The Wizard of Woy Woy is the indisputable GOAT

“…if we must choose between them, it is safer to be feared than loved.”

- Macchiavelli, The Prince (ch17, 1513)

With Australia’s Indian summer finally cooling off the finals of Australia’s premier men’s football competition, the (Hyundai) A-League, are imminent. As temperatures cool, Australian ‘Sokkah’ connoisseurs are gearing up for a finals series that, while thrilling, can easily make a team’s dominance over the 27 week season completely invalidated, creating a very A-League sense of excitement coupled with dread.

While most eyes (that can afford Foxtel) would have been drawn the weekend before last to the Sydney Derby or Tony Popovic’s Perth Glory stylishly clinching a well-deserved Premier’s Plate (otherwise known as the ‘You’ll be embarrassed if you f*ck up the Finals Trophy’), TRUE A-League fans will know the real event of the weekend came on the game before Perth’s win on Sunday, when in the 53rd minute at Marvel Stadium, a Central Coast Mariners legend stepped up to take a penalty against Kevin Muscat’s ever-belligerent Melbourne Victory.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the seismic momentousness of the slightly awkward penalty scored on Sunday afternoon, one needs to place it in the context of the league’s history.

The (Hyundai (and don’t you forget it)) A-League was created in 2005 out of the ashes of the old National Soccer League, which despite enthusiastic local support, was eventually sunk by low viewership and a disastrous broadcasting deal. This new competition was designed to appeal to broader markets than the traditional European migrant communities who were the passionate lifeblood of the NSL, with the hope a more resilient corporate culture would awake the sleeping giant and make football the nation’s biggest sport.

14 years later, the goals of the league haven’t entirely been achieved. Attendance isn’t fantastic, and the quality of the league, though better than it is stereotyped, is not fantastic. The central leadership of the FFA hasn’t guarded teams from glaring financial problems, and a fair few have gone under due to inherent and glaring unmarketability or Clive Palmer’s wrath.

Nonetheless, even with the past year or so being an annus horribilis for the FFA, there are two expansion teams coming within the next two seasons with an eye for more, and the league will survive at least in the near future. The FFA’s leadership, if problematic, has at least meant one thing: much higher quality players could come to Australia than ever before

In the young history of the marquee system, a number of incredible players have graced our shores, buoyed by the new era of money and enthusiasm for the round ball game. It is probably too early for the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT) argument to develop here, such as has occurred in the NBA between Michael Jordan and Lebron James.

One could say the best ever was Italian maestro Alessandro Del Piero. He was probably the most successful foreign player in terms of return on investment and marketing, scoring 24 goals in 48 games over two years as the highest paid player in the country’s history ever or since.

Other superstars of European football like Robbie Fowler, Luis Garcia, David Villa and William Gallas have all shown up to have a kickaround, and even some home-grown stars like Tim Cahill, Harry Kewell and John ‘the sound of Craig Foster’s voice cracking’ Aloisi have all put in admirable shifts of their own, though none really put together an A-League career with the consistency or longevity to mark them the GOAT.

Really, many of the league’s best ever players, like Perth’s Diego Castro, Sydney FC’s Miloš Ninković or Western Sydney’s Shinji Ono are blokes who never did all too much in Europe but inexplicably found their rhythm as athletes near the end of their careers while playing for 90 minutes in temperatures exceeding 30 degrees. They all have some claims on being the league’s best ever import, or maybe even best ever player.

But none of these pathetic jokers can truly hold a fucking candle to the footballing behemoth born on the 22nd of January 1986, a man only just returning from suspension for calling the referee who sent him off a ‘f*cking dog’, the man whose penalty brought a beautiful little bit of fight into what should’ve been a routine win for the Vuck on Sunday afternoon, the man who truly personified the last decade and a half of football in Australia, Matthew Blake Simon, the A-League’s greatest ever player.

Central Coast Mariners legend and human cinderblock Matt Simon does not fit the modern mould of a stellar footballer. He does not have it in him to play with the hawkish iciness of Keisuke Honda, nor does he possess anything resembling David Villa’s sharpshooter instinct, despite having played well over 200 A-League games as a striker. Somehow, none of this matters.

