Like many other clubs in the National Premier League Victoria, Bentleigh Greens are yet to finalise their squad with the late implementation of the competition.
Head coach John Anastasidis admits that he needs to bring in a few more faces to the club, just to ensure they have enough depth to push for honours this season.
“I think we’re still a little bit undermanned. By the 18th we’ll have a couple more players and we should be ok,” he said.
“We reckon we just need to cover our frontline a little bit more; we probably got three of them at the moment and one youngster so we want to cover them for a couple more and probably in the midfield area, the number 10 player.”
Bentleigh will also continue to develop youth this season, and it was evidenced by Christian Cavallo, who was named to start on the team sheet against Ballarat.
The 17 year-old full back played a number of games in the National Youth League this season for Melbourne Victory, and left a good impression on youth coach Darren Davies.
Anastasiadis has been pleased by Cavallo’s performance in training and is happy to see these elite youngsters get a proper platform to showcase their talents.
“Excellent, he’s been really good and credit to him,” he said.
“He was going to start today and I believe seeing him in training’s he’s been very good so there’s a good little player there that I presume Victory’s got on their books and there’s some good talent coming up now and it’s good to see.
“The NPL will expose these kids and I’m pretty happy with that because too long kids have been lost at that age, 16-17, they seem to get lost because there’s not another step to go apart from VPL and there was just no answer.
“Today we were actually debuting two 17 year olds, unknowns, and we had on our bench another two so that’s pretty young if you put in all of them.
“We’ll provide that stepping stone for them to be in the A-League.”