Wellington
Olympic 2 Western Suburbs 1
Central
League
Wakefield
Park
Saturday
16th April 2016
Attendance
around 150
This
did present a problem – photography under lights, last time I tried
this I ended up with lots of shots where the ball looked like
Halley's Comet. I remembered Enzo from In the back of the net had
written about this issue in a blog and using some of these
ideas I tried a few different things. At first it was good but then
it was still light, once the night fell it was harder I tried a few
different settings and got a couple of OK shots, then tried something
else and ended up with completely white pictures! After trying a few
other things I couldn't remember the settings I'd used to get the OK
photos so gave up and just watched the game instead.
 |
| An OK photo (as long as I don't zoom in!) |
Wellington
Olympic are the team of the sizable Greek community in Wellington,
founded in 1953 as Apollon, they changed their name to Christian
Youth FC in 1959 before changing to Wellington Olympic in 1983. They
are coached these days by ex All White Stu Jacobs, who has coached
among others Miramar, Team Wellington, NZ U23's Central Coast
Mariners youth team and today's opponents, Western Suburbs. He also
runs his own academy – The Kaizen Football Academy.
Western
Suburbs are one of Wellington's oldest teams, founded as a staff team
of Porirua Mental Hospital and originally known as Mental Hospital
FC, becoming Western Suburbs in 1956, they then had a couple of name
changes (Porirua United, Porirua Viard-United) and then merged with
Mana United in 1992 and reverted to the Western Suburbs name. In the
1990's they were involved in setting up the Ole Academy (who are
based in the old Mental Hospital grounds where Western Suburbs were
founded). Their current coach is another ex All White, Declan Edge,
another who had his own academy and is now in charge of the Ole
Academy.
So
this game could be described as the battle of the academies (well
thats what I'm describing it as). When I was young there were no such
things as academies, coaches would use scouting networks and junior
rep programs to pick up what they thought were the best players and
coaching was pretty rudimentary. These days there seem to be
academies everywhere, this can be good and bad, I know someone
involved with a junior club who has told me the number of academies
around has definitely affected the parent volunteers as most of them
expect junior clubs to provide some sort of academy coaches. Also
player development is restricted if it is only with players your own
age, you need to be in the game with older players who will kick you
and look after you and teach you about the realities of the game.
 |
| Jimmy Haidakis (Olympic) keeping the ball away from Wests Will Walker |
Western
Suburbs \ Ole passed the ball around and played some nice football
but seemed to have forgotten the aim of the game was to score goals.
Several times they had players break in to the Olympic penalty area
and instead of shooting they passed the ball across the goal (and on
one occasion passed the ball backwards!) and it was telling that
their goal came from a penalty. They had some quality players
including NZU20 internationals Noah Billingsley and keeper James
McPeake (who is one of the nosiest keepers I've heard for a long
time). Olympic had a few players that had played in the youth league
and the difference was that they were always attacking the goal and
they had Gianni Bouzoukias up front who can score goals, and he did
getting 2 in the 2nd half to give Olympic a 2-1 win.
As
it's referee's week, put down of the week has to go to the assistant
referee who late in the 2nd half was told by a Western
Suburbs player that he had no integrity, his reply was “neither
have you, you can't even score a goal!”
Cameras eh? Tricky beasts.... ;-)
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