A season that ran to twenty-four matches came down to the last twelve minutes of the last one.
Melbourne Knights led 2-0 at Eltham North Reserve on Sunday afternoon with a promotion play-off place resting on the result, and the Redbacks finished the day level. Joshua Divin put the visitors in front in the sixty-third minute and Lewis Gilboy doubled the lead in the seventy-eighth. Yianni Panakos pulled one back in the eighty-first, and Marco Rojas, on from the bench, made it 2-2 in the ninety-first. Both Eltham goals arrived inside the closing ten minutes of a match the club could not afford to lose.
What that single point was worth is the whole story of the afternoon. Eltham finish sixth in VPL Men 1 on thirty-six points, level with FC Melbourne Srbija and ahead of them on goal difference at plus sixteen against plus two. Srbija won their own final fixture, so a defeat here would have left the Redbacks on thirty-five and handed sixth place to Srbija on the last day of the season. Every side has now played twenty-four and the table is final. Rojas scored in the ninety-first minute, and sixth did not move.
Sixth is the last of the four positions that contest the play-off for the third promotion slot into NPL Victoria. Third plays sixth, fourth plays fifth, and the two winners meet for the place. Eltham go to Melbourne Victory, third in the division, on 11 September.
It is worth being clear about who was held. Melbourne Knights finish first on forty-nine points as champions of VPL Men 1, and the reverse fixture back in Round 13 at Tompsett Stadium was a 4-0 defeat. Recovering from two goals down against that side, on the one afternoon the season was actually decided, is the fairest measure available of how far this group has come in a single year at this level.
The numbers underneath it hold up to inspection. Fifty-three goals scored is the second-highest tally in the division, behind only Melbourne Victory’s fifty-five, from a side that came up from VPL Men 2 last season and is playing its first campaign in VPL1. Ten wins, six draws and eight defeats, thirty-seven conceded, and a goal difference of plus sixteen that ended up being the exact reason the Redbacks are still playing in September. The attack has carried this team all year and it carried them again when there were twelve minutes left and nothing else was going to do.
Sunday also finished a run-in that had to deliver. Five goals against Manningham United at home, two away at Port Melbourne, and now a point taken from the champions, so the season closes unbeaten in three with the position defended rather than surrendered.
There is a precedent for the ninety-first minute too. Josh Millar equalised at exactly that point away to North Sunshine Eagles in Round 21 to rescue a game that had looked gone. Twice this season a Redbacks goal in the ninety-first minute has been worth a point the side badly needed, which says something about a group that keeps playing until the whistle rather than counting the clock down.
The women’s team were crowned VPL Women champions the day before, so the club heads into September with a title already secured and the men’s season very much alive.
Melbourne Victory away on 11 September, a huge game not to be missed.