News! Sweet, nourishing news!

Finally some solid sense of when local soccer might come back, as well as in what form. Hold on to that feeling for as long as you can though, because you don't know when it will be taken away from you by irresponsible Essendon players or people attending poorly thought out house parties.

So the date for resumption of NPL Victoria is the weekend of July 25/26th. According to this Joey Lynch article (which is well worth a read), the recent spike in corona virus infections and the associated re-implementation of some pandemic restrictions won't have any effect on the resumption of local soccer, but we'll see. 

The consensus resumption format *seems* to be that in the men's NPL competition there will be eight more rounds played to complete the home and away season, which with the five already completed rounds, will at least set up a situation where everyone has at least played each other once. After that there will be an eight team finals component, of who knows what format.

This proposed return to action has been complicated by the fact that Bentleigh Greens have withdrawn from the rest of the 2020 season, As long as they pay their fiscal dues for this year, they get to keep their spot, and it seems like there won't be any relegation anyway.

As to what happens to Bentleigh's first five results, one assumes they'll be annulled and each team granted a bye from now on, but until such time as Football Victoria clarifies the situation all I can d is speculate. No official word either on what happens to members of Bentleigh's squad now that there's no senior team for them to play for in 2020. The talk is that at least some will try their luck in the state leagues.

No word either from what I can on the status of and/or existence of a mid-season transfer window, or whether the Dockerty Cup will continue - though the persistence of the latter for 2020 does seem to be something that is being mentioned.

As for the NPL women, they're looking at a 14 match home and away season with a top four finals series. Unlike the men, the women's NPL had not yet started before the pandemic lockdown. South is still signing players up for that competition, and in some respects it all looks a bit more straightforward on that front, for the time being at least.

In terms of whether fans will be allowed to attend games, my hunch - and it really is only a hunch - is that it's not bloody likely, especially with the recent spike in corona virus cases. Quite how anyone will enforce a ban on spectators at games in open parks - such as those used by many women's teams, and of course many state league teams - is anyone's guess though.

Football Victoria plans to continue streaming some games, but that doesn't mean there's any guarantee that we'd be a team being covered. Still, I assume the club itself would endeavour to do whatever is possible to provide streams of games.

And there's also this...
Interesting news emerged over the weekend that along with a reformatted broadcast deal, the A-League will move to a predominantly winter season from next year, for at least the next couple of seasons. Whether this is a temporary move in order to deal with the effects of COVID-19 and the 2022 Qatar World Cup - which will be played in November-December - or a move that the A-League will be in for the long haul, remains to be seen.

I have my doubts about the sensibleness of this change in direction, but that's for those who are more engaged with the A-League - and those who are trying to get promotion and relegation up - to deal with. What hasn't been explained yet - not that I was expecting to have been sorted out so early in the piece - is how this will effect the leagues below the A-League.

From a Victorian perspective, one assumes that there will be little problem in terms of accommodating the match day use of AAMI Park between Victory, Heart City, Storm, and the Rebels. Where Victoria Patriots Western United end up is an ongoing problem, and while I don't think that any of the local A-League teams will end up at Lakeside at times during the winter, it will be interesting to see if any attempt is made by the government to accommodate them on the off-chance that AAMI Park is double-booked by another sporting event or a concert.

Of course there's also the issue of training venues which some local A-League teams are sorted for (City, United), and one which still isn't (Victory). Again, we will wait and see.

Up until now the tail-end of the summer-based A-League seasons have already extended into the start and/or end of the NPL Victoria (and before that, Victorian Premier League) and state league seasons. In the beginning, when the A-League had an August-September start, the competition would finish in early February. In more recent seasons, as the A-League has pushed back its season starting point, the competition has gone all the way into May. That is much like the National Soccer League had done its business during its summer seasons, with both competitions crossing well over into the start of grassroots soccer seasons across the country.

Where this becomes relevant to us is scheduling. Some states - I believe South Australia is one such case - does not allow local competitions to run against Adelaide United fixtures. That's easy enough to do when you have just one A-League team in your city, but also where there isn't a holdover collective of clubs who are not fans of your city's A-League team representatives. The multiple teams issue in particular is going to be very interesting to see play in Victoria in terms of scheduling A-League matches.

