Despite having missed out on finals in the first two seasons of the NPL, Port Melbourne Sharks coach Eric Vassiliadis is confident he’s built a team strong enough to compete over 26 league games and an FFA cup campaign in 2016.

His first task was to re-sign the bulk of his squad from last season and then to replace the departed forward trio of Kamal Ibrahim, Nicholas Krousouratis and Trent Rixon.

He deliberately went after established players, managing to sign six recruits from other Greek clubs. These include forwards David Stirton (ex-South Melbourne), Jamie De Abreu (Bentleigh Greens), experienced midfielders Lambros Honos (Oakleigh Cannons) and Bonel Obradovic (Northcote City) as well as defender Janes Karvelis (Kingston). Jacob Eliopoulos (Northcote City) is a late addition on the eve of the transfer deadline.

Vasiliadis told Neos Kosmos: “We’ve signed in my mind five established footballers, so of course given our season last year, it was imperative that we improved because that was clearly a failure. So we’ve done that. We’ve bolted those players onto what I think is a very encouraging group. On balance, I have no doubt, based on the pre-season, that our core group of young players have become, in 12 months, completely different players. So the improvement we’re going to see in them, complementing the recruits we’ve got, means we’re pretty happy and pretty optimistic.”

That core group of younger players he speaks about, together with two or three youngsters promoted from the successful U20s team, means that almost half the Sharks’ senior squad is 20 years or younger.

“When I say to you we’ve got a good balance of young and old, that’s the facts,” he says.

Vasiliadis concedes that losing the bulk of his strike force in the off-season, had left the club with a massive hole in the front third. However, he believes with the likes of Stirton, De Abreu, Honos, Alex Goodwin and Ryan Opperman, “we’ll have the firepower to bounce back, and more importantly in my mind, we’ll be less predicable”.

Together with new assistant Goran Lozanovski, Vassiliadis has also tweaked the way the Sharks are going to play this season.

The coach is determined that his team improves its performances markedly in both the league and cup competitions.

“For us, we’ve set ourselves some targets, in the league and in the cup. As far as the FFA Cup’s concerned, we have to make the last four of the Dockerty Cup, which will then qualify us for the FFA Cup. And from there, we don’t set limits.”

Port kicked off its season last Thursday, away to Oakleigh Cannons.