we had people saying it was a lock and/or imminent that he would be our next coach as soon as Bentleigh's FFA Cup run was over. Therefore because of the certain fact that Johnny A was going to be our coach, certain folk had to start doing the mental gymnastics needed to accommodate this return of a newly re-minted favourite son because of the, er, unpleasantness, which had come to pass us lo this past decade. For the sake of being able to get a coach with some pedigree of success and good football - and more importantly

And then whether because we couldn't stump up the necessary money or because he's some twisted genius, Johnny A signed up with Bentleigh for another season, leaving us with our pants around our ankles. But while we don't have a coach as other clubs start making signings and begin thinking about pre-season, and we have no idea if Con Tangalakis hasn't been insulted enough by our bypassing him for this long after he saved us from relegation, we at least get to boo Johnny A again assuming we have a club next year.

If you believe what's been said around the traps, we're not going to have any players left anyway, that we'll be starting from an even worse position than our return to soccer in 2005 after our long lay off, and that even long-serving players are considering their options and shopping themselves around. Now half the rumours around that include the notion that we owe players two months wages, the other half being rumours that we only owe them four or five weeks wages - which if true is still bizarre and horrific considering how rarely we had to pay for win bonuses in 2018 - and further to that, that we're being taken to the PFA, and FIFA, and the United Federation of Planets. But who cares if some of these players are leaving, because according to dark corners of the internet, some of them tried to get us relegated anyway.

So like I said, it's going well. At least I have other things to distract me now.

Safe - South Melbourne 0 Port Melbourne 1

Having looked for it in a few places since I first read it several years ago and come up empty, the following anecdote is possibly something I've made up. When the late Les Murray  published his memoir By the Balls, he joked that he wanted to use the title The Great Poison instead, alluding to the hold that soccer has on its most dedicated supporters. And whether my recollection is true or not, the trope of football fans joking about how their support of their team is like an illness is a well-worn one anyway.

Usually we laugh when we talk about such things. In the first place, it's because it's just an absurd thing to say. In the second place, it's because when we say such things we seek to establish a sort of self-valourising and self-justifying aspect to it; we add a moral dimension to our support of the game and our particular club, clothing ourselves in the idea that we are making a noble sacrifice, both misunderstood and not understood by those poor souls who exist outside that cultural milieu. The more dour the experience, the worse the results, the more obscure and downtrodden the club, the more football fandom karma we accrue if not quite the benefit in the next life, then at least the ability to be smug in this one. What would those other people know about loyalty, dedication, and good old fashioned sticktoitiveness?

But there is of course the other side of this fable: that the unconditional attachment to this kind of cause can be very unhealthy. Thus I put it to you, dear reader, that South Melbourne Hellas' 2018 season consisted of little to no nobility, honour, valour or whatever other lofty epithet you want to attach to it. Indeed, it probably actually made people sick. Proximity to the abomination that was this season made just about everyone who came into contact with it much worse off mentally, socially, and in some cases maybe even physically.

Things were bad enough as they were leading into the game, and worse when we saw Sunday's squad weakened by the absence of Luke Adams with injury, Then when Tim Mala got himself sent off a minute and a half into the game with one of the dumbest challenges you'll ever see, all thoughts turned towards waiting to see how much worse it could get, which didn't take long: youth team debutant Ben Djiba, thrust into the left-back position as a starter, gave Sam Smith - one of Port Melbourne's many ex-South players taking the field that day - the perfect chance to give Port the lead and thrust them towards the finals, and send us toward relegation.

At that moment I just wanted to leave, or throw up. I've had nervous spells and felt dizzy at football matches, I walked out (as far as the social club) once, I've had my arms go numb, but the only other time I ever wanted to spew was round one, 2010 in the AFL, when Collingwood dodged a bullet by beating the Demons by a point when some Melbourne plonker dropped a mark with about two seconds left. Thankfully for the patrons in the top deck of the Great Southern Stand that day, I was able to collect myself and not chunder across the row in front of me.

What made things much, much worse on Sunday was that all things considered, we actually started playing well. Sure we were shaky or less than competent across different areas, but we weren't nearly as bad as we had been at times in 2018. One felt that Port were the more likely to score next, but it was not the fait accompli that the previous two weeks had been. At times we even outplayed Port, though you knew the goal was never going to come, and thus we had to do that thing where half our time was spent watching our phones for updates of other games. Hume had taken the lead at Pascoe Vale, but Kingston were doing well against Gully, and thus despite being down in our own game, things were looking up.