On any given week, there could be two A-League games in Melbourne, with limited premium time-slots available. Saturday afternoons are out, because that's already taken up by the vast majority of senior men's soccer teams. Sunday afternoons have a variety of junior and women's competitions in action, though most will be over by early afternoon in the event that our local A-League teams choose to go with a late Sunday afternoon kickoff.

Friday nights, apart from often being the AFL's marquee night (with most of those games being played in Melbourne), will also go up against the majority of NPL senior men's games. These Friday night senior men's games have come about sometimes from long habit, and some from recent attempts to avoid clashing with junior NPL Sunday fixtures.

Will the A-League seek to create rules in cities like Melbourne, which have multiple teams, preventing local soccer from clashing with local A-League fixtures? Or will most teams - including the increasing numbers of state league teams which have gone with Friday nights as their preferred home game timeslot - simply move out of the way when there's a clash? It will be interesting to see how the A-League goes about trying to make this work, considering that some of the accompanying rhetoric around the move to winter is about coming into line with/connecting with grassroots soccer and its participants.

(keep in mind that I don't buy the angle that there is any great hostility toward the A-League from most local soccer people - apart from the usual suspects - just indifference)

The switch to winter doesn't seem to bode well for the future of the perennially embattled Y-League. Will they persist with their too-short, budget summer season? Or will it also move to a full-length winter season winter, where you would then assume the A-League (senior) NPL reps would leave their respective comps? Or will the concept gets dumped entirely - with A-League youth teams (and I assume senior players who miss out on A-League selection) going on about their business in the NPL competitions?

There's also no word on what will happen to the W-League, and whether it will also move to winter. If the W-League moves to winter, it jeopardises its favourable alignment with the American NWSL. If the W-League does move to winter, it will probably see most capable W-League players move overseas to the more lucrative NWSL, as well as then sucking up even more players from local WNPL competitions to fill out the numbers.

All in all, a lot of things to ponder for those of us in the second (and third and fourth) tiers, even though public consideration of our relationship to this change seems to have been negligible at best, except as possible customers for a competition heading into waters left uncharted for 30 years.

All these things are baseless assertions (the cosmic ballet goes on)

So, another 'South has ambition' article has come out, and once again people have latched on to it with the usual blend of outrage and attention seeking. Mission accomplished, SMFC Social Media Team!

South looking at W-League and NYL admission if A-League ambitions thwarted. Lakeside its biggest asset it says pic.twitter.com/5bcHZdIVpd

— Matt Windley (@MattyHeraldSun) January 17, 2016

Now me, I'm at the stage where I see no point in getting excited one way or another about these kinds of articles unless there is something worth getting excited about. Having advanced to a higher plane of Australian soccer bitterness - somewhere above crass 'OMG Hellas is da best' Facebook banter, but below the level which would see me ignore all of this - right now I'm more interested in the 'South has ambition article' genre itself; how it came to be, why we get excited (mostly, but not always, in part because of over-exposure) and what we should perhaps focus on instead.

Over the past ten years or so, South Melbourne has attempted to court various writers and commentators in both the Greek press and the mainstream media. Of course we have always done this, as it is what any even half competent sporting organisation would do; but the difference now is that since the end of the NSL, South Melbourne is no longer as newsworthy as it once was, even as the coverage of soccer in Australia in the mainstream has generally improved (with the necessary caveat that while it has improved for some, it has deteriorated for many, and that the media landscape we live in now is of course not the same as that which existed 15 or 30 or 45 years ago).

So, if your bread and butter operation is no longer worth anyone's time or effort - in this case, winning soccer matches - how do you make yourself newsworthy? Well, you do it by playing what you consider is the best hand at your disposal - in this case threatening to join the national top-flight every few months, and getting someone sympathetic to that cause to do a write up on it. Now South has some natural advantages in this area, but also some disadvantages. The disadvantages are that, unlike some other clubs, it is harder for South to use its legacy of creating champion soccer players as opposed to buying them, because we don't have a development legacy of any note. More of a problem though is that as the most significant ethnic club in Australian soccer - or at least in the NSL - we have become the poster boys for everything the NSL stood for; and with the NSL not being the most attractive thing to be attached to, we struggle to avoid being blamed for everything that was wrong with soccer in the past, even if we were only responsible for approximately half of it.

