It's All Happening Here...

at the MCG, to quote the great Bill Lawry. An apt title on the day that ground was announced as the venue for cricket's 2015 World Cup Final and a week on from the memorable game between Liverpool and Melbourne Victory there.

Also apt because it really is all happening. Nearly all the VPL clubs have announced their lack of support for the FFV's proposed structure for the NPLV. It is, as they say in the classics, about to get real.

It may not look like it;s all been happening on the Melbourne Soccer blog front, but looks can be deceptive. I'm currently in the midst of my most intensive spell of research in the history of the local game ever. It began just over a month ago, when for three consecutive Sundays I hit the newspaper microfilm archives at the State Library of Victoria (SLV). That run came to a halt when Richmond played Melbourne Knights away on a Sunday, but in speaking matters historical with Pave Jusup he offered to let me go through his vast collection of old documents and newspapers.

For a while the SLV visits saw me more immersed in the soccer split of the late 1920's than the current dramas. After attending more than my usual quota of matches recently though, that soon passed as talk of the looming confrontation between the FFV and clubs intensified.

After sorting out through a huge bundle of copies of Soccer Action from the 1970's and 1980's, there is a lot to process, which has kept me from posting on the blog. I'm not a greedy man, so I wouldn't want any more than 10 cents for every time Tasmanian journalist Walter Pless has written the name Ken Morton since then. The 1970's was big on Cups, there was the Dockerty Cup, the Harry Armstrong Cup, the Ampol Cup, the Federation Cup, the Cumberland Cup, the Provisional League Cup, the District League Cup and the State League Cup. All we really get from the FFV today though is one fuck-up after another. That last gag will only really work if read out aloud.

I've found a few of my own items I'd forgotten about, and many of my notes from the SLV sessions are starting to come together. With Pave telling me there are more boxes to come, the blog posts may still remain infrequent for a while to come. If you are desperate for my random musings, check out my twitter account

 https://twitter.com/MarkBoric

Apart from my struggle to bring back the return of monkeys riding greyhounds in races(#monkeyjockeys) as a mainstream sport, most of the content is football related.