Public Image Ltd - Preston Lions 2 South Melbourne 0

Prior to kickoff on Friday night, an adolescent Preston supporter, who found himself by some clerical error in the part of BT Connor Reserve allocated to South Melbourne fans, complained as he made his way around to the area designated for Preston supporters, "why was I directed to go to the South end, do I look like a Turk?".

The National Soccer League is dead. Long live the National Soccer League. Long live dubious crowd numbers. Long live cigarette smoke. Long live ethnic bullshit. I'll leave out my usual take on flares, because at least unlike last year's Dockerty Cup match between the two sides, the flares lit on Friday night didn't end up being thrown at anyone. Call it progress of a sort, at least on this occasion.

Anyway, for all that Preston has managed to achieve during its unlikely resurrection - and it has been some feat to buck the trend suffered by pretty much every ethnic soccer club in this country - some habits die hard. If that "Ellas, Ellas, Turkiye" chant happened once or twice early on, and was then stopped by their marshals, I'd understand - it's just a bunch of hotheads getting carried away, but someone from their side took responsibility for it. But it was non-stop throughout the game, and everyone's just ignoring it because it was part of "a cracking atmosphere".

It's not about being offended (because it's a chant that's too stupid to be offended by), or being humourless (I was dead inside long before this), or being unable to handle banter (there's no cleverness here). It's acknowledging that this stuff did drag down what came before, and that people ignoring it, or not acknowledging that it's happening and burying it under the guise of "atmosphere", do a disservice to the game in the here and now, as did those who excused this stuff before.

It's also not about ignoring the past, or pretending that we're all friends now, because we aren't. Some people are willing to buy into that part of the current story, because they think there's some greater good to be achieved by that. Some people in the ground are choosing not to pretend, not to hide what's in their hearts. That's their prerogative, of course. But then maybe in the return fixture, some people from our side will choose not to pretend, and what should or could be pantomime rivalry, hostile, but within the bounds of good taste and decency, instead becomes... well, you know the history. It's in print, it's on video, and it's in folklore.

I don't really care much for either pretending we're all mates, or in getting carried away by thinking that when I attend a South Melbourne Hellas match in Australia, that I'm responsible for bringing with me the badly framed and badly taught history lessons I received at Greek school 30 years ago, excised of all complexity and nuance. I want to go to a game, have a laugh, and hopefully see my team win. But I get that that approach isn't enough for some people. 

It's the age old problem of big time soccer in this country, ethnic or otherwise, that people are drawn to these games because they can get close enough to the possibility of something going wrong, potentially spectacularly so. Now most don't necessarily want something to actually go wrong, but some clearly yearn for it to at least be a possibility - if something couldn't go wrong at a fixture like this, then the kayfabe spell is broken. If all that hate isn't actually real, then it becomes just another game, like all the other games.

But for the sake of a feel good story, and especially for the sake of the Australian Championship, and for some, sticking it up the A-League, the narrative will be "passionate fans, great crowd". And yes, the fans were passionate, and the crowd was good, but that 9,000 figure... I'm not the only one querying that one. And this is where the suspect crowd figures of the past come back to cast doubts on the reliability of today's numbers. 

BT Connor Reserve has a smallish stand (nowhere near the capacity of Lakeside's southern stand, let alone that of Knights Stadium's much larger one). It also has no terraces, and on Friday night a western wing almost completely out of bounds. And the ground has no history of getting a crowd that size during the heady days of the early 1990s summer NSL years. And yet we are expected to believe that, were all parts of the ground available to spectators, that this venue could accommodate up to 13,000 - just under what the old pre-athletics Lakeside could squish in.

Goodness knows that South has an appalling reputation for rubbery crowd figures, and that's long before some people made it a social media sport. So why begrudge other clubs from getting in on the act? Why assume the worst of others, just because you assume the worst of yourself? I suppose that's the overall point for me - that whatever hope I have that things could be better, and could actually get better for us, I ultimately have no belief that they will - and especially not if I don't feel like I can trust even a fundamental element of soccer story telling, like "for better or worse, this is how many people were actually there that day".

