To say that Southern United and inaugural coach Stuart Munro have kept their cards close to their chest throughout pre-season would be an understatement.
With a first competitive fixture of their short tenure awaiting this Saturday, away against Box Hill United, the news in regards to playing staff has been kept at a bare minimum – a far cry from some of the other clubs who’ve paraded and celebrated their new signings as a part of their own media cycles.
Heck, even the Southern United season launch on Friday night didn’t serve as an official squad announcement, with the only confirmed news from the club being the signings of South Melbourne trio Tiffany Eliadis, Saphri Lines and Brittany Dudley-Smith. Whether that has been a direct order straight from the coaching hierarchy remains to be seen, but what the secrecy has done is add another layer of intrigue surrounding the consortium club.
How will they line up in their opening fixture? How are the girls taking to Munro – who has never coached women at a senior level – and his style of training and expectations? What are their ambitions and goals for 2016?
We tapped into the mindset of their senior coach upon his appointment in late October 2015, but now sitting some four months later, we’re no closer to understanding how true his words then rung.
His sentiments seem to be just as poignant now, with the same questions he posed remaining just as unresolved for those not within the inner sanctum of the club. So to dig through the myriad of questions directed at the Peninsula-based club, we analysed our initial conversation with the Scottish-born Munro, firstly, asking why he decided to take on the challenge of women’s football and Southern United.
FEATURE > My Football Story: Stuart Munro
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“A better question would be why womens football?” Munro responded when asked about why he chose Southern as his latest career move.
“All my life I’ve been involved in mens football and it’s something that I’ve thought about for a few years now. The last couple of years I’ve watched the development of womens football and the success of the Matildas recently will only make it grow. Being involved in mens football, I don’t know what it was but I just had that feeling that I’d done as much as I could there.
“Sometimes you just want to freshen it up a little bit. As soon as I thought about getting involved in women’s football, and I found out that [the league] themselves were trying to become a little bit more semi-professional and structured with the NPLW, I thought it was a perfect time to get involved. I’m getting a good feeling about it, probably the newness of it.
“I have no idea if I’m going to be good at it, I have no idea if it’s going to suit me, but I come in to this with my eyes wide open and I’ve got massive confidence that this is something that I’m going to enjoy, trying to build a new team from scratch and seeing something that they younger girls underneath can aspire to be part of, all while building a culture in the club and dressing room.
“The focus will be on Peninsula football, women’s Peninsula football. I’ve lived here for seven years apart for the couple of years I was in Perth, so I thought it was a great opportunity to get involved in something here in the Peninsula and this came along at the right time – that’s why I’ve done it.”
The real test for Munro will come this weekend, but from all reports, the players have taken well to his style of management and training. With no player squads made available as of yet, we’re yet to see how much of a Peninsula flair the first team has.
This focus on development on the Peninsula area was similarly asserted by inaugural president and former Matilda Theresa Deas when speaking to us late last year, who also discussed her desire to have female coaches running through the ranks of the club.
FULL INTERVIEW > Q&A: Southern United President Theresa Deas
“It’s not just about developing women footballers, it’s also about trying to develop female coaches as well,” Munro said in support of Deas.
“It’s something that there’s not a lot of, there’s not too many female coaches in the league itself – it’s male-dominated. In the past there might be 150 people [at FFV coaches conferences] and only five or six might be female. But we’ll look at creating a pathway to achieve that, we just need them to want to be a part of it.
“It’s something we’ve spoken about and we’d like to create. It’s not a pathway for just players, it’s also for coaches.”
Former Sandringham SC and Casey Comets coach Deborah Nichols is lending her hand with the Southern Under 13’s, but each other senior role is currently held by men: Simon Crosbie and George Perpina are coaching down the age groups, with Mark Cassar the club’s Technical Director.
The desire to introduce more women coaches serves as a ringing endorsement from Munro, a coach that boasts such an illustrious CV.
His own coaching experiences have seen him stretch the top-leagues of Australia, with stints at Gippsland Falcons, Carlton and a wealth of Victorian State League clubs and a season and a half as assistant coach at Perth Glory in 2011.
Munro was a tough-tackling left-back in his playing days, which saw him win numerous titles with Scottish powerhouse Glasgow Rangers. He’s hoping his experiences in all facets of football, his mental resilience and dealing with varying levels of professionalism will help in his role at the club, with everything from recruitment through to training and match-day.
“I mean I’m no Sir Alex Ferguson but I’ve been involved in a decent level in coaching and playing, in both the old National League and the A-League. Hopefully it’ll be good for the club to help us attract some girls who will want to be a part of it. Maybe the fact that I’ve been there and done it, albeit at a men’s level, they might think ‘well he knows what he’s talking about, lets work with him and see what happens’. I think I can help them as much as they can help me.
