Social club artefact Wednesday - Team of the Century team sheet

I found a small bunch of these during my social club clean out a few years back. Not being there on the team of the century night, I assume these were made available on all the tables. Of course, the team of the century concept has always been something that's baffled me slightly, not only because it was clearly influenced by both the AFL's centenary celebrations as well as the millenarianism that was in vogue at the time, but also because the club was barely 41 years old and well short of the century mark. Of course as with all such endeavours there was also controversy regarding the selections. George Donikian noted at the time (in an interview with the Four Diegos I believe; wherever the link to that transcript was, it's now gone) that Ulysses Kokkinos was left out due to character issues. But perhaps the most interesting decision was to have Michael Petkovic in as first choice goalkeeper, ahead of the very popular Peter Laumets. While Petkovic did have the runs on the board with two national championships, his tenure at South up until that time had been comparatively brief; then again, Oscar Crino's South stint was much shorter. Petkovic is also the only person in the team of the century to have begun his South career in the 1990s - his 1996 starting date coming in seven years after the other most recent inductees. More disturbing perhaps in hindsight, is that due to the circumstances we find ourselves in, there will probably never be another player that could be included in any future or revised team of the century affair.

Social club artefact Wednesday - Steve Blair caricature, by Jerry Davies

You know, while pondering what to add next for this series, I did a search on the blog and found just one reference to Steve Blair, a throwaway comment in an article about some old Neos Kosmos English Weekly articles I uploaded early last year. Well it was surely time to start rectifying that discrepancy by uploading this photo I took of a caricature of Blair from 1992 by an artist named Jerry Davies, of whom I know nothing. It led me to do a general search to see what Blair has been up in recent times, and found that he is now in player management. His website isn't very good, but the photo section is just incredible A lot of great photos from his lengthy South Melbourne career (sadly none that I could see from his stint as general manager), but also from his Socceroos and Victorian junior team stints, but perhaps rarest of all, photos from his early days playing soccer in the western suburbs with the old Albion Rovers. Best of all, a lot of the photos are in colour. You can check out the collection here.

The results of very novice hoarding

Bit of a slow time of year, isn't it? Not much going on for this blog to report on. So let's go back in time a bit, and relive some highs, lows and mundane parts of South history.

While doing some cleaning, I came across some old copies of Neos Kosmos English Weekly from 2001 and 2002. I don't know why I was collecting them, and I'd forgotten I'd even had them.

By contrast, I remembered that I had a half dozen copies of the AFL's Football Record. Goodness knows why. Biggest waste of money, but those were the days before you could get them all online.


You can rest assured that I'm no hoarder - it was just some stuff that had gone from drawer to shoe box to slightly less worn shoe box and so forth for about a decade or so. Then again, I have to share this place with four other people and their crap, so proper hoarding is not so much of an option.

There was other stuff, too, such as:

• Reform of Soccer Australia, which of course we all thought would never happen.
• Ian Knop and the state federations trying to justify the player levy increase to bail out Soccer Australia.
• Something about Ned Zelic wanting to play for Australia again.
• Soccer Australia frantically trying to get the National Soccer League finals onto television.

But none of that had any specific mentions of South. There were only four articles in that lot to do with South at all, and for the most part it's routine stuff. Thanks to my bro for scanning, cropping etc.

The first article is about one time South VPL player Evan Karavitis, when he was just a fresh faced youngster at the Victorian Institute of Sport, looking to make it big in the world of soccer. He got called up for one of the national underage teams, along with a bunch of other hopefuls including then South junior Stefan Piorkowski. Kristian Sarkies is there as well. Some bloke called Postecoglou was in charge of things. According to some basic research, the bloke couldn't coach his way out of box of corn flakes.

The second article is from when we 'miraculously' stormed into the finals of the 2001/02 season after being just awful for about half of it. Much harder these days to have these kind of occurrences when more than half the teams in our national competition qualify for the finals.

The third article is about Paul Trimboli looking to stay at South. Also has some bits about Steve Blair getting involved with the administrative side of the club.

The final article in this collection is about South's first home game of the 2002/03 season, and the difficulties Zeljko Susa had in getting a clearance from his club in Croatia, even though they no longer wanted him.

Trimboli To Stay At South - Neos Kosmos English Weekly