It'd be easy to accuse someone like me of actually wanting the game to be smaller, and even for South to be small. Small fish, small pond, small problems, small headaches. But that's not the case at all. I want the club to be successful on and off the field. I want more people to come watch our club, and to support it. And somehow I want it done with honesty, and without giving in to crass attempts at public relations. I guess this is just one of the many reasons why I'll never be close to anything resembling a place of responsibility at a club.

As for the game
The high press from the first three matches of the season is gone. Thus against Preston it was more of what we've come to know and love over these past five years or so, except without Javi Lopez and Harry Sawyer (or Ajak Riak) to make it somehow work. It continues to be the case that those who see us play only occasionally and almost exclusively during so-called "big matches" were, and continue to be, surprised by the ugliness of it. The two or three hundred regulars, well, they aren't surprised at all. 

Quite what was the point of resting all the players on Monday, we'll never know. The one player who probably should have been rested (Javi Lopez), wasn't. Now, barring some luck at the tribunal, or Javi recovering in time for Saturday's match, we're down to our third choice goalkeeper, and therefore on the bench, our fourth. Nahuel Bonada getting injured means we're down to one striker, that being the Danish guy who, while he isn't fit enough, is also apparently not worth putting on to try and rescue a game at 1-0 down, only at 2-0, even though two of his substitute appearances have yielded goals this year.

The field at BT Connor Reserve is very wide. We knew this from last year, when Max Mikkola's long throws weren't getting close to troubling the keeper. So what did we do on Friday? The same thing as last year, of course. To be fair, it's pretty much the same thing as every other game anyway. If it worked at all in last year's fixture, it's because of the same reason it works in any game - the opposition is ill-equipped to deal with anything coming in from the air, not just throws. That was certainly the case in last year's match, but not so much on Friday. 

I'm not sure what the alternative was, because given our general lack of composure on the ball, once we went down, all we could resort to was knocking it forward chaotically, thus creating a series of 50/50 balls to be won, which some basic mathematical principle says will work eventually, while at the same time acknowledging that it will hardly ever work, especially once you're down to ten men. It was not a great experience for player or fan.

Next game
Dandenong Thunder away on Saturday night. Please note that due to the very hot conditions forecast for Saturday, kickoff has been changed from 7:00pm to 8:15pm.

Vale George Karantonis
The club lost of one its staunchest supporters this week, with the death of George Karantonis. A reserves player in the 1960s, a volunteer of many years, and a long time presence in local Greek language media, especially in radio, George was a big personality with strong opinions on all things soccer, and especially all things South Melbourne Hellas. I'm not going to lie and say that I had much to do with George, because I wasn't a listener to his radio programs, nor did I really run in the same circles as him at South. But I always appreciated his forthrightness, especially his contributions at AGMs.

In particular, I'll never forget that AGM around 2008. We'd just had a second lousy season in a row, the club was going nowhere, and George gets up midway through the meeting and heads towards the exit of the old social club, and everyone's just quiet... like, fuck, if Karantoni's giving up, then the club really is fucked... only for him to say in his unforgettable voice of a million cigarettes, "I just go for a smoke". The tension in the room just disappeared. He will be missed.

The cost of masochism going up
Those of you who ended up paying to go to Friday's match may have noticed that the ticket price was $20, not the more usual $15. That seems to be your unofficial notice that the price cap for NPL Victoria matches has gone up. It almost makes a certain someone want to put in more effort into this blog, so that they can qualify for a media pass again. For others, it might dissuade them from going to away matches, especially at venues lacking certain amenities like adequate shelter and seating. Some people might decide to go the footy instead. On the other hand, it just made buying a South Melbourne membership that little bit more value for money. Only on a cost per game basis, of course, not in terms of entertainment. 

Ange and the Boss national release
After a successful festival run in the back half of 2024, the documentary is now going to have a short national run. Tickets and further details available via the website.

Final thought
How did learnings become a thing? Whatever happened to lessons? And I don't care that Shakespeare used "learnings", because none of the LinkedIn Lunatics using that word have read any Shakespeare since high school.

Things that are happening, or that have happened, or that will happen, or that will never happen

Just when you thought it was over...

