Sydney Olympic – March

I was meant to do monthly blogs starting from this year, not for any specific reason, it’s just the way I want to go about it now. With what’s going on right now in the World and with the suspension of the NSW NPL season until mid-April, I have brought it forward.

What can anyone say? All that optimism before a ball was even kicked, has turned into frustration and a mini nightmare. The first 3 matches have been tough viewing for us Sydney Olympic Supporters.

The first 3 rounds have been performances littered with errors, careless and poor play.

We were not at our best in our opening 2 matches, but even still, we threw away vital points against both Wollongong and APIA, conceding late and devastating goals to lose both matches. Matches that we should never have lost.

Against Marconi in our most recent match, it was a different story. It resembled something close to an Under 10’s match. The conditions didn’t help, but there was plenty of hacking from the opposition as is their style as well as, a lot of kick chase and long ball stuff which would be OK, if we had personnel to play that style. Very poor to say the least.

But let’s go back to January, this is what we knew to be our squad for 2020:

William Angel, Bai Antoniou, Darcy Burgess, Anthony Bouzanis, Fabio Ferreira, Hagi Gligor, Paul Henderson, Peter Kekeris, Shato Kohno, Nikola Kuleski, Charles Lokolingoy, Alexander Lopez, Zac Mackenzie, Jason Madonis, Giovanni Panuccio, Adam Parkhouse, Billy Patramanis, Dimi Petratos, Raul Beneit Romero, Sebastian Ryall, Alejandro Sanchez, Jack Stewart, Niko Tsattalios, Thomas Whiteside.

Very impressive some would say, which sparked much of the pre-season optimism and hype surrounding Sydney Olympic.
Within that list of players – Henderson announced his retirement. Gligor, Lokolingoy, Ryall, Patramanis, Kohno (who has since gone home) all have long-term injuries, Stewart and Lopez have gone overseas, Sanchez has gone home and Petratos asked for a release and was given one.

Bad luck has played its part, but all-in-all, it has been a disaster in terms of recruitment and squad management.

All that, means we are sitting bottom of the table after 3 rounds, Mt Druitt are below us on the table, but they have a game in hand.

Relegation as we all know has changed for this season and beyond, no longer will it be judged via the Club Championship, which was a combination of points from U18’s, U20’s and First Grade. It is back to the traditional format of First Grade results.

Also and it was news to me when told, not only would the team finishing 12th (last) be relegated, but the team finishing 11th (2nd last), will find itself in a Promotion/Relegation playoff, with the team that finishes 2nd in the NPL 2 competition. So, bare that in mind also.

In the same vain, in the last blog I spoke about the importance of getting off to a good start. Especially in this competition, which goes for only 22 rounds and knowing how hard it is to fall behind early and to then, have to chase results from the get go. Well, those warnings have not been heeded obviously.

Not sure what’s going on at training or within the squad and this is not about pointing the finger at anybody, everybody needs to get their heads out of their asses and wake up and do it quickly.

Maybe this break will do us some good, especially when it comes to getting some of our injured players back on deck.

Other than that, no one knows when the competition will resume, so we will all have to wait around to see what happens. But when and if it does resume, we need to make up for our bad start, be ready and hit the ground running.