The advantages of being South Melbourne are not without merit though. We can point to crowds that didn't taper off towards the end of the NSL, regardless of whatever fair and unfair rubbery figures allegations people like to make. We had and still tend to have a better reputation among the more open minded folks in the New Dawn, even those who are against bringing ethnic or former NSL teams into the top tier, and we've been putting in the hard yards on the public relations front for a lot longer and more effectively than most of our contemporaries. That doesn't necessarily mean that our effeorts have been very effective, but someone comparing the image we have projected of ourselves is probably going to be more sympathetic to the way we seem to want to do things than perhaps may be the case for other clubs. Those things being the case, we have the opportunity to exploit those advantageous circumstances; circumstances not necessarily open to other clubs in our situation.

Another aspect to the problem of how to make ourselves newsworthy is the issue of how to deal with two very different groups of media, in this case the mainstream English language media along with the local local Greek media. Over the past decade, the relationship with the local Greek press has largely been a bust, and not just because of the local Greek media's adherence to the old system of quid pro quo; rather, the problem is that the local Greek media industry is serving a demographic that is steadily losing numbers, as an increasing number of their readership ends up in the paper (in the death notices) rather than reading the paper.

More importantly, while the Greek-Australian demographic has been and will be an important part of who we are, in a sense most of those people have made up their minds about us. They either come to our games (actual supporters), refuse to come to our games (sell-outs and apostates), or are waiting for the 'right opportunity' to come to our games (the occasion needs to warrant the effort - so a grand final, or more realistically FFA Cup match). Still, as stagnant a market as it may outwardly appear to be, it is important to us from a historical point of view, and still a worthwhile source of sponsorships and connections - and there are elements of that demographic which themselves are transforming what it means to be a Greek in Melbourne.

On the other side of the equation, you have the attempts to work with and use the services of writers within the English language press. This is crucial for all sorts of reasons. Most of our supporters, regardless of their background, speak and read English as a first language, and associate with others who do the same. Getting our name and goals out there in the English language press is therefore not just a way of making a bit of noise to be noticed, but an acknowledgement of our present reality. Of course, anyone can look back at the match programmes and other attempts at engaging the mainstream and ask 'if it didn't work then, why should it work now?' - a fair point in an era where we are even more on the margins of Australian culture than we used to be. But for the time being, neither as a club nor as a spectator do you want articles and information about South Melbourne coming only from South Melbourne's media team; as a pleb South Melbourne supporter (unless you're one of those getting shouted coffees by board members), this is because you don't necessarily want the club being the sole source of information about the club; and as for the club itself, because they need to have evidence beyond the boundary of their own content creation machine to show to potential sponsors and other third parties that there is a broader interest in the club, even if it happens to include hostile interest.

So another important aspect of these articles is that while they clearly include our involvement, they are not written by us, but rather presented via the middleman of the journalist. South can, and has, written and published much of its own guff on the same issues, but that will only get the issue going so far in terms of being taken seriously. Going via a journo or esteemed media personality, while risky, is a necessary extra step towards convincing non-South Melbourne people that what you have to say is important. Like every other club at this level, South just doesn't have the cultural or commercial leverage to attract people consistently to its content - and that includes its matches, media and ideas - without outside help. So rather than work belligerently against the system, why not attempt to work if not with it, then at least within the parameters of the contemporary Australian soccer culture in a way that they can understand?

Of course once an article like this gets published, the club loses control of the message somewhat, as must happen in all cases on platforms where they can't simply press 'delete'. But it is this discussion which the club is looking for, despite the club's censorious tendencies on its own social media spaces. And these articles scarcely fail to bring in the contest of ideas that the club is looking for. Considering that for the vast majority of the past decade or so, we have been (along with every other ex-NSL club) considered worse than persona non grata when it comes to the topic of A-League expansion, any public discussion which includes something other than the total denial of our acceptability is seen by the club as something positive to latch onto.

