Thursday 10 November 2016

Sydney Olympic Off-Season Blog #3 – November

Well we are deep, smack bang in the middle of the off-season, with the First Grade squad only recently beginning pre-season training in the hope of a better campaign for Sydney Olympic in 2017.

First order of business is news on our coach. After 3 and a half seasons Grant Lee is no longer the coach of Sydney Olympic and from what I understand he will be fulfilling a different position for the Club.

His tenure as coach you’d have to say was a mixed bag. 2013 was a write-off when he arrived in difficult circumstances and he came in and steadied the ship. The next 2 seasons, both 2014 and 2015 we genuinely had good football teams, but unfortunately we were not capable of capitalising on the great opportunities and we came away empty-handed on the trophy front in both seasons. 2016 was a disaster which was not of his own doing, a late season surge was unfortunately not enough for us to seriously make a challenge.

Unfortunately and sadly, zero trophies is the main legacy during the last 3 and a half seasons.

Our new coach is an unknown quantity, Jaime Monroy Zamith, a Portuguese who allegedly has experience coaching in Barcelona’s youth programs. All Sydney Olympic Supporters are hoping he can deliver us to the top and of course we wish him well.

Onto the Sydney Olympic communications front, it has been virtually impossible to find out much about what is happening given there are no announcements anywhere, minimal Facebook activity, not much on Instagram and zero updates on the Club’s Twitter account for the past 4 months, (as I write this, they have made a Twitter post, a very significant one at that). Again I will say this needs to be rectified and soon.

As for news on the squad, to the best of my knowledge the following list of players is what I believe to be our current squad at this current moment. Obviously it is impossible to know for sure if it is 100% accurate. But here it goes:

Paul Henderson, Eoin Montford, Mitch Stamatellis, Jake de Marigny, Niko Tsattalios

Will Angel, Howard Fondyke, Yianni Spyrakis, Peter Makrillos, Jason Madonis, Hagi Gligor, Paul Katsetis, Nikita Andricopoulos

Jacob Boutoubia, Michael Gaitatzis, Evan Patramanis

From what I understand a few players from the 20s will be moving up. The club is also looking to sign 2 to 3 more players over the next bit of time, hearing a couple of Defenders and a Striker.

Onto the ground situation, according to everything I have been told, the Tempe Re-Development Project is the Club’s No.1 priority, as it should be. It is vital for the future of the Club and would be great if we can pull it off.

As for the present situation with Belmore, the Club is endeavouring to improve the relationship with the Canterbury Bulldogs and the Council which will see us be treated better and more fairly than we have in the past few years.

Finally on the AGM front, the new Board has followed through with its promise to sort through the clubs records and hold one this year.

The AGM will be on November 30 at 6:30pm at the Cyprus Club in Stanmore. All Life Members and Club Members are encouraged to be there.

Details here:
http://sydneyolympicfc.com.au/news/sofc-agm-notification/