Monday 17 June 2019

Sydney Olympic 1-0 Hakoah Sydney City-East

We all rejoice in the experience and feeling of winning a match for the first time since we beat Marconi away, on May the 4th, 43 days ago for those who are counting. It wasn’t pretty, but the 3 points are what counts and hopefully we can mount some sort of a charge, in the final 7 rounds of the season.

The match, a home match for Sydney Olympic, had to be moved from Belmore Sports Ground after the downpour on Sunday Morning. Meaning we had to go to Lambert Park in Leichhardt on Sunday, a Lambert Park that now has a condemned grandstand, so even less people can actually go there these days.

I don’t think many people minded, as Lambert Park has always been a happy hunting ground for Sydney Olympic and in contrast, our home record at Belmore this season has pretty much been abysmal.

As you would expect from a match featuring 2 teams who are struggling and down on confidence, the first 5-10 minutes of the match didn’t begin with any great tempo or enthusiasm as both sides sussed each other out. Soon enough though, we got ourselves into the match and would from then on dominate proceedings.

Around 15 minutes into the match our quality showed as William Angel made a nice run down the right and then crossed it into the box, where Peter Kekeris made no mistake to finish from close range, to put us 1-0 up.

For the rest of the first-half we were in the ascendancy and had a couple of really good chances to extend our lead, but as has been the case this season, our finishing let us down.

The second-half was a bit more nervy and would be, so long as the score remained only at 1-0. Hakoah who are really struggling this season, didn’t really pose us too many problems defensively. Here and there they would mount an attack but we managed to snuff it out pretty quickly.

Our play was improving compared to recent weeks and we had yet, more chances during the second-half to put the game away for good, but again, the final product was just not there.

There was a massive sigh of relief at the full-time whistle, as we picked up a vital 3 points and finally got back into the winners circle.

That victory puts a significant gap between us and Hakoah in the Club Championship standings now and barring some sort of unmitigated disaster, we should do enough to avoid being relegated.

It was also only our 2nd clean sheet of the season, ironically, the only other one coming in our 1-0 victory over Hakoah earlier in the season. They must really be struggling.

Quickly on what I wrote last week about Tempe, nothing has been refuted by anyone at the club, you can draw your own conclusions from that. Added further intrigue, was the fact that the CEO in an interview he gave last week to NEOS KOSMOS, mentioned nothing of it, I don’t think he was asked, instead the interview focused on Sydney Olympic being interested or involved in some sort of phantom future National 2nd division.

In the Club Championship, the 18s and 20s were postponed for another day.

Our next match is a difficult one, down in Wollongong against the Wollongong Wolves, who have been scoring for fun all season and lead the competition by a good margin. Sunday June 23 at WIN Stadium in Wollongong. Kick-Off is at 3pm.

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