This approach manages to upset people in a very predictable manner. Part of that I feel is because there is a perception from some South fans that the achievement of the articles being published is the goal in itself - and what else could it be, since by themselves these articles appear to achieve no tangible outcomes? What needs to be understood here is that the goal is to get people talking about South Melbourne in the comments section of a website or on social media. More comment equals more traffic; more attention means a better chance of attracting better and more diverse sponsorship, instead of having to dip back into the same old social connections, which rely more on the notions of goodwill, guilt and favours than on the idea that the club is worth sponsoring because the sponsor will be able to get a tangible increase in business from it. It's part of an overall media plan (yes, it does exist; this blog was even in that media strategy at least once a few years back, but I don't think that ever mattered in any material sense) which the club uses as part of its overall corporate strategy (vomits a little inside). There is also the hope that, whether after reading that article or by attrition over time, people previously hostile to South Melbourne will soften or change their stance. By itself that change in attitude may not make a great deal of difference, but it is part of a plan to reposition the club as something other than the bogeyman of Australian soccer.

Whatever the good intentions and long term planning involved in getting these articles out there though, it doesn't always turn out for the best. I've already noted the issue of over-exposure to these articles, but there are other bugbears that people have with them as well. First, these articles upset people from within the club, who would rather see more immediate and day to day concerns addressed as a matter of importance, like the lack of resolution to the lease and social club issue. Second, it upsets people from our club who see any attempt to curry favour with the mainstream as a betrayal of the club's values, however they may interpret those. Third, others become upset at the appearance of the club seemingly whoring itself out in desperation for any sort of mainstream attention.

And then there are those from outside the club. Knights fans have latched onto the not entirely implausible idea that South Melbourne is looking after South Melbourne first, and not the greater good - which then brings in the proponents of promotion/relegation and the second division, of which Knights fans are the loudest supporters. Some A-League fans have brought up the ethnic angle, while others have been more considerate and at least tried to consider the practicalities of South's A-League ambitions including, but not limited to, the club's ethnic background. And then you have the Hellas apostates, who are the most rabid when it comes to rubbishing the club, in their own desperation to prove their allegiance to the New Dawn.

My favourite trope though in this mess is an idea - one I've long considered in private, but which has only in recent times been expressed in public by others - that South Melbourne are preparing a sort of Trojan Horse attempt to get into the A-League. That idea by itself manages to upset people in two different ways (and has some form in more recent times in a different situation), and is inescapable when you're Greek and seen to be pulling a shifty. The first demographic that uses the Trojan Horse trope are those who think that if they let 'pleasant enough' South Melbourne into the A-League, that it will then only be a matter of time before all the really bad clubs come in as well - I leave it up to you to decide, dear reader, as to who they might mean. The second manner of making people upset in this area, is the idea - or rather perhaps the fear, so feel free to take your pick - that South will get into the top-flight, and rather than helping to break down barriers between old soccer and new football, that South will shut the door behind them, and bolt the door down for good measure. 3200 years on, and Odysseus still has a lot to answer for.

The thing here is that they pretty much all have valid points. The social club issue is important. It does often seem like the club is desperate for attention (I am particularly annoyed by this), Yes, it looks like the club is looking out for numero uno. Yes, this approach doesn't really help the idea of a second division or promotion and relegation. The sell-out Greeks are still concerned that their apostasy will come into sharper focus. There are also a billion good reasons why a club like South should not be let anywhere near the A-League, and just as many as to why they should, but all those things get lost in amid the competing agendas.

And for some of those not entirely in favour of this tactic - and I tend to count myself among those - there is the worry that apart from the perception of a lack of any tangible benefits or even progress for our ambitions, that rather than the discussion creating goodwill and positive momentum in the broader soccer community, that the tendency for these kinds of articles to attract the very worst of Australian soccer humanity en masse to these discussions actually does our cause a disservice. That goes for those folk on both sides of the 'South in the A-League' equation. For those opposed, their rabid hostility could be interpreted by casual onlookers as evidence of a market not just unready but unwilling to accept a club like ours. On the other hand, some of our supporters have little sense of shame, decorum or the ability to be anything other the worst kind of Hellas stereotype; the kind that thinks we not only deserve an A-League spot, but are owed one.