In fact, especially when compared to the surgical likes of Ninkovic or Castro, his first touch can at times appear profoundly amateur. Sure, he can win a header, but his holdup play as a striker often looks like a fight between a stork and a street bollard. Somehow, this is immaterial.

He has only ever scored an exceedingly modest 51 goals in his 235 game A-League career with CCM and Sydney FC, in which time he has totalled 46 yellow cards, a number worthy of intense police surveillance. His total card count is 48 when one includes times he was given marching orders (though on one of these occasions he was only retaliating after being spat on by Brisbane’s Avraam Papadopolous). But despite all of this, somehow he has been playing in the league for the better part of 12 years.

His rate of return is poor, his skills are subpar, and he is a disciplinary nightmare. But none of this matters, not for a second, because Matt Simon is f*cking brilliant.

The Wizard of Woy Woy is a footballer from a bygone era, an era when there was no alternative to the 4-4-2, centre forwards looked and played like bouncers from an Aberdeen strip club, and Tiki Taka was a nightclub in Ios rather than a game plan. He doesn’t do stepovers or feint with his shoulders. He runs directly at terrified centrebacks, elbows akimbo, ready for any eventuality.

His body is half-gazelle, half-cassowary. There seems, despite the modestly lean muscle mass on his 188cm frame, a sense of incredible hardness to his skin, as if his bones were made of ashphalt. Sometimes his elbows and shoulders appear to be jagged. In motion, he is more limb than man.

He commands attention and seizes respect wherever he goes because he is simply more eager, more mongrel and three shades more insane than his opposite number at any given moment. When he does score, he celebrates with a terrifying intensity, his eyes wild, his body shaking from joy and his hand splayed into a shaka.

No player in Australia or maybe even the world exudes the same intensity. Its as if he fears that each minute of football he plays may be his very last. He lunges at crosses, shots and shins with a blind indifference to his own safety and that of others, and fans the league over either hate him or adore him for his incredible devotion to the game. As the song goes:

[To the tune of La Bamba by Ritchie Valens]

Al-bino Messiah

Alllllbino Messiah

Albino Messiah, His name is Matt Simon, and he’s f*cking brilliant

It should be noted that though he is not at all polished, his contribution is often sorely underestimated. He helped to set up the fourth goal in Sydney FC’s historic 4-0 win against the Western Sydney Wanderers in 2016 (in front of 60-thousand odd people no less), and was an integral part of that Sydney team’s title winning side (In my incredibly biased opinion, the greatest A-League team of all time). I was a member for that year and watched him play dozens of times, and truly believe that Sydney would have lost a lot of their dominant edge without his contributions coming off the bench to close off games.

See: Matt Simon’s awkwardly passionate celebration while at Sydney

https://twitter.com/asothdotcom/status/977508786385575936

When Pep Guardiola suggested the goalkeeper should be the first attacker and the striker the first defender in his footballing system, he probably wasn’t thinking that striker would look like Matt Simon. Bizarrely though, Matty’s relentless, head-on sprinting at defenders perfectly captures this philosophy and often makes it impossible for opposing teams to play out from the back (though of course this is not true at the moment because the Mariners are so god damn awful in every other department of defending).

He plays for the most A-League team in the most A-League of ways, and for that he is utterly remarkable.

He is, empirically, the greatest A-league player of all time because he personifies what the A-League is: a bit scrappy, not particularly flashy, but supremely adorable and incredibly funny. We don’t have the league we would like, but the ambition of having a European style top tier of football in Australia is probably untenable for the moment. It doesn’t matter if its not the Premier League. Its ours, and it should be cherished, for the yearly blooper reels if nothing else.

Simon’s goal against the Victory in the end could not help the Mariners from avoiding their fate of being consigned to a second consecutive wooden spoon, tying them with their local rivals Newcastle on 3 each. However he has written yet another chapter in the legend of his career, slotting into a niche no one would ever have thought anyone could inhabit, and riding it for all its worth.

Skill, talent and poise are all well and good, but when all is said and done, guts win games, and at the top of the intestinal totem pole rests the six feet and two inches of greatness that is the Wizard of Woy Woy, the Thunder from Kincumber, the Balrog of Bensville, the Messiah of Umina, Matt Simon.

* this article was written before Matt’s glorious brace against the Wanderers on the 20th of April and thus tragically does not include accurate statistics, PULP asks for the mercy of our readers and the Wizard himself