Apart from a couple of near miss free kicks, our great moment came late in the first half, when Pep Marafioti squared the ball to an unmarked Marcus Schroen on the edge of th six yard box and right in front, only for Schroen to blast it over the bar. Realistically, we weren't going to save ourselves, and some atrocious refereeing didn't help, as the game threatened to flare up into several scuffles. The worst decision was none of the three officials seeing one of our players getting potted by a Port player behind play in the middle of the field. Not that any of that mattered. Kingston went up 3-0 late in their game, and for good measure Paco equalised late in their match. So, without having to do any heavy lifting of our own over the last four games, we survived thanks to the kindness of strangers - and that 3-2 win against Gully before things fell apart well and proper for the last month of the season.

As our survival was secured well before full time, there was time to ponder things half relevant. Like if we got into the A-League, how good would it be to have Clarendon Corner located in the few surviving spectator amenities of the 1926 Stand? It would fulfil so many of our requirements - in the best Clarendon Corner tradition it would be the worst spot in the ground to watch a game from; it would be perfect for making sure we were nowhere near the returning bandwagon; in a few decades there'd eventually there'd be just a couple of people left, leaving two lucky fans the chance to live out a real life Statler and Waldorf fantasy.

Some people broke out some chants, willing us to score to get Kingston into the finals as payment for rescuing us. Milos Lujic got benched, to his disgust. Everyone has the feeling that he's on his way out, probably to Oakleigh and Chris Taylor. We can talk about ignominious ends, but there almost no one came out of this year clean. You looked out onto the field, at the players who took part on the day and even those who weren't there, and wondered how many would be back next year. Brad Norton, probably. Leigh Minopoulos, if he feels his body is right, perhaps. Kristian Konstantinidis, if his head's screwed on right. Luke Adams if he wants to settle down in Australia permanatently. But the rest? Makeche, Howard, Foschini, Jawadi, Mala, Marshall, Minatel you'd all assume our likely to be gone.

Will we keep one or either of the Marafioti brothers? Pep did well enough I thought to earn another season; Giordano was meant to be the great white hope of the youth system, for whom so much was sacrificed for, but injury and insanity meant his season was a wash. Will the once implausible but now perhaps merely unlikely happen, and Nikola Roganovic stick around? We went through four goalkeepers this year - one injured, one discarded, one flew in and flew out, and the last came back in our hour of need but can he commit to something more substantial? What's the fate of the several youth players we tried once Sasa Kolman left? As promising as almost all of them looked at some point, did anyone of them do enough to warrant anything more than fringe bench spot next year? Next year, eh? What a luxury to be able to say that without a complete and overbearing sense of shame.

Those who still listen to 3XY say that they heard president Leo Athanasakis had re-appointed Con Tangalakis as our coach for 2019, but as usual with these things, I'll believe it when I see it. A strange coaching decision at the start of the season set all of this in motion, to the point where we were two bad results away from a relegation playoff, and our now on the verge of a player exodus the likes of which we haven't seen since the end of the NSL. Now maybe the sacking of Chris Taylor was necessary, maybe it wasn't - regardless one gets the feeling that things were coming to a head one way or another behind the scenes for reasons that probably have as much to do with interpersonal dynamics between Taylor and the board than any issues of competence.And even if his sacking was executed brilliantly from a Machiavellian, didn't see that coming point of view, clearly everything else to do with that decision was done so poorly, that one wonders if people actually thought this through properly.

At the end of the day and at the end of our season, there was relief, and time for a rum and coke. But there was also the feeling for me that had this season gone on any longer, then I would have had to follow in the footsteps of Julianne Moore's character in Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe, and remove myself to an igloo in the desert, where none of this mattered, or even existed.

But, please, South, don't drive into that chasm!
Now a lot of this next segment originally made its appearance on Twitter, so if you've already seen it there, you can skip to the bit.

As much as South Melbourne's car crash 2018 season was (rightly) the focus of many people's attention, let's not let it obscure Green Gully's remarkable decline. After round ten, where Gully had crunched us 3-0 at Lakeside, Gully sat in fourth spot with six wins, two draws and two losses. They were eleven points clear of us, and in a good position you'd think to make a finals run, and certainly not be considered a likely candidate for (provisional) relegation. Yet Gully picked up just one win and three draws in their final sixteen games. For a club with a stable income, no obvious external sponsor and supporter expectations to live up to, as well twenty years of alternately successful/competitive teams, it's quite an astonishing situation.

