Sydney Olympic Off-Season – December

It’s that time of the year where not that much is going on. The club has already gone in early on their signings and re-signings and it appears that at this stage, the squad is pretty much settled for 2019:

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, Stephen Athanaseris Billy Patramanis, Mitch Stamatellis, Troy Danaskos, Harris Gaitatzis, Michael Gaitatzis.

Darcy Burgess has returned from his overseas trial and has re-joined the squad.

We will just wait and see whether anyone else is added, but at this stage that’s how the squad is looking.

The squad has all gotten together and have done a few sessions of pre-season work. They will break for the Christmas and New Year period and by mid-January, preparations for 2019 should be in full swing. By then, the start of the new season will be just around the corner and who knows, maybe Football NSW will have released the Draw for the 2019 season.

Of course, the other big issue which is pre-occupying the minds of a lot of Sydney Olympic Supporters. is this situation with Tempe Reserve.

It has been nearly 5 years since this was first announced by the Club and mentioned in media circles prominently, by the late Mike Cockerill.

In that time, there has been a change at Board level at Sydney Olympic and the Marrickville Council, which gave its backing and in-principle support to Sydney Olympic to redevelop parts of Tempe Reserve, no longer exists.

The newly amalgamated Inner West Council, which took a while to get its affairs in order and get going, finally decided that it would move forward with the tender process with the Club. Discussions resumed and they were on-going as of mid-2018.

Two weeks ago it was reported in The Greek Herald, that the Club had met with the Council for further consultations, any news from this meeting or decisions coming out of it, has been hard to come by, nobody is saying a lot.

Given Sydney Olympic’s track record in this type of thing, it is very easy to be pessimistic or just plain negative about it all. If not by the end of this year, definitely by early 2019, we should have some idea of what is going on.

Until then, Merry Christmas to everyone and see you next year.