June was a tough month for the Wanderers but the Red & Black will not have lost their cause for optimism as the NPL 2 campaign stretches into its final third.
June was a tough month for the Wanderers but the Red & Black will not have lost their cause for optimism as the NPL 2 campaign stretches into its final third.
Perhaps none more so than Jordan Morfitis, the nippy, uncompromising forward from Carss Park who has emerged as a genuine first-team bolter for Trevor Morgan as the team look to fill their Lachlan Scott and Mario Shabow shaped void.
To some extent, Morfitis has come out of the blue in recent weeks having set himself the goal of racking up minutes in the Under 20s at the start of the season. Fittingly, it sums up the last 12 months of his burgeoning professional career, which has been punctuated by a series of pleasant surprises.
Sydney Olympic came calling for the Marist College Kogarah student when the NPL 1 outfit caught a glimpse of Morfitis in the NSW Combined Catholic Colleges tournament midway through last year.
After donning an assortment of Metro League, Super League and Premier League appearances for St. George for the best part of seven years, Morfitis looks at what was only a brief spell in Belmore as something of a big break.
He didn’t have to wait long after the conclusion of the 2015 NPL season before it was superseded.
“I got a random email one day from a Wanderers representative who said they’d been looking at me closely and invited me to a trial the next week”, he says.
“I was excited but mostly in shock”.
Alongside a host of other young hopefuls, Morfitis took his place at the in-house trial conducted by Trevor Morgan and Kory Babington and was initially taken aback by the quality of his surrounding competitors.
“When we were warming up it was clear everybody there was at a completely different level to what I’ve seen”, he says.
Uniting ambition with humility is an especially tough ask for an up and comer like Morfitis but he pulls it off like someone who has been in the game for years.
And for someone who wasn’t hooked on the Hyundai A-League growing up, a self-admitted non-Westie who grew up with views of the Georges River, he acclaims the collective mindset of Western Sydney in glowing terms.
“When the Wanderers came in I saw the players going there, the youngsters going there and thought the team was totally different to other A-League clubs.
“From then on it became a club I’d have liked to play for.”
Equally, Morfitis himself has proven to be a good fit for the Red & Black but having shot up the proverbial ladder in the last year he knows he can’t afford to slow down to catch his breath.
“The National Youth League season is coming up so it’s about hard work and proving that I can play at a high level.
“We have new boys in the team now and I’m one of them, we’re just trying to get better every week as a team and as individuals, play our style of football and play with a winning mentality.”
