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The football world cup starts in Qatar on Monday week. Next to the Olympics it is the world’s biggest sporting event.
Australian filmmaker Janet Merewether’s documentary O-LYM-PIC FOOTBALL DREAMS is currently screening in cinemas around Australia, perfectly pitched to have maximum interest with the World Cup in Qatar just about to commence.
The Greek soccer club Pan Hellenic, now known as Sydney Olympic, is one of Sydney’s oldest and proudest soccer clubs. It fully intends to remain a strong soccer club and one of the ways it sees itself doing this is by developing its junior players.
With this in mind the club organises its team of ten years old players to go on a whirlwind trip to Europe where it will compete against some of the world’s best junior football teams.
A few parents were invited to travel with the group. Merewether’s son was one of the players selected, and the filmmaker seized the opportunity to make a doco about the tour.
It’s a very warmly put together film and I feel Merewether made the right decision in not pointing out who her son was.
There is plenty of good match footage, some interviews with coaches, and though the team of youngsters from Sydney Olympic do not fare too well against their more skilful European opponents, they had learned a bit from the experience, and were good sports.
As well as the footage from the tour, Merewether interviewed, at length, former Socceroo captain Alex Tobin OAM and former Liverpool, Crystal Palace and Perth Glory player Nick Rizzo who shared their views on how best to develop the talent that is there in our junior players and how we can rank better as a soccer nation in the world game.
Well worth seeing, catch O-LYM-PIC FOOTBALL DREAMS during the next football mad month.
http://www.footballdreams.com.au
