The Fairy Tale Is Complete. Well, Almost.

South Melbourne refused to surrender. After 120 minutes, the Australia Cup final was heading to penalties. Image: South Melbourne FC.

We watched South Melbourne win the Australia Cup live on Saturday night.

Then we got up on Sunday morning and watched it again from the start of extra time.

We knew exactly what was going to happen.

We knew Melbourne Victory would score. We knew South Melbourne would equalise. We knew there would be penalties.

We even knew who would miss.

And we were still nervous.

How ridiculous is that?

There I was watching Paramount's coverage and commenting on the strange way the clock was counting extra time. Instead of continuing from 90 minutes it showed each period from zero to fifteen.

Ken looked at me and said that if I hadn't married him I wouldn't even have noticed.

He's probably right.

But that is what happens when you spend your life around football.

You notice everything.

And even when you know the result you still feel everything.

The tension on the sidelines. The desperation as the minutes tick away. The joy when South equalised. The nerves as the players stepped up for their penalties.

Would we have stayed up to watch two A-League clubs play each other yet again?

Would we have got up the next morning to watch extra time all over again?

Not a chance.

This match got under your skin.

It wasn't just about winning a trophy.

It was about everything that winning meant.

Penalties Are Making Me Grey

Goodness me.

For the second time in a month a penalty shootout involving Melbourne Victory has tested my nerves.

Last month it was personal.

Max's Northcote City side played Melbourne Victory's youth team in the VPL promotion playoff.

Northcote won on penalties.

They are going up to the NPL.

Promotion. The reward for a season's work.

Funny how that works in Victoria.

Now South Melbourne.

Max Mikkola equalised in the 117th minute.

Javier López saved Harrison Sawyer's penalty. Then he had to face it again because he had moved off his line.

And saved it again.

When Jason Davidson sent his penalty over the bar South Melbourne had done it.

And then there were the connections.

Harrison Sawyer is a former South Melbourne captain. He had his penalty saved. Twice.

Jason Davidson is the son of South Melbourne legend Alan Davidson. He missed the decisive penalty.

You could not write it.

At this rate I will be completely grey by Christmas.

But there is a connection between those two matches that goes well beyond my nerves.

Both clubs had something meaningful to play for.

Both had the chance to achieve something through results on the pitch.

That is what makes football so compelling.

The Tears

What I loved most was not the football.

It was the passion on the sidelines.

The interviews afterwards.

The tears.

The people who could barely find the words to explain what had just happened.

South Melbourne is a club built by generations of people who came to Australia and found a community through football.

Some have been there for decades.

Some are no longer here to see this moment.

Max Mikkola spoke after the match about the older supporters, the people remembered with black armbands and the club legends whose faces look down from the mural at Lakeside.

Imagine what last night meant to those families.

To the people who stood on the terraces when South Melbourne was winning national championships.

To those who watched the A-League begin without them.

To the volunteers who kept turning up.

To the supporters who never stopped believing.

You cannot manufacture that kind of emotion.

It has to be lived.

Last night it poured out of AAMI Park.

And I suspect the celebrations went well beyond South Melbourne.

Players at NPL clubs right across Australia would have felt a little of that victory belonged to them too.

Because South Melbourne had done what so many of their clubs aspire to do.

It had taken on one of the biggest clubs in the country and won.

For one night a club from outside the A-League stood at the very top of Australian football.

A Tasmanian on the Line

There was a Tasmanian out there too.

Claire Green was one of the assistant referees.

A national Cup final. Almost 30,000 people. The first Australia Cup match to use VAR.

And when it went to penalties she was on the goal line.

Watching Javier López's feet.

Every kick. Every save.

One of them had to be taken again.

Imagine the pressure of that job.

In a Cup final. In a shootout. With the whole stadium roaring.

Nobody handed her that appointment.

She earned it.

Well done Claire.

Tasmania was proud of you.

Fifty-Four Matches

South Melbourne's coach Sinisa Cohadzic said last night was their 54th match of the year.

Fifty-four.

An A-League club plays 26 matches in a regular season.

South Melbourne has played more than two A-League regular seasons in one year.

The Victorian competition. The Australian Championship. Oceania. The Australia Cup.

Travel. Training. Recovery. Another match. Another trip.

And still they kept going.

Early last year South Melbourne was fighting to avoid relegation in Victoria.

By December it had won the Australian Championship.

This year it reached the Oceania Professional League final and lifted the Australia Cup.

That is not luck.

It is not a fairy tale.

It is perseverance.

Cohadzic has his own story.

A qualified coach who struggled for years to get an opportunity.

He took over a club fighting relegation and has now led it to one of the greatest victories in its history.

He confirmed after the match that it was his last game in charge. He has been linked with a move to Avondale, although that remains unconfirmed.

Almost Thirty Thousand People

29,911.

The biggest crowd for any sporting event ever held at AAMI Park.

I am not going to pretend geography played no part.

Two Melbourne clubs only a few kilometres apart.

Of course it was easier for their supporters to attend.

If Perth Glory had been playing South Melbourne you could hardly expect thousands of Perth supporters to travel across the country.

Australia is enormous. Travel costs and distances matter.

We know that better than most in Tasmania.

But geography alone cannot explain what happened last night.

It cannot create generations of loyalty.

It cannot manufacture the tension on the sidelines.

It cannot produce the tears in those interviews.

And it cannot make someone in North Hobart get up early to watch a replay of a football match when she already knows the result.

That comes from something else.

A connection.

A sense of belonging.

A belief that what happens on the pitch really matters.

Nearly 30,000 people were there to share it.

Many more like me felt part of it from a long way away.

How Many Brick Walls?

Perhaps South Melbourne's victory means so much to me because I know something about the years of frustration behind it.

All those years involved with the Association of Australian Football Clubs (AAFC).

The meetings.

The submissions.

The discussions.

The painfully slow responses.

The changes of personnel at Football Australia, which so often meant starting the conversation all over again.

Explaining the same things to different people.

Trying to convince people that clubs outside the A-League had ambition, expertise and something worthwhile to contribute to Australian football.

There could never have been enough brick walls for me to bang my head against.

But we kept going.

And eventually the Australian Championship began.

Not everything we wanted. Not the end of the journey. But a beginning.

A recognition that ambitious clubs deserved something more.

And then I think about our own experience at South Hobart.

Two years of work pursuing a place in the proposed National Second Tier.

The meetings, the planning, the conversations and the determination to give Tasmania a place on the national stage.

We were seeking government funding, not Football Tasmania's money.

And then, on 19 March 2024, came Football Tasmania's public statement.

"We have been clear about our position that we are not supporting this bid."

Those words have stayed with me, some will say obviously because I keep writing about it.

Tony Pignata later explained that Football Tasmania did not oppose South Hobart's ambition but would not seek government funding on behalf of an individual club.

I understood the distinction he was making.

But I never accepted that supporting a club's ambition had to come at the expense of supporting the rest of Tasmanian football.

Why can we not do both?

I noticed Tony was at the match last night.

Lucky him.

What an occasion to witness.

I wonder what he took away from it.

Because here we are in Tasmania still having conversations about whether clubs should be encouraged to aspire to something beyond what they are currently permitted to do.

And inevitably comes the question.

What about the other clubs?

Well, what about them?

The opportunities should be there for every club prepared to do the work.

Put your hand up.

Go to the meetings.

Learn about the opportunities.

Understand the requirements.

Build the relationships.

Make the commitment.

If you want to be part of something, get involved.

Don't sit on the sidelines, decline to participate and then complain that you have been left out.

That is not exclusion.

Not every club has the same resources or ambitions. Nor should it have to.

There is nothing wrong with a club wanting to remain a strong community club concentrating on its local competition.

That is every bit as valuable to football.

But why should a club that wants to do more be held back because others don't?

Why should ambition be treated as a threat?

A Pivotal Moment or Same Old, Same Old?

I keep wondering whether we have just witnessed a pivotal moment in Australian football.

Or whether after the celebrations and the headlines it will be same old, same old.

South Melbourne has spent 21 years persevering.

Twenty-one years saying look at us.

We are still here.

We are not going away.

Last night it made the whole country look.

But will anything change?

Will those who fear change continue to stifle aspiration?

Will the financial arguments, some of them perfectly legitimate, once again become reasons to do nothing?

I am not suggesting South Melbourne should be handed an A-League licence on Monday morning.

That would simply replace one closed-door decision with another.

I want something much more important.

A real opportunity for clubs to earn their way forward.

South Melbourne has shown what perseverance can achieve.

Does Australian football have the courage to respond?