Screenings of the documentary on Ferenc Puskas and his time in Australia just will not quit. Now the club itself is getting into the game by holding its own screening on December 4th, 7pm, at the Astor, with all the trimmings of a Q&A and special guests and such, rather like the film's Melbourne premiere in October. If I may say so, this is getting a bit weird, in ways that I can only really articulate in a separate post dedicated to the film as a whole. I may have started writing something about that, but don't hold your breath on waiting for that to come out, because you know how the blog is these days. Anyway, the film's pretty good, so go check it out if you haven't seen it already, unless you've already bought tickets to the Matildas match on the same night.

Forums - apparently people are still setting up new ones!
I was asked via email to promote this new Australian soccer forum which includes some South Melbourne Hellas content and commentary, and would apparently like more. It looks like an off-shoot of the 442/Inside Sport forums - not my cup of tea, but it may be yours, especially if you're looking for an alternative to the relative Fort Knox of smfcfans.com, and the dearth of South content on other social media like Twitter, Facebook (at least the places I visit), and Reddit. (and while it's still early days, I really don't anticipate Bluesky becoming a South Melbourne Hellas/NPL wonderland).

2025, here we come

A very large chunk of the 2024 senior squad has re-signed, notably minus Harry Sawyer (living the dream), Emile Peios (rumoured to be heading to Preston), Mario Barcia (rumoured to be heading to Port), and maybe one or two others I haven't got on top of. No mention of Andy Brennan's status for next season just yet. George Mells is the most notable new signing so far, joined by an outwardly underwhelming cohort of former junior players of one sort or another, which has a few people flummoxed, me included. No sign of a new striker just yet, though the rumour is we're bringing in an import whose size makes Harry Sawyer look like Gus Tsolakis. Make of that what you will. 

Back to Oceania?
Apologies to the person who sent this to me on Twitter messages a few weeks ago, to which I did not respond. Quite unlike me to do that, but anyway. The answer to whether South should consider joining a mooted Oceanian Professional League is "no". Occasional sojourns into things like the Singapore Cup had their uses, but even their limited windows of participation were incredibly taxing on the club from an organisational point of view, and upon the part time players that make up our squads.

People generally mean well when they bring up stuff like this - they see no future for the club plugging away in this comp as we have been doing for the past twenty years. But putting the question of logistics aside, the main issue is this: either South Melbourne is relevant playing in Australia, against Australian opposition, or it is not relevant at all.

Second division, yeah right
Just a very quick comment on the "champions league" model for the NSD being brought in next year, and the disappointment and concern that the NSD really seems just as far away as its ever been. 

Show me the money.

If the money was there, if it all stacked up, clubs, sponsors, governing bodies (some of them at least) would be falling over them to make this thing happen.

Puskas in Australia documentary screening this week

Hello everyone, as per the title, after seven long years, the Puskas in Australia documentary I've mentioned one or two times on here is finished, and will be screening this week at the Greek Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne.

Unfortunately, the producers couldn't raise the finances to use footage subject to copyright to get a commercial release for the film, but they have raised enough for film festival screening. So this might be your only chance to see it!

The film is screening in Sydney this week on the 17th (Palace Norton Street), and in Melbourne on the 20th (Astor Theatre) - tickets available through the links. The Sydney session has a Q+A session with Paul Trimboli and Simon Hill, and the Melbourne screening has a Q+A session with Trimmers and Mike Petersen.

Having some minor involvement with the production of this film (the real heavy lifters were kind enough to give me an associate producer credit), I'm obviously a biased about the film, but the last version I saw, I laughed, I cried, and I learned stuff - it's pretty good. One very lucky South fan I showed a near-finished version to a little while back loved it.

I'm just so relieved it's actually going to at least have a limited public screening. Fingers crossed it can take off from there.

You can watch the trailer here. 

Some thoughts on the Greek episode of Optus' Football Belongs series

Well, some people were certainly underwhelmed, confused - and perhaps even a little miffed - with the Greek episode of Optus Sport's Football Belongs series, which was released the other week. Since I was also underwhelmed, confused, and miffed, I feel it warrants a now rare non-match report spiel from me on South of the Border, if for no other reason than it's better than me posting vaguely that "it just wasn't very good" on Twitter.

