By Craig MacKenzie

Hume City has signed off on a software package that will revolutionise the way its players are prepared for combat.

“We have an exciting vision of how we think the team should play and we have developed software to enable us to see digitally what we want before we go out on the park and work on it,” the club’s new technical director, Dean Hennessey, said.

“It’s to do with our shape, the way we press, the way we drop off, the way we play against different systems and the way we attack areas if the opposition sets up in a certain way.

“It’s the sort of thing the A-League does but I’m not so sure that the NPL does this and if we’re the second tier of competition then we’ve got to start bridging that gap.”

Hennessey is champing at the bit to get stuck into his first ever technical director’s role and from the moment he drove into Broadmeadows Valley Park and surveyed the $13 million football complex he knew this was the job he wanted.

“Hume had contacted me before the season ended but I was still with [Dandenong] Thunder and made it clear that I wouldn’t talk with them until the season was finished,” he said.

“The facility that Hume has is outstanding, it really is. It feels like an international training complex with five pitches, a restaurant, a bar and the dressing rooms are painted up like they do in Europe.

“It’s got a great feel to it and it’s a great place to go to work.

“I sat down with the chairman Steve Kaya and the other thing that attracted me to the club was its stability.

“You have a senior coach (Lou Acevski) that played there for three years and is about to start his fourth year as coach with an assistant (Zoran Markovski) that he is used to working with and when you go through the under-age teams I think there has only been one coaching change since last season.”

Not all Hume supporters may know that their club has hired one of the sport’s true blue bloods given that Hennessey’s father Terry is a former Derby County, Nottingham Forest and Birmingham City star who was capped 39 times for Wales and also had a successful coaching career.

Hennessey himself has been involved as a player and coach in Victorian football for 32 years.

As a coach he has won promotion to the old Victorian Premier League with four different clubs – Essendon, Richmond, Bentleigh Greens and Southern Stars – so he is no stranger to success.

Hennessey also spent last season as head coach of Thunder working side by side with a technical director, Stuart Munro, an experience he thoroughly enjoyed and one which he hopes to draw on while working with Acevski.

“It was probably my favourite season as a coach working with a really good young playing group and working with Stuart,” he said.

“Generally when you coach a club you are the most experienced person within the coaching group and although your assistants are fabulous it can be a very lonely job at times.

“But at Thunder Stuart was the most experienced person there, a man with an unbelievable background as a player and as a coach and it was great to have someone like that to bounce ideas off.

“I’d like to think that I will offer the same to Louie as Stuart offered to me.

“I’m not going to go into the dressing rooms and make comments and go over the top but I often asked Stuart what his thoughts were and nearly every time he’d come up with something I hadn’t seen.

“That’s the great value in having another pair of eyes.

“And if he thought he’d seen something, he’d just come over to me quietly and say ‘by the way I’ve spotted this or spotted that’ and it was brilliant advice.

“He was very, very supportive and that’s what I want to be with Lou.”

Lines of demarcation between head coach and technical director can sometimes become blurred but Hennessey points out his role has been clearly marked out and he is confident that he will work well with Aceski and the other coaches.

“I’m the support act for the head coach, it’s as simple as that,” he said.

“Lou wants me involved in recruiting but more to emphasise to a player how we see him fitting in and to reinforce how keen we are to get him to Hume and if I go out and put a session on for the first team I’ll be like one of his assistants.

“I’ll be working with the under-20s down, working with every coach to try and help them to become better coaches to put on better sessions and to produce better players.

“The 16s, 18s, 20s and first team will all play the same way based on how Lou wants to play for the coming season.

“We’ve done all our trials so the 12s, 13s, 14s, 15, 16s and 18s are completed.

“Pretty much bar a couple of spots in the first team, we’ve got our squads sorted already.

“We’ve got more of an open mind with the 20s and there are maybe four or five spots there but we’re not going to rush in to filling them.”

When senior training starts on 21 November the first team squad will feature six fresh faces from last season.

Jai Ingham, 21, is a winger signed from Brisbane Roar; Shaun Timmins is a left back signed from South Melbourne; Petar Franjic is a former Hume player who returns from a stint in Uzbekistan with Olmaliq FK; Deng Aguek is a striker from Ballarat Red Devils; Marcos Schroen is an attacking midfielder from Dandenong Thunder and right back Dean Tomeski has been signed from Macedonian club FK Makedonija Gjorce Petrov.

They better have pace because that’s something both Hennessey and Acevski noted when analysing last season.

"Louie and I feel that the NPL was quicker this year than the VPL used to be. I’m not saying that it was technically better but it was faster," he said.

"I don’t know whether or not that’s down to younger players being involved, being eager to please and wanting to stay in the squad and show their wares but it’s something we’ve certainly taken notice of.

"Our plan is to train the same way from the first team down through the juniors so that when players move up it’s not such a big adjustment for them."

You sense the excitement in Hennessey’s voice when he talks of Hume City’s prospects and he’s been thrust into a key role at a very ambitious club.

"When I came to this country South Melbourne and Melbourne Knights were the big clubs and they still are but I think Hume City could be a massive club, I really do,"  he said.

"I think there are five or six clubs that will be a threat next season and we want to be one of them.

"But that’s not a priority at junior level.

"If we can see vast improvement in our junior teams from their pre-season to the end of the season then for us that is a measure of success."

It will also be a measure of how well Hennessey is performing as a technical director in a role that he tips will become increasingly important in our sport.

Image credit: Peter Psarros