South Melbourne in exalted company at awards

MICHAEL LYNCH
January 24, 2010


Melbourne Victory may have claims to be Australia's top team in the early years of the new century, but it has still some way to go to match the historic achievements of one of the standout clubs of the old National Soccer League, South Melbourne.

The Albert Park-based club, which won the NSL title four times and competed on the highest international stage at the inaugural World Club championship a decade ago, has been named Oceania's top team by the International Football Federation of History and Statistics.

The federation is a FIFA-recognised body that collates data and awards points to teams from various parts of the world on their achievements, with a weighting built in for the degree of difficulty in the competition in which they take part.

These days, South plays in the Victorian Premier League, the elite state-level competition from which a number of A-League clubs harvest players. It's a far cry from when it was a power in the football land, but when the Crawford Report ushered in a new era in the Australian game, traditional clubs such as South, Melbourne Knights, Sydney United, Sydney Olympic, Wollongong Wolves, Marconi, Preston and Heidelberg, to name a few, were excluded from the top table as root-and-branch reform was effected at all levels of the sport.

Nonetheless, their achievements are very real. Although the NSL folded almost six years ago, many of the current Socceroo squad who have taken Australia to successive World Cups learned their game and developed their skills at those clubs or teams like them.

South officials will fly to London this week to be part of a ceremony that will mark the team-of-the-century awards to clubs from all of FIFA's confederations. They sit in exalted company, as the European winner was Real Madrid and the top South American team was former Uruguayan powerhouse Penarol.

In the Oceania section, South accrued 106.5 points, double that of nearest challenger Sydney City.

Along the way South won not only four NSL titles but seven Victorian state championships and two NSL Cups as well as the 1999 Oceania Confederation Club Championship.

South president Leo Athanasakis, who will travel to London for the presentation alongside former playing great Paul Trimboli, described South as an ''iconic club''.

''This award is an acknowledgement of our success, and reaffirms the high esteem it is held in the football world. It is truly amazing that South will be on same stage as Real Madrid and Penarol, two great clubs of world football,'' he said.

George Triantos, the club's head of marketing, events and corporate sales, said: ''This award represents the culmination of 50 years of hard work and the sacrifice made by past boards and volunteers to establish this club as a dominant force in Australian football in the past century.''

http://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/south-melbourne-in-exalted-company-at-awards-20100123-mrsa.html