As an actor, Ufuk Talay makes a very good football coach.
The new Western Sydney Wanderers boss is the frontman of a cheeky commercial for the A-League club’s sponsor, property management group Starr Partners, in which he pokes fun at his controversial defection from arch-rivals Sydney FC, setting the tone for a spicy season-opening derby on Friday night.
It’s filled with unsubtle Easter eggs - Talay replacing sky blue things with red and black, nods to famous footballing turncoats such as Luis Figo and Sol Campbell - and ends with Milos Ninkovic, the most high-profile player to have switched from Sydney to the Wanderers, welcoming him to the neighbourhood.
It’s also the hardest thing Talay reckons he’s ever done.
“I’m not an actor, I’ll tell you that much,” he laughed.
“It was actually quite enjoyable, but very stressful at the same time. I did so many takes … they’d go, ‘That was excellent, but can you just smile at the end, please?’ I’m just trying to remember the line, not remember about smiling.
“Overall, I think it was good fun. I think it adds a bit of banter to the derby that we play in the first round.”
It remains to be seen how Talay is received by Sydney fans at Allianz Stadium, which is tracking for a crowd of over 35,000. Many of them were happy to see the back of Talay anyway, and have since embraced the club’s new direction under Patrick Kisnorbo.
The Wanderers faithful, meanwhile, are daring to dream again after a productive off-season, in which they went unbeaten in trial matches against A-League opposition (they were knocked out of the Australia Cup on penalties by Melbourne Victory) and suffered their only defeat to visiting Chelsea, of all teams.
Their squad looks decent enough, but then again, that’s never really been the problem.
With all due respect to Talay, the club’s ninth coach since the departure of inaugural boss Tony Popovic, in which time they’ve played finals only twice, he is not the most important appointment the Wanderers have made.
Finally, they have addressed a key off-field vacuum above the coach and filled it with one of the game’s most respected operators.
Step forward, Mal Impiombato, the club’s inaugural director of football.
His name may not resonate widely, but his track record suggests he could be exactly what the Wanderers need.
Out of a job after the collapse of Western United, having essentially served as the architect of the defunct club’s productive football department, Impiombato has spent the last few months trying to understand why one of Australian football’s biggest clubs has been punching below its weight for so long.
His diagnosis was as straightforward as his proposed remedy, and it will not shock anyone: the Wanderers had the resources, facilities and talent, but their various football departments were operating in isolation, without a coherent strategy to connect them.
Since arriving in April, Impiombato has tried to bring their men’s, women’s, academy and even disability programs closer together, establishing clearer lines of communication and responsibility, as well as a common set of playing principles which will govern how any Wanderers team tries to approach any game, the profile of players who are brought into the club, and what kind of players they develop internally.
“People think you’re going to add this whole new plethora of things that no one’s ever heard of before,” said Impiombato, who has also worked at two other A-League clubs as well as Football Australia.
“There’s no groundbreaking thing that I wanted to bring in, outside of the fundamental basics of what makes teams successful, and that’s stability, structure and a bit of strategic direction and alignment to understand where we want to go and how we want to get there.”
It’s boring, but hopefully, the outcomes won’t be.
If it wