South’s season continues with an away match against Green Gully on ANZAC day. A loss could see us sink as low as 13th on the table, but a win may see us move up as high as 7th. Once again we find ourselves facing what feels like a must win match.

Although South have not lost to Gully in our past 12 encounters South need to be weary as Gully is a team on the charge. After a poor start to the season Gully have now won 10 points from their past five games, having only lost to Heidelberg in that time. Add to those recent league results their 1-0 win against Keilor in the Cup (funny how that draw works) and it’s clear that Gully are in good form.

South on the other hand can’t exactly say the same. It’s now been two weeks since the Heidelberg game and we are yet to announce a replacement for Estaban Quintas, meaning interim coaches Leigh Minopoulos and Tyson Holmes will take charge of the team against Gully following their win against Eastern Lions in the Cup.

In that first game in charge Minopoulos allowed South to play a more possession style game with Mells pulling the strings in attacking midfield, a welcome sight for many fans, however the 3-0 win needs to be contextualised by Eastern Lion’s relative ability. The Lion’s defence was shocking against South, and although we dominated the game the poor opposition and a lucky goal awarded to Brennan (did it cross the line?) doesn’t mean much as we head to face Gully.

Gully on the other hand have far more convincing performances in the lead in to this game. Although they were ran over by Heidelberg in the second half they went toe to toe with them early in the game, and more recently against St Albans, Gully managed to snatch the win with an 82nd minute wordly from Josh Hope – despite playing with 10 men for the last half an hour.

Gully are coached by David Chick (previously the head coach of Hume), a more than competent manager at NPL level and have strong attacking options with Kasper Hallam (4 goals this season) and Aamir Abdallah (3 goals this season) in the line up. Josh Hope though remains a key player for Gully as well, now in his fourth season in the club and boasting A-League experience.

We’ll be hoping that Minopoulos brings continued to bring the traditional interim manager bounce in form, and there are green shoots after the Eastern display, however Gully are in good form and will be tough to beat. It’s worth noting too that following this game South will face Avondale, Bentleigh and Oakleigh over eight days. A win against Gully will be critical as wins for the period following it clearly won’t come easy. We don’t want to find ourselves 13th half way through the season.

Final thoughts

Insanely, our game against Gully is one of 6 NPL Victoria games schedules for Friday. There are no NPL Victoria games on Saturday or Sunday and only one scheduled for Monday. It seems like clubs expected a bump in attendances on ANZAC day but with so many teams thinking the same thing you can’t help but think this will backfire in a few ways. Firstly, it splits the general NPL Victoria viewers thin which may impact both attendances and online viewership. Secondly it spreads the volunteer and media personnel thin which must be a scheduling nightmare for the poor person organising commentary for the week. Thirdly, it looks like it’s going to rain, so good luck with that. Finally ANZAC day award rates are higher so as well as lower turnouts, clubs may need to manage higher costs. Anyway good luck to all involved.

Also, big props to Green Gully on their website. They manage to have pumped out Match Previews and Match Reviews every round so far this year and the content goes beyond listing who scored! Interestingly they have counters on these articles so we know that they each get about 100 views. Much more than I would have expected – but also indicates to me that there would be many more people reading the South website if it was more consistently pumping out content. In their previews as well they add the nice touch of asking people to eat at the bistro before the game, and advertising the fixtures of their 19s and 23s. All in all, makes me wonder if we should be doing more triple headers at Lakeside throughout the season.