MELBOURNE, Australia — One hundred-and-ten days after the start of the A-League Men‘s Melbourne derby between Melbourne City and Melbourne Victory was abandoned amid violence on one of Australian football’s darkest days, Wednesday’s much-delayed conclusion to the match gave it one of its most absurd.
A cursory glance at the record books in a few decades, when the exact circumstances have faded from memory, will show that City took out a 2-1 win, re-establishing a five-point buffer atop the table and dealing a blow to Victory’s late push to secure a playoff spot. But there’s so much more to the story.
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What the scoreline won’t show is that Aiden O’Neill’s second goal came a shade over 157,000 minutes after he’d scored the opener, not the 46 that the match clock would suggest. It won’t show that Bruce Kamau, who provided the assist for Nishan Velupilay’s 89th-minute goal to reduce the deficit to one, was on the books at OFI Crete when the game kicked off on Dec. 17 last year. It won’t disclose that this was bizarre a contest that was resumed, not forfeited, after a three-and-a-half-month hiatus, and not restarted with the scores tied at 0-0 and 90 minutes remaining but, instead, with City leading 1-0 in the 21st minute. But given how the A-Leagues got here, maybe an absurdist conclusion was fitting. At the very least, it was better than what had gone before.
Last December, the traditional Christmas clash between the two rivals made headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons: called off in disgrace after Victory fans stormed the field 20 minutes in, caused an estimated $AUD 150,000 worth of damage, and injured five people. Those five included match official Alex King and City goalkeeper Tom Glover, who was taken to a hospital with a concussion and needed stitches after having a metal bucket filled with sand hurled into his head.