For those unfamiliar with the concept: Optus Sport's Football Belongs series focuses on European migrant communities in Australia, and their connections to Australian soccer. The series is made up of short episodes (usually around five minutes), with each episode focusing on a different ethnic group. Originally intended to act as a promotional tie-in for Optus' coverage of the Euro 2020 tournament, with Euro 2020's postponement until 2021, half the episodes were released last year, and the second half are being released now. 

Apart from Optus seeking to dip its toe into a variety of Australian soccer history projects - there's a number of video stories they've done on players, as well as John Didulica's Australian soccer history podcast series - it's a project that's been made possible by recent changes to the local soccer cultural landscape. The most important of those changes has been the emergence of the FFA Cup which, even with the patronising tone of the broadcasters and organising body, began dismantling to a certain extent the ethnic boogeyman trope of Australian soccer.

Since then we've also had the dismantling and/or adjustment of the National Club Identity Policy, which means that now we can stop pretending that ethnic clubs aren't ethnic clubs - and that we may even want to celebrate the cultural variety and difference that exists within Australian soccer. Thus Football Belongs is also an attempt at remedying the specific kind of "ethnic club" bashing and erasure of history that Australian soccer took part in for the better part of the last two or three decades.

Within that context, you have the emergence of a series which seeks to celebrate the contribution of migrant European communities to Australian soccer. It's been an interesting diversion of a series, with many issues. There's the near total lack of women players interviewed, with most women interviewed being - at best - ancillary members of the soccer community; the lack of almost anyone from outside the specific ethnic groups covered discussing their place within the specific ethnic club structure they find themselves in; and (in general) the lack of people who had been involved with those ethnic soccer clubs, who ended up moving away from that particular scene for various reasons, without the requisite explanation as to why that happened.

There are also a lot of technical and philosophical obstacles to making a series like this, not least making an all-encompassing series which condenses into very small packets the often decades long experience of migrants to Australia and their soccer lives. Each ethnicity covered also provides its particular quirks and challenges. How do you avoid talking about politics, when the foundation of many of these clubs is overtly political? How do you make a club and culture based on self-evident minorities - when their mere existence upsets a good chunk of Australia that doesn't want ethnic minorities? How do you make a small, self-sufficient, even insular community, not come across as being so insular that they come across as unsympathetic? How do you approach a community whose younger generations have withered away entirely as a distinct Australian soccer ethnic group, or whose sense of self has changed so dramatically due to political developments that their former selves are no longer recognisable to their current selves? 

And with particular reference to this episode - how do you condense the experience of an Australian soccer ethnicity which is so large, so diverse, and spread across every state and dozens of clubs? These are questions which are hard to answer, especially in a five minute burst format. It's probably even outside the remit of the project to answer those questions with any sort of depth. And to a degree much of this is understandable - the series is meant to be a short, punchy, quietly celebratory look at communities which have nurtured soccer in Australia in difficult circumstances. 

I've found many of the episodes up until this point to be quite enjoyable, with a whole range of caveats (which you can hear about in the last segment of this episode of my history podcast from last year), but the Greek episode was not a good outing. This wasn't just noticed by the Greeks, but also by people from outside the Greek soccer community. 

But what the Greeks noticed first up (apart from Nick Giannopoulos; more on that later) was a film that ended up being neither very much about Greek-Australian soccer or about South Melbourne Hellas specifically, even as South featured more prominently than the other clubs featured. There was talk about Lonsdale Street, and Oakleigh's Greek precinct, and an erroneous statement by George Donikian about who was Australia's first minister for immigration. 

There was barely any mention of Sydney Olympic, apart from a very quick grab with Peter Katholos. Almost nothing about Heidelberg, apart from footage of them from our round one meeting earlier this year, There was nothing at all on Greek-Australian soccer from Tassie, Western Australia, Queensland, and most unforgivably, nothing about West Adelaide at all. I get that there are budget and time restrictions, and that there are a bajillion Greek backed clubs in Australia, and that the pandemic has made a mess of being able to travel especially for a Melbourne based production crew. But leaving out West Adelaide seems very wrong in this context.

There was some good content in there. There's Ange Postecoglou, no doubt the Greek community's most important soccer product, who makes the kind of comments on this topic you've heard him make before; there's Katholos and Con Boutsianis talking about how difficult it was playing for a Greek backed club, at least in terms of the expectations of the supporters. Unlike other episodes in this series however, there's no current supporters at all; even Football Australia chairman Chris Nikou, who makes an appearance in this film, makes the point that he is a former supporter of South Melbourne. And that's pretty much it. 