“I think the training methods – something that I’ve been used to – will [also] translate. One thing I know about womens football – not at the top, elite level – is that it’s a slower league. So a strength for me coming into womens football, I’ll be trying to get things moving quicker – my standards will be higher than what the girls are probably used to. There will be a level that I get to where hopefully I can get the girls to raise to that will make them a better player, quicker thinkers and reactions.
“That will come through training and we’ll encourage that. We’ll try our best to become as professional as possible. It’s about doing things right and making the girls feel like they’re part of something in the training environment that we create. The culture is something that we need to create where they enjoy coming to training. The last thing that we want is girls thinking ‘here we go, another training session’.
“Training has changed a lot in the last five-six years, it’s a lot more enjoyable, more thinking involved in training and coaching now, so we’ll try bring this to the girls and to Southern United.”
The head coach once more toucheed on the culture of the club, and how he and the board had planned on building something unique at the club. He also provided an insight into what he was looking for in a player and how that’ll translate on match-day at Southern.
“I think there’s a few things [to building a culture]. There’s the club itself – which will come from the committee, the technical director, the coaches – then there will be things that we can discuss and find out how to create it, whether that’s family-orientated, work-related or technical-related. These are things that we’ll work out.
“As for the senior coaching, given that I’ll be most focused on my team, I’ll be trying to develop a culture in my team. Women’s football is very technical, and if you can get quick players who aren’t so technical, you can help them out and they’ll have the edge. I want a fast, exciting game, and that’s something that modern football has become now – we’ve moved away from tiki-taka football to counter-attacking with a lot of pace and width.
“I’d like to think that we can do that, with a bit of local flair to it. A team will always have four or five local girls that the supporters can relate to. We want to get to the point where we can get all eleven girls from the Peninsula, that’s what we want to aim for.
“People talk to me about the players age – I never look at a players age, I look at whether they are a good player or not. I remember signing Scott McDonald as a 15-year-old and giving him his debut for the Gippsland Falcons in the old NSL. He played his first game against Milan Ivanovic and Alex Tobin who were the two stalwarts of the Socceroos at the time – Scott was fearless. I gave Josh Kennedy his debut for Carlton at 16 years of age, I gave Kristian Sarkies his debut for South Melbourne.
“It’s never been about age, it’s always been about god players. It’ll be the same thing here, doesn’t matter about their age, if they’re a good player, then I’ll be looking to get them into the team as soon as I can. But there’s a way of bringing players into the team, sometimes you find little diamonds in the rough. That will definitely be a big part of Southern, trying to create a pathway for those local young girls, not a case of just putting them in for the sake of it. They’ve got to deserve it and be ready to get put in.”
In looking at their recruits to date, Eliadis, Lines and Dudley-Smith aren’t well known for their blistering pace or – with the exception of Dudley-Smith – their elite physicality, but in that trio, Munro has recruited players with supreme technical ability. Players capable of breaking open a game with one key pass or one rapier like burst forward with the ball at feet.
As for introducing youth into the senior set-up, the club have made the right steps so far, providing a good platform to showcase their young talent via their social media channels, which have focused heavily on their age group representative teams, while shying away from giving too much attention to their senior line-up.
It seems a deliberate tactic, whether that be to keep expectations at a minimum in their opening season or to keep intel away from opposition coaches until the final moment remains to be seen. While he may have distanced himself from any comparison to the legendary Manchester United manager, if the shielding of attention off the senior side is a calculated move, even Fergie would be proud of the mind games at hand.
Interestingly, Munro was just as deflective when initially asked about season objectives and expectations.
“People talk about KPI’s and all those sorts of things. But who’s opinion is that? Who’s opinion is it that you’ve had a good season. Is a good season having points on the board or is how many young players you develop and bring into the first team?” He asked.
“I’m more than happy to be set some kind of targets, but I need to know that the people setting those targets know what they’re talking about. I think you get a feel for it, there’s enough people in the club that have been involved in football for a long time. They’ll know that if I’m not doing a good job, there’s a reason for that.
“If there is a reason for it, then I’d know about it first, so I don’t think there will be any issues there at all. I’ve still got to learn a lot about how it works in the womens game. I don’t know enough about the financial element of it. In the mens game, it’s easy. You’re either South Melbourne or Oakleigh and have a lot of money or you’re a team that doesn’t have any money and it’s always been that way. In womens football, I’m not sure if it’s the same. I know some teams have more resources than others, but it’s more of a level playing field.
“Now the fact that they’ve gone from a 12 team league to this new nine team league means that there should be a surplus of female players looking to be involved at the top level league. We’re hoping that we should get our fair share of first-team players.
“Can I squeeze a little more out of them than somebody else may get? If that’s the case, then with my drive and the enthusiasm of this all being fresh and new for me might be enough to get an extra 10% out of the girls. If that’s what happens, then we could be in for a good season.”
As for now, these questions for the most part remain unanswered, but in four days time, we’ll know a lot more about Munro and his intent with Southern United, and just how they may fare in their inaugural season. Maybe then we’ll have the means to fully contextualise his words.