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Opinion
With the A-League Men season coming to a close in the coming weeks, clubs are already working hard behind the scenes of not only retaining current players but signing new ones.
Liam Miller’s departure from the Mariners has been known for some time, but his replacement in Western Sydney Wanderers right back Thomas Aquilina has come as a real surprise to many.
Aquilina’s junior club was Blacktown, but it’s perhaps his time at Bossley Park High School where his real football education started to gather pace.
Bossley Park High School is well known for its talented football program, which has been going strong for nearly 30 years.
It has a long list of graduates who are playing football in the A-League Men as well as overseas, including names like Liam Rose, Mitchell Osmond, Fabian Monge and Anton Milnaric.
That is as well as several pupils who have gone into coaching, refereeing and administration roles like Nathan Sherlock, who is the strength and conditioning coach at Brisbane Roar.
When it comes to the A-League Men though, Aquilina has only known the black and red of the Western Sydney Wanderers.
He has been part of their academy team since its inception in 2015, where he initially started in the under-15s side.
In his late teenage years, he became a stand out for the Wanderers’ reserve side at NPL level and ended up debuting in 2020-21, displacing Tate Russell to become the Wanderers’ first-choice right back.
While the Wanderers imploded both on and off the field under Carl Robinson’s tumultuous time in charge, Aquilina becoming a regular player in the first team. He was a success story.
He featured 23 times, was named five times in the A-League Men team of the week, and had two man-of-the-match performances, which included the derby against bitter rivals Sydney FC.
(Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
His performances had not gone unnoticed, as sides from Austria and the Netherlands began heavily monitoring the player. A European move was expected before the start of this season, but it never came to fruition.
The current season has seen the Wanderers and the player in particular regress.
Carl Robinson was relieved of his duties, which became a relief for the Wanderers’ fans who were growing tired of the team’s possession-based style, without much of an end product.
Opposition teams where happy to let the Wanderers have the ball, knowing they would struggle to penetrate a compact defensive shape and be forced to move the ball side to side aimlessly.
Aquilina seemed to lose his attacking instincts and more often than not ended up playing the safe pass rather than the risky one and he didn’t push forward as much as he should have.
A change of manager can either help or hinder a player. Unfortunately new Wanderers coach Mark Rudan never took to the player and reinstated the previous right back Tate Russell.
At 21 years of age, Aquilina is already at a cross roads. The European interest had dried up and the likelihood of regaining his starting position was non-existent.
Leaving the toxicity both on and off the field at Wanderland for the peace and serenity of the Central Coast should help kickstart his once-promising career.
Gosford is a tight-knit community and the Mariners have a family-like bond, which has been instrumental in shaping the future of many young players.
Defensively there are no issues with Aquilina. He is a fine athlete with good recovery speed, who is able to read the game and know whether to intercept or stand off.
The offensive side of Aquilina’s game will be a work in progress, given how the Mariners will want him to play.
They will need to work on his decision making in the final third, in particular positioning, weight of pass and crossing range.
If the Mariners can even improve this by 50 per cent, it would come as no surprise to see Aquilina chip in with a goal or two and a few assists.
While sides will begin to announce signings for next seasons in the coming weeks, the Mariners have acted quickly and have already done an underrated bit of business for Thomas Aquilina.
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