The Victorian women’s National Premier League season will breathe a rejuvenated sigh of relief when it kicks off in early April after two seasons lost to Covid-19. However, former NSL/Greek First Division Professional and past South Melbourne senior women’s premiership coach Ange Koutos believes the competition remains shackled by Football Victoria’s insertion of their Emerging Matildas side.
‘FV Emerging’ are one of just eight sides that contest the league, providing an opportunity for those within the full-time National Training Centre program to experience the graft and grind of weekly senior football, with an eye to higher honours.
If the theory is sound, Koutos believes the reality is of significant detriment to the other seven clubs. It’s a lesson he thinks the game has already learned, evident through the discontinuation of the male equivalent after 2011.
“Here in Victoria the talent pool is so small, and the Emerging Matildas program is actually detrimental to growing the talent pool,” Koutos told Soccerscene.
“The Victorian Federation goes out and gets the most talented girls and puts them in their program – that goes down to junior ranks as well.
“Instead of these girls being in a club environment and then selected to go and represent Victoria, they’re invited to the Federation program, and we’re starved of them. It says ‘if you’re not in this program, you will never, ever become a Matilda.’ So for me, it’s like all the other girls that are at South Melbourne, Heidelberg, Box Hill and all the other clubs are just cannon fodder.”
Koutos believes the channelling of talent into one side means a lack of competitive tension – which is, counterintuitively – what Football Victoria hopes players in their program are exposed to by playing in the competition. It also means players who fall out of the program see the other clubs as unfit to provide them a pathway to the professional ranks.
“When girls trial for the Federation Program, and the ones that don’t get selected come back to their clubs, the parents demand they play a higher age group to be challenged and prepare to return the following year to try again,” Koutos said.
“They’re using the clubs as intermediaries, when it should be the clubs developing players with an eye to the long term and their senior teams.
“There’s a lot of girls in Victoria who are what we term ‘institutionalised’ – they’re not focused on results, they’re focused on the pathway. They train without the added pressure of going out on the weekend to try to win points. If they lose 5-0 it feels like ‘that’s alright, just go back to training, keep developing.’
“The same thing happened with the boys program. It produced players with no emotion. It said ‘win, draw, loss, it doesn’t matter.’ It should, and when all the boys came out and went back to clubland or overseas there was all this pressure, which was new to them.”
Koutos has seen a great deal across his 30 years in the professional game. Following his career as one of the first Australians to ply his trade abroad that wrapped up with a denouement in the NSL, he’s coached men’s football, women’s football, junior boys and girls, both in Australia and abroad. Of all the hats he feels junior development fits best, and this winter he’ll coach South Melbourne’s Under 17 girls and Manningham’s Under 14 boys.
“If junior coaches are not there, you’re not going to get the players to filter up. For me it’s about growing the talent pool and passing on my knowledge, whether it be football related or physiological. It’s a whole package,” Koutos said.
Koutos’ life in football began in the same manner as many Greek-Australians of his generation, following the migration of his father Peter from Greece in 1954.
“My father started off as all Greek immigrants did, as a South Melbourne supporter. In Greece there’s a cultural difference between the north and the south, and my father happened to be at a game – South Melbourne against Heidelberg – where some South supporters were throwing derogatory remarks at the Heidelberg fans.
“My father thought ‘well, you’re effectively swearing at me there’, so he changed allegiances and went for Heidelberg.”
Without knowing it, Peter’s switch reflected how his son’s career would play out, criss-crossing between Melbourne’s two strongholds of Greek football: starting with South Melbourne’s juniors in 1975, and ending his career with Heidelberg in 1994 – fleetingly managing their seniors the next year, and returning to South in 2018.
In between were two defining periods in Greece, firstly as a player with S.F.K. Pierikos between 1986-1994, and secondly as a coach of their junior academy from 2008 – when the game grabbed him again after a period of disillusionment.
“I had interest from Heidelberg and South Melbourne aged 20 but was looking for my next challenge so went overseas. I thought if nothing eventuated, at least I had one of the two big Greek clubs in Melbourne to fall back on. I ended up staying for eight years,” Koutos said.