If we can change just one person's mind to be for us, is all
that effort worth it? Don't ask me, I'm just a girl.

Thus the discussions always end up at the level of the lowest common denominator, which is a feature of Internet discussions to be sure, but not necessarily something you want to be associated with. Still, before you can even envisage the return of South or any old club to a stage where they can be considered relevant on a consistent basis (as opposed to something you'd see on the Food Network), you have to get people to accept the idea as not only plausible, but something worth considering from an emotional standpoint. Sure, some people are more interested in the less abstract world of hypothetical spreadsheets and the intricacies of minimum stadium requirements, but the majority of people falling well short of the ideal of applying even rudimentary self-control to the random pulses of electricity occurring in their craniums, I guess you sometimes have to move the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.

Right at this moment what I want to hear more about is not what Knights or other non-South fans think about us (because they'll tell us anyway if they feel like it), but more on the very possible and/or tangible attempts by South Melbourne to weasel its way into the NYL and/or the W-League. No one really seems interested in that at all, despite it coming up both in these latest batch of articles, and in a Mike Cockerill article from last November, which we discussed in our November 2015 digest. My humble opinion is that NYL participation seems a far more likely occurrence at this stage for South (and other clubs) as opposed to getting into the A-League, especially if FFA are planning on creating a split division format in order to cut down on costs.

But back to the topic at hand. Yes, what a world it would be if we could somehow marry these two approaches; an appeal to the heart and to the head, but that's not where we are. (perhaps with the exception of the promotion/relegation crowd's appeal to the somewhat specious idea of 'that's what everyone else in the world does'; specious, because it refers to an idea that in some cases may only be continuing because for the time being it is too hard for those who want to discard those systems to do so. Who's to say that if they were starting a competition from scratch that they would do it the same way?). As distasteful as these efforts are to all right thinking South Melbourne Hellas supporting humans, it may be the case that they are a necessary evil - and as I've mentioned before, neither the right way or wrong way to go about these things, especially if neither co-operation nor belligerence is successful in the long run.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't still complain about them, and hope for a day that they are no longer seen to be required, but the same could go for the more belligerent approaches, too. Acknowledging that these articles and the relationships which see them created are not the only thing the club is doing to improve itself - regardless again, of the actual effectiveness of the bigger plan - will at least remind people that the articles are part of a longer game which has no guarantees either way. The conclusion, for now, is yet another South of the Border 'neither endorsement nor denouncement' piece. And I hope that upsets everyone in equal measure.

Hellas sells out to multiple enemies in the name of solvency

Well as most of you are aware, recently South's been making a tidy sum - at least we hope so - in hiring out the ground to both our real and imagined enemies, including such worthwhile organisations as the FFV (summer league and VPL finals), the Victory (their youth team) and the FFA (W-League). Now we've apparently gone one step further, by accepting moolah from our oldest and most shameless competitor, the AFL. Add to that there being an ad for financial services company Colonial First State also incorporating footage of rugby training and running up the terrace steps and you start wondering why didn't we make the most of this asset until so very recently? It does your head in.

 

Sneak peek reveals gridiron theme to new AFL promo

Chris de Kretser

February 17, 2009 12:00am


THE AFL's promotional ad this season includes an American football theme and is filmed in a soccer stadium.

Brisbane Lions strongman Jonathan Brown will run through a team of linebackers in full regalia, with refs wearing black and white stripes ready to call the shots. 

Bob Jane Stadium was taken over for the shoot yesterday by a convoy of trucks carrying props and film gear. 

Brown looked on as his stuntman stand-in bowled over a field of burly gridiron tacklers. 

In the morning, Hawthorn star Lance Franklin, St Kilda big man Justin Koschitzke, and North Melbourne's Daniel Wells also filmed segments. 

"It's a closed shoot," declared AFL brand manager Jane Ballantyne. 

She suggested yesterday's filming was only one part of the ad and that the league preferred to release it in its entirety to the media.