In 2008, Barcelona President Joan Laporta was tasked with the responsibility of finding the club a successor to outgoing manager Frank Rijkaard. The Dutchman had led the Catalan outfit to two successive league titles, ousting Florentino Perez’s Galacticos in the process before overcoming Arsenal to record only their second Champions League crown. Despite the success, two years without a major trophy forced the Barcelona board to act with regeneration of an aging and somewhat disunited squad needed.
The frontrunner for the Camp Nou hot seat quickly emerged as Jose Mourinho who had achieved continental and domestic glory with Porto before leading Chelsea to back-to-back Premier League triumphs, ending a fifty year drought in the process. The Portuguese tactician was a strong favourite to return to Barcelona having served as Bobby Robson and Louis Van Gaal’s assistant at the club in the 1990s although Laporta and club legend and advisor Johan Cruyff had other ideas.
Instead the duo decided to recruit within by hiring the club’s reserves Manager who had previously played under Cruyff, Robson and van Gaal at Barca but had only spent one year at the sidelines of Barcelona B. That man was Pep Guardiola and the decision proved to be a masterstroke.
While Northcote City’s new manager Alex Gymnopoulos is not expected to revolutionise football and conquer all before him at the helm of one of the league’s most unfashionable clubs, his appointment shares some resemblance to that of Guardiola’s at the La Liga giants in the summer of 2008.
The 48-year-old former playmaker began his career with Heidelberg United, where he went through the club’s junior system alongside his first cousin and close friend George Katsakis. His junior career with the Bergers culminated in 1984 when the pair, alongside future senior-team players and respective coaches Peter Tsolakis, John Anastasiadis and John Gabrielson won the State Under-21 Championship.
From there onwards, the playmaker embarked on a successful state league career at Northcote City, and one which included further spells at Green Gully and Fawkner in the 1990s. After calling time on his playing career in the early years of the previous decade, the man affectionately referred to as “the Rat,” due to his timeless portage of the rat’s tail, turned to coaching by helping out the club where he spent the majority of his senior career with.
His time on the touchline at John Cain Memorial Reserve began in 2004 as a youth team coach before becoming assistant to the newly appointed City manager and former teammate Tsolakis. Together they helped Hercules win promotion from the third tier and second tier as the club returned to the VPL in 2010. Gymnopoulos then moved onto coaching the club’s 20s side in 2011, spending five seasons at the helm, which included being crowned 2013 Premiers and runners-up twice over the course of the last two campaigns. In that time, the likes of Wade Dekker, Jonathan Bounas, the returning Anthony Rizk and other current first-team members Aaron Ward, Nicholas Bavcar and Todd Dekker have all played under Gymnopoulos.
After a season in which mid-table survival was ensured without the need for a relegation scrapheap, Northcote were dealt a major blow when manager Goran Lozanovski tendered his resignation at season’s end. Club Vice-President and football operations manager Peter Kotsiris and the board were tasked with the responsibility of finding a replacement and they did not have to look too far afield to find one.
“We felt that it was the right time for him to step up and take the senior role given the amount of players who have been promoted into the senior team over the last five years that had been coached by him,” Kotsiris says. “Additionally, it also made sense to appoint someone who knows the club inside-out and knows the expectations, values and morals we’ve instilled here over the years.
“Once Goran stepped down, the board approached me and said they believed it was my time to step up especially given the side was filled with many players I had coached in the 20s and thus presented me with his opportunity” Gymnopoulos adds.
He commenced pre-season in late November and set about building a competitive young squad full of enthusiasm and a desire to improve. Anthony Rizk returned to the club after spending a season with Melbourne City youth, while young goalkeeper Phil Petrovski replaced the outgoing Chris Theodoridis as first-coach custodian after two impressive seasons with the Goulburn Valley Suns.
Several 20s players have been promoted into the first team, while the squad has been boosted by the recent additions of Greek defender Michalis Karvouniaris and American forward Mike Cunningham. Despite these additions, many observers have tipped Hercules for the drop in 2016, with Gymnopoulos’ fully aware of this label.
“Ever since we started pre-season about two months ago, I’ve been telling the kids that everyone out there thinks were relegation favourites given our young squad and the fact that I’m a rookie manager at senior level,” Gymnopoulos says. “I’ve told them to prove everyone wrong as this is an opportunity to make a name for yourself and hopefully one day a lot of you boys can get picked up by A-League teams like some of our players have in recent years.”
The production line of late at John Cain Memorial Reserve has seen the Trifiro brothers of Jason and Glen, as well as Paulo Retre and Rashid Mahazi, use the club as a springboard to launch their professional careers, along with Wade Dekker, who was a revelation for City during the 2014 campaign.
Gymnopoulos, who evokes passion aplenty on the touchline, outlines that the approach of the club is very different to some of their more illustrious NPL rivals who have much bigger pockets than that of City. “What we are trying to do here is give a lot of young players a chance to showcase themselves to others what type of footballers they are instead of going out and spending the big bucks on more experienced players,” he says.
This approach was designed to be the hallmark of the recently implemented NPL, however most clubs in the NPL attempt to tailor the balance between youth and experience. Despite the presence of several older heads in the dressing room, Northcote’s squad is the youngest in the league and Gymnopoulos knows that is part of the reason why so many have tipped them for relegation.
However, he remains optimistic about their chances and is hoping that his youthful chargers will be one of the upcoming season’s surprise packets. “It’s going to be a tough season but as long as we’re a tight-knit group who work hard off-the ball and use our youthful enthusiasm to press opponents before showing what we can do on the ball then we’ll have a good chance to survive and if we do so then I believe this team can be a very good team for a good six or seven seasons after that,” he says.
While avoiding relegation is still seen as the ultimate goal, Gymnopoulos does not want to make that the benchmark to aim for, instead focusing on winning every available point in the 26 round campaign. “Survival is a minimum for us and I’ve told the boys that we play every game to win and at the end of the day my number one priority is to win as many games as we can and then hopefully maybe even finals may be on the cards but we need to ensure that minimum goal is reached first.”
Image: Northcote City FC