Sydney Olympic Off-Season Blog #4 – December

After a few years of not having one and as promised by the new board, Sydney Olympic has had its Annual General Meeting, which took place on November 30.

Several outcomes and assurances were given by the Board during the AGM, concerning several issues.

1) There was a thorough examination of the Club’s finances, which was undertaken by an accounting firm. It was discovered that the Club was left with a significant amount of debt by previous Boards. The current Board, has been working extremely hard to manage this situation.

2) The current Board assured us and is confident, that the Tempe-Redevelopment will be going ahead as planned and it will become the new base and home of Sydney Olympic, with talk that it will be ready by 2018. Now with all of these things and given how many “projects” and “new homes” we have been promised and have had fall through for the Club throughout the years, I personally will remain pessimistic about the whole thing until I see it has become a reality, with my own eyes. I’m sure many others feel the same way.

3) The Club is also pushing through with trying to get a synthetic surface installed for Peter Moore Field.

4) The Club is aware of the lack of communications, via the Website and via Facebook, Twitter etc. and will be taking steps to resolve this problem.

5) The Board has also made assurances that First Grade will not suffer or be neglected as a result of the many other issues the Club is currently dealing with, they also re-iterated that Sydney Olympic will be more than competitive for season 2017.

Continuing with the playing side of things, with some team news. There hasn’t been much more to add to the previous blogs in this regard. What is for certain though is Jacob Boutoubia, who was decent for us during season 2016, before he was seriously injured towards the back end of last season, has left the club to play on the Gold Coast.

So at this stage without being able to confirm it 100%, as more players may have come and gone over the last few weeks, this is roughly what our current squad looks like:

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

Michael Gaitatzis, Evan Patramanis

Looking at this list alone, we need a couple more defenders and at least 1 quality striker if we are to seriously challenge on multiple fronts next season.

Finally, we also have some pre-season hit-out news, we will be having a match this Sunday Night, December 11, at Arlington Oval in Dulwich Hill against Stanmore Hawks, Kick-Off is set for 7pm.