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Okon's Mariners project will be judged next season

Paul Okon has had an influence on the Mariners, and now the positive results are starting to come. (AFP PHOTO / William West)
Expert
5th April, 2017
21

The Central Coast Mariners will finish this season in the bottom three, and it will be the third straight campaign that has ended with them wallowing and spluttering in Gosford.

Paul Okon, suffering through a difficult maiden campaign, has by now realised the scale of the task ahead of him; if he thought it was big at the beginning of this season, it has only broadened since.

He has not been able to break the cycle of losing, and is surely already preparing for what will certainly be an off-season of some tumult and exodus.

14 Mariners players are off-contract at the end of the season, including all of his marquee and foreign visa players.

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The potential is there for a completely new Mariners team to trot out in 2017/18; how well this team will do next season depends primarily Okon’s ability to construct a roster that can haul this club out of the bog.

His merits as a manager have been apparent over the campaign, albeit only while arguments in favour of them tremble under the reality of another disappointing league finish. Still, his Mariners team have gone through a series of phases this season, and Okon has shown himself capable of solving problems, and adapting.

They started out playing a highly ambitious possession-heavy style, relying very much on the ball-playing skills of their defenders. This proved unwise; Okon was yet to really get a sense of what his players could and couldn’t do, and watched on as his team conceded 17 goals in their first seven matches.

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Jaques Faty, for example, one of the main offenders in this period of defensive haplessness, played in every one of the Mariners’ first six matches. Faty has only played in two of the subsequent 19. Okon was warming into the role, feeling out when to push a philosophical agenda and when to act more pragmatically.

Their win over the the Western Sydney Wanderers in February is a good example of the latter.

Under Okon, Connor Pain and Jake McGing have excelled, with Pain, the former Victory substitute-eternal, growing into his role as the one of his team’s central attacking weapons. His season has been one of industrious wing-play, although with little tangible product at the end.

McGing leads the league in passes, both completed and attempted, and has played the full 90 minutes in all but one of the Mariners’ games. Pain is 23 and McGing in 22; both should only improve next season.

The topic of age is also worth expanding on; the Mariners are by far the youngest team in the competition. Paul Okon, who is only 44, sent out a team against the Wanderers in December that had an average age of half his own.

Liam Rose, Paul Izzo, Scott Galloway, Trent Buhagiar, all these players are 21 or younger. 23 year old Storm Roux, who has also excelled – relatively speaking – this season recently signed an extension with the club. Okon will want to tie up the other youngsters whose contracts are ending; Scott Galloway and Izzo are the most pressing.

Forming a young nucleus, nurturing them and allowing them time to develop is not something that is generally associated with immediate success. But it is a worthy endeavour, and it may well be these youngsters who end up dragging the club up the table in the years to come. It would also incentivise the Mariner to develop these players if transfer fees between A-League clubs were allowed, but that, sadly, is still a pipe dream.

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Roy O’Donovan, the club’s top scorer this season, is on an expiring contract, and the decision to part ways with him will be a difficult one to make. He is a very good finisher, and appears to have taken up something of a mentor position for some of the younger players.

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However his salary is proving the biggest obstacle for the Mariners, and multiple other clubs in need of a striker have already begun eyeing up the Irishman. Fabio Ferreira is also out of contract, and it might also be worth letting him go.

The next few months for the Mariners will be tip-toed through, trepidatiously, but with a fluttering heart as well.

The future they are stepping into is tremulous, but it’s also exciting; the stagnation of the last few years has been refreshed by youth, by a young ambitious manager, and now by the prospect of an almost-clean slate on which to work.

New signings, hidden gems plucked from the slag heap, the promise of some young, eager lads all buying in; this could be the most fun the Mariners have had in years. There is no threat of relegation in the A-League, and with the organisers apparently content to tolerate awful crowd numbers coming out of Wellington, and underwhelming turn-outs in Sydney, the Mariners should use this safe-haven to start a project of their own.

If they finish last again next season, then perhaps we can use the wooden spoon to beat the manager black and blue. For now, it should only be used to stir whatever exciting concoction Okon is brewing in Gosford.

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