Sydney Olympic Off-Season – November

A fair bit has happened since the last blog. Sydney Olympic has announced the re-signing of 16 players from the 2018 squad:

Paul Henderson, William Angel, Jason Madonis, Niko Tsattalios, Alejandro Sanchez, Radovan Pavicevic, Hagi Gligor, Jinya An, Thomas Whiteside, Nicola Kuleski, Riley Woodcock, Zach Mackenzie, Ezequiel Consoni, Jake de Marigny, Billy Patramanis and also Darcy Burgess.

But like his brother Max, it appears Darcy is off and is heading to Europe to try his luck, specifically with Spanish 3rd tier club, Unionistas of Salamanca. So, we will have to wait and see what comes of that.

 

Apart from those re-signings, the club also announced a few more signings for 2019, with some interesting names returning to the club.

Mitchell Stamatellis is back at Sydney Olympic after his 1 season sabbatical at Hakoah. A good player and a good character who can cover several positions, so he is a welcome addition to the squad for 2019.

Troy Danaskos, who last played for us in 2015 before having a crack at the a-league, is back via a couple of detours in Bonnyrigg and Marconi. He did not set the comp on fire at either of those 2 clubs, so it will be interesting to see what he dishes up for us in 2019.

Harris Gaitatzis, who chased some coin (and good on him) over at the un-named for the past 2 seasons is back. He seems to be a direct replacement for Max Burgess in the No. 10 role and he should have some good football left in him and no doubt, he likes the idea of having the chance to win some silverware at Sydney Olympic.

Michael Gaitatzis has also returned after scoring for fun in the NPL 3 competition last season. In his previous life at the club, he managed to score some big goals for Sydney Olympic. Who could forget the one night when we all froze our nuts off down in Gungahlin in the FFA Cup that year.

Although the club has re-signed Sanchez and Pavicevic, you never know what will happen as anybody from anywhere, can now swoop in and take whichever player they want, that is the nature of the sport these days. But if we manage to hold on to both of those forwards, it’s going to be interesting to see where Michael Gaitatzis fits in to Abbas Saad’s plans.

From what I understand, all the players and coaches caught up only a few days ago for a get together and will soon ease their way into pre-season over the next few weeks, before they break for the Christmas/New Year period.

On the Tempe Reserve re-development situation, we will continue to wait to see what happens on that front. Negotiations are apparently continuing and by the New Year we should know either way, whether it is going ahead or not.