Gully also have some quality players - who many clubs will be circling in the event they lose the playoff game - played some decent football, and seldom got belted (especially in the way that did). One shouldn't write them off in the upcoming playoff, of course - but you have to wonder how they of all clubs ended up in this situation. The on again/off again affair with Arthur Papas hasn't helped; and for a coach touted by some as part of a young generation of up and coming Australian coaches, that should put a solid dent in what's left of his local reputation.

Part of the word on the street is that Papas shared at least one trait with fellow young full-time coach Sasa Kolman, in that his expectations of semi-professional players - especially the time they could reasonably be expected to give to their soccer careers - were wildly optimistic. I'm talking extra training sessions, before work morning sessions and the like. Now well may we say that for the money players in the NPL are getting, they should be doing more than what they do (especially since their ability to draw cards is negligible at best), but as long their chief source of income comes from a day job, that's not going to happen.

Alongside playing in a second tier cut up into a dozen pieces, we are all aware that the differing levels of professionalism between the A-League and the aforementioned second tiers is one of the most-significant barriers to Australian players making the step up to professional ranks. As we all know, there are people working on fixing at least one part of that issue, by virtue of getting a national second tier up and running, but one wonders whether it'll be worth it if the players are full professionals. But that's for the optimists to figure out.

In summary, this is another warning that in NPL Victoria you don't even have to completely sabotage your own season like we did to find yourself in trouble - just the slightest complacency in a tight season, and you're in the relegation playoff. And it's only going to get tougher next year with Altona Magic and Dandenong City getting promoted. For the moment just be grateful that were at least three teams worse than us in 2018, remarkable as that might be..

Off-season winding down mode, pending...
Usually when the senior men's team season ends, South of the Border goes into our half-arsed off-season mode. In recent times that's meant at least a few more weeks of blog action, but since this will be the first time since 2012 that the men won't be involved in any post-season antics, we find ourselves in the slightly anomalous situation insofar as the blog is concerned. That's because even though our men have greatly disappointed all of us, the senior women's teams are still very much alive and kicking, and looking to add several pieces of silverware to their collection.

This week they're aware to Bulleen on Saturday afternoon, hoping to clinch what I still anachronistically call the minor premiership, and after that they will be embarking on a finals campaign which will hopefully see them make an appearance at AAMI Park on grand final day. It'd be great to see a few more people at their games, because they are worth watching, and lopsided as the NPLW can be, at the business end of the season things get a lot more competitive.

Now that's all well and good for those who have an interest in our women's teams, but I get that's not a sentiment shared by everyone at South Melbourne. As noted ad nauseum recently (OK, twice), I'm a bit busy with work and stuff at the moment, and I don't expect that to let up until early November. Nevertheless, along with the women's stuff, there'll eventually be the usual off-season winding down of South of the Border. So that means the usual patchwork awards, book reviews, maybe some historical guff, and possibly drawing into the archives for draft pieces that maybe should see the light of day at some point.

There will also be some A-League bid news (not that any of that matters), and I assume there'll be an AGM at some point. So, there'll be enough to talk about: just gotta find the time to do it all.

Speaking of the A-League bid
The club has confirmed that it has "submitted its formal bid to join the Hyundai A-league in season 2019/20". Some have mocked the "60 years in the making reference", though I'm not sure why. If anything they should be congratulating the club on at least making the sensible decision to post the notice after we had avoided the relegation playoff, rather than putting it up beforehand.

Final thought
It's well before my end of year round round up, and it'll sound typically self-pitying as I write this, but I feel as if in a lot of ways I've let down the South of the Border readership this year with my writing efforts. There are some personal reasons for this - which I can hopefully let you all know about in due course - but mostly it comes down to me being utterly depressed and demotivated by the experience of watching and attending South Melbourne matches this year.

That goes for almost the whole experience - the performance of the men's team, the often self-serving and self-preservation antics of the board, the decline in quality of the social club (I'm leaving out manager Tegan, and Noula the cook, who did the best they could with the resources given to them), and the sometimes (often) embarrassing antics of the fans, myself included. The things that kept it all together? The fact that enough players gave enough of a stuff for just long enough to get us over the line, showing us that there was at least some residual pride left in the squad; the persistent camaraderie of the ramshackle operation that is Clarendon Corner, including some of the younger boys; lastly, the fact of what else are you going to do when there's a South game on?

Here's to the hope that this is a serious wake up call to the club that a half-arsed approach to running and supporting South Melbourne Hellas is going to end very badly. Here's to the hope that 2019 will provide us with a much better season on the field than the rollicking shambles that was 2018.