Time for Hakoah to reflect on a lost season
HAKOAH coach Andrew Prentice does not know if he will be re-signed by the club after his side finished its 2009 campaign in 11th spot.
DAVID WEINER
HAKOAH coach Andrew Prentice does not know if he will be re-signed by the club after his side finished its 2009 campaign in 11th spot in Football NSW’s 16-team State League Second Division.
It was one of the side’s most disappointing seasons in recent memory.
The team faced a 10-game schedule over the final month of the season to try and salvage a top-five spot, but that hurdle proved far too daunting, with some players suggesting the side showed a “lack of passion” as the season faded.
The season was punctuated by Maccabiah football and futsal commitments and bad weather. By the time the fixture backlog was to be caught up, the depleted squad could not cope.
“It’s hard to look back on this season with a great deal of joy, but that’s compared to last season when we only lost three games and played some fantastic football,” head coach Prentice reflected.
“This year, we played really good football, but only in passages … I don’t think we performed to our potential. You can’t make excuses, when it’s all said and done, we only kept three clean sheets in 22; compared to seven in 18 last year and therein lay our major problem.”
Co-captain Adam Dinte lamented the side’s slow start to the season, where the team knew they had to win to stay ahead of the pack post-Maccabiah.
“We let ourselves down at the beginning of the season … once we put ourselves behind the eight-ball, we were always chasing,” he said.
“Then we were playing good football but results weren’t coming our way and that’s football. We were always playing catch-up.”
Both captain and coach have been around the club for a long time. Was it the most disappointing year they can remember? “It probably was, to be honest,” Dinte assessed.
“We’ve had a lot of success and set the bar pretty high. We expect to be one of the top teams. So it’s definitely disappointing.”
Prentice’s biggest disappointment was that the side failed to build on last year. On a positive note, the club unearthed Jarred Rudman, Eli Port, Andy Kanchik and under-18s striker Daniel Toblib as genuine first-grade options.
Prentice praised Jordan Mundell, Gareth Martin, Jon Pillemer and Adam and Daniel Joseph for their work ethic over the daunting last month fixture list, but felt let down by some others in the squad who “left their team mates in the lurch and you just can’t do that”.
Mundell was the side’s standout this season, but was also concerned by the “lack of passion” in the squad, despite having the foundations of a “great pre-season”.
“A lack of passion, coupled with the interruption of Maccabiah caused a mid-season collapse,” he said.
“After we returned from Israel … the team obviously wasn’t happy with all the mid-week games and lost interest. This was apparent with the bad results that followed, which only led to a greater lack of passion.”
Striker Doron Pozniak added that there was an “overall lack of intensity and loss of passion, which caused a rift in the team, which resulted in no one really caring as much as in other seasons”.
Prentice’s challenge is to galvanise the squad for next season -— if he is still at the club.
“I, as a coach, didn’t succeed with the squad of players I had this year, so I’m not counting on the fact that they want me next year,” Prentice said.
“Early indications are that they want me to stay on. If they don’t, I can accept that the results aren’t there.”
Club president Jon Pillemer is overseas at the moment, but vice-president Mike Evans said: “This year is no different to any other year. The season is barely finished. We’ll go over everything that goes on throughout the club when we review the season.”
Regardless of his future, Prentice has plenty of suggestions for Hakoah moving forward. The club has always maintained it wants promotion to Division One, especially with rumours of Football NSW streamlining Division Two, but Prentice says the time for rhetoric is over.
Unless the club reviews facilities, player recruitment and retention, pre-season training, alignment with youth development league and playing standards, he said the club will stay at the same level.
“It’s an untapped gold field. I can’t believe the potential that exists in this club, but there has to be a commitment to the cause.”
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