Oh, except for Nick Giannopoulos. Now I'm not a fan, but I get that people out there were, and still are, especially those generations that grew up with his comedy. And that's fine, because different strokes for different folks and all that. And I'm not here to eviscerate Giannopoulos and his brand of comedy, because that's been done by far more capable people. But here's the problem as far as Giannopoulos' appearance plays out in this episode. A major part of Giannopoulos' schtick is authenticity - his belief that in his comedy, he tells an authentic story to both the demographic he emerged from (second generation migrants, especially Greeks), as well as to those outside that demographic, in this case principally those in Anglo-Australia.

Authenticity is also an important angle for this series. The producers are striving to present real people, real clubs, and real supporters. In contrast to the focus grouped, marketing spin, corporate backed A-League, this series seeks to relate a much more organic Australian soccer story. Authenticity is a tricky thing though. When you play around in generalities, you can get away with a lot more than when you deal with specifics. When dealing in generalities, the broadness of (for example) a comic stereotype is easily recognised by everyone watching. It's easy, it's cheap, but it's also artistically safe. 

But when it comes to making specific claims, that's where things get trickier. If your specific claims are laden with errors, the members of the audience from outside your demographic will likely struggle to recognise them. That's not the case though for those members of the audience who are "insiders" to your claims of authenticity, and whose ability to connect to the authenticity of your cultural product is dependent on your being much more precise.

Giannopoulos starts off badly with the claim that the Greek word "passatembo" is the word for "pistachios". It is not. Passatembo (a derivative of the Italian passatempo, meaning "pastime" or "diversion") in Greek refers specifically to pumpkin seeds. Eyes were already rolling at Giannopoulos even being in the film, then he makes that error, and finishes it off with his "compensaysho" bit. One of the stylistic challenges for a series like Football Belongs is to avoid having your subject - in this case Australian ethnic soccer communities - come across as fossils. And yet here we are in this episode, with a fossil comedian front and centre, dredging up gags that weren't that funny when he made his name with them thirty-five years ago.

But away from whatever specific details Giannopoulos gets wrong, or how tired his shtick is, the most dumbfounding thing for many current South fans watching this episode is that he was even asked to appear at all in a documentary about Greek-Australian soccer. Social media was awash with people trying to remember the last time Giannopoulos was anywhere near a South game; not only that, people were trying to remember Giannopoulos even attending South matches during the NSL.

More evidence, if you needed it, that Giannopoulos has little to no interest in local soccer, is the almost complete absence of soccer references in his social media presence. He seemed to be a Victory fan about six years ago, but has barely posted about them since. That's about as much soccer content as you get out of him online. References to South Melbourne? None. References to the Essendon Football Club? Plenty, especially if you want to dig in to Giannopoulos being a Hird Truther.

To be fair, it's probably the case that the producers just didn't know any better. They made an error in judgement in thinking that Giannopoulos would have something worthwhile and relevant to say on the topic of Greek-Australians and soccer, and so they approached him to appear on this thing. Having made that mistake, the onus should then be on Giannopoulos to say "sorry fellas, I'm flattered that you've asked me to be in this film, but I have nothing to do with soccer in Australia, let alone any local Greek clubs, and haven't for a long time - best to find someone closer to the scene".

Instead, over a quarter of the very short running running time - which all up, is just four minutes - is taken up with Giannopoulos, with a good portion of that consisting of his "ethnic" minstrelsy. That's time that could've been used to talk with a lifelong volunteer or supporter of any Greek-Australian club, or a player (like Boutsi or Kat) who understood what it meant to play for a Greek backed club, or to feature something on Heidelberg or West Adelaide.

The whole thing felt like a fundamental misreading of Greek-Australians and soccer. The joke was even made on the South forum that the only way it could've been worse, was if George Calombaris made an appearance as well; and perhaps the only thing preventing that from happening is the fact that for the time being at least, Calombaris remains a social pariah. Unlike other episodes, there was little about specific about any clubs. The references were so dated, that the film inadvertently raised the question of whether we are living clubs and a living culture, or just a memory of one.