“When going to Europe from Australia at that time, going to the moon was probably closer! Only Eddie Krncevic was a recognised Australian playing, and then there was a big influx of players into the Greek league: myself, Jimmy Patikas, Chris Kalantzis, Louis Christodoulou and Johnny Anastasiadis. Frank Farina was also starting his career at the time, so there were a dozen of us in the mid-to-late 80’s.”
It was at Pierikos that Koutos’ views on the game were challenged, primarily under managers John Mantzourakis and Dimitrias Liapis, who exposed him to a level of management then non-existent in Australia.
“Mantzourakis was young and ambitious, and a very strict disciplinarian and tactician. I learnt about looking at the game from a tactical point of view – when here in Australia the coaches just put the starting eleven out and said, ‘go out and play,’ Koutos said.
“Suddenly I came across this coach who gave me something to think about. When we came up against the bigger clubs we took up different conservative tactics, then when we played clubs at our own level we might attack a little more.
“The one that really influenced me completely was Liapis – who was a lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. He majored in football! At that stage football was changing from that technical, romantic style that we all want to see to a more robust, athletic, ‘German-style’ game.
“We were robots, athletes, but he kept his training around the ball rather than running, and he’s probably the major influence on my coaching.”
Further influence came while working as an assistant to Zoran Matic at Heidelberg in 1997, with the club at the time operating as the Collingwood Warriors following their expulsion from the National Soccer League in 1995. A six-game stint in charge of Heidelberg, existing separately to the Warriors in the Victorian Premier League, would also follow.
“The two candidates for the Warriors job were Krncevic and Matic. Eddie had a chat with me and said if he was given the nod I’d be playing. Zoran didn’t say anything, and didn’t endear himself to the existing Heidelberg players; I think he had a bleak view of the standard of players that were at the Bergers, and even let Bobby Despotovski slip through his fingers.
“I thought if Zoran got the nod it would be a good opportunity to go into coaching, which was the natural progression for a player. I thought, ‘who better to learn under?’ He got the nod, I put in the application, and we worked together for a good eight months before it fell apart.”
Koutos makes no secret of his disappointment in the way his first stint in Australian management concluded, and it was only after a chance meeting with a former teammate while living in Greece that the wheels of his second-coming as a coach began to turn.
“After the Heidelberg stint as senior coach I was just despondent with the game, and the way things had happened,” Koutos said.
“When you’ve got like minded people, you can work – but once the committee changes with a different outlook on things, you clash. I was pretty hurt by that and walked away from the game.
“Then I went overseas, and just out of the blue a former teammate of mine at Pierikos approached me and said, ‘how about coming over to our academy?’ I ummed and ahhed but after a couple of weeks gave in, found my niche and that’s where the junior development all started.”
Koutos’ vast experiences have given him a worldly view on the game, and also the opportunity to test ideas and theories in a range of environments. But like Ange Postecoglou – who he first crossed paths with as a South Melbourne junior – his views on the game remain shaped by his formative years.
“My key principles are always the same, whether it be boys, girls, senior men, senior women,” Koutos said.
“Whether I’m playing a different system, it’s about aggressiveness, keeping the ball on the deck, and the stuff you read from Ange’s autobiography. Our fathers saw the game the same way.”
Despite years of public consternation around National Technical Directors and Coaching Curriculums, he sees unity of purpose as the greatest challenge facing development in the men’s game, and that the lack of it hinders any chance of NPL pathways stitching together with the professional level consistently.
“Even though Football Australia have come out with their National Coaching Curriculum to streamline everything and get everyone to think the same way, unfortunately each state has their own way of playing the game,” Koutos said.
“If you look at the Victorian NPL, it’s a very aggressive style of football with not much on the tactical side, which is the legacy of the English and Scottish influence in Victorian football. If you go to South Australia, New South Wales or Queensland, it’s more possession based, and thinking about the game.
“It is healthy to a certain point, but what do A-League teams want? Do they want someone who will run, chase and be aggressive, or someone who can think about the game? We need to find some sort of uniformity in the way we all play.”
