Social Club Artefact Wednesday - Save Our South T-Shirt

This Friday marks one of the most significant moments in the club's history - as well as perhaps its lowest point - the 10th anniversary of the 'Save Our South' campaign.

A month after being eliminated in the finals of the last NSL season in heartbreaking fashion by Adelaide United, South wasn't just on the ropes, it was down for the count. Despite the windfall of the infamous World Club Championship money just four years previously, we had huge debts and no income stream on the horizon. South was placed in administration. Our players, their contracts declared null and void, all left.

We weren't involved in any competitions,  being blocked along with Melbourne Knights from joining the VPL in 2004 by certain insecure clubs, most infamously Whittlesea Stallions and Ernie Tapai's bloody fridge magnets. I guess the assumption was also at the time that, with the Melbourne licences for the new competition reduced from two to one, that we were a goner anyway.

A rally was organised to save the club, much like many VFL clubs had had to do over the preceding decades. Where thousands were expected to turn up, only a few hundred bothered to do so. I'm ashamed to say that I was one of those many thousands of South fans that did not turn up to that day. Whatever personal issues I may have had at the time, I suppose like many South fans I just assumed that someone else would rock up to save the club. In the end, that's what happened, but only just.

In several ways both tangible and intangible, the legacy of that period still follows us to this day. Tangibly in the sense of having to pay back the Toumbourou/Christopher money, with the attendant hysteria that came with it, or the Lakeside issue still not being resolved. Intangible in the sense that the club's sense of invincibility and self-importance was dealt an incredible blow, both to those who followed our club and those outside of it who reveled in our fall from grace.

But I'm not looking to dwell on that. What I want to emphasise is that we still have a club ten years on, when many thought it was doomed. And I would like to thank all those people, whether they are still with the club or not, who fought for the club on that day, and after that day, to keep it alive. You showed that we can't just take the club for granted, that it has to be fought for, and that duty belongs to all of us.

A disappointing debut. Must try harder 3/10

This post was originally published on the Park Life blog by Supermercado/Adam 1.0.

Welcome to Park Life. Inconsistently posted news, rumor, undue speculation and outright slander about events surrounding the four time Australian national champion South Melbourne Football Club. That's football in the world game sense of course. If you've come looking for wild Sydney Swans post-Premiership celebrations you'll go home empty handed. Face facts, they ditched you and moved north. We've flogged the name now. Cop it.

What we've missed posting in the last couple of years,

* South Melbourne plays in the NSL.
* The NSL is abolished.
* A new league is created.
* The new league declares that each city will have only team.
* Everyone realises that we're no chance of making it.
* The VPL refuses to admit South and the Melbourne Knights for the 2004 season because the Whittlesea Stallions would have been forced to reprint thousands of fridge magnets with fixtures on them.
* With no money coming in South go into administration and come ludicrously close to going out of business. Extinction is only avoided due to big donations and creditors accepting insultingly low payouts on what they were owed. Thanks for that.
* The Whittlesea Stallions were relegated and forced to merge with Fawkner to avoid dying in the arse. They were then invited to stick their fridge magnets fair up their arse.
* South finally admitted to the 2005 Victorian Premier League, along with the Knights.
* 13000+ show up to the first game of the new season against Heidelberg and everyone wonders why we didn't do this years ago
* 5000 show up to the next game and we realised why
* The world came to Bob Jane to punch on against Preston. Result = we lost, people knocked down a fence and the next two days were spent with frenzied media reports about the evil nature of football in this country.
* By the last home and away game of the season there were 600 people there.
* South were defeated by Heidelberg in the preliminary final.
* Australia qualified for the World Cup and suddenly football wasn't evil anymore and everyone loved the World Game.
* Another season rolled around and left us right at this spot.

This page has been created as a way of dissecting all the important things covered on the SMFCboard forum but without having to go through two hundred "OMG! ROFL! LOL!" posts to get to it. Thanks to Adam 2.0 for our logo. I think the picture of Albert Park looks a bit like a giant cock and balls but he assures me that's it's stylistically off the charts and worthy of any number of design awards so I'm sticking by it.

Stay tuned. There's at least a couple of months of this to be had before I lose it and give up. If you want to contribute to Park Life please contact me via the forum (username: Supermercado) and you'll be firing off lengthy slanderous diatribes against Neos Kosmos journalists before you know it.