MAYBE it was the pre-match function that I attended or the fact that the last time I saw Melbourne play at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon they stuffed that team from up north 5-0, but I was feeling a tad nostalgic going into our match against Wellington.
It could also have had something to do with the fact that we would no longer be seeing Danny Allsopp in a Melbourne Victory shirt and thus his legion of boo-boys would be without a target for their complaints. I often wonder who their new target will be. Kemp? Brebner? Broxham? Thompson?
That feeling of nostalgia continued after four minutes when Carlos Hernandez curled that wonderful free kick around the wall and past a despairing Mark Paston. It made me think of the last time Hernandez came back from international duty and tore Adelaide apart. Unfortunately it wasn't to be a repeat performance much to my regret.
Ernie Merrick, who was also at that function that I attended, must have had better memories of the Brebner/Broxham combination in the middle of the park than I had ever had. For me, it brought back those repressed memories of two seasons ago when we played some of the most atrocious football that I have ever seen played by Melbourne.
Well maybe not quite as bad as those four home games in our first season where we failed to find the back of the net, but it was pretty bad.
There was also the more than odd occasion when a perfectly hit pass would bobble wildly on the less than perfect surface. That made me think of last season when had to endure poor surfaces time and time again. Those times it was due to white dressed ravers and wannabe classical music aficionados. This time it down to the plodding feet of that egg-shaped football code. Surely, you can remedy a surface in two days.
Speaking of that football code, it seemed as if many of the Wellington players may have been a little confused as which brand of football that they were actually playing with their tackling leaving a lot to be desired at times, not that the referee seemed to notice. But maybe that is just my navy blue recollection of events.
You may all accuse me of trying to skirt the current issues by reminiscing about the past, but at the moment any attempt to think about how we played against Phoenix has me curled up in a ball in the corner, rocking silently back and forth. So for the time being just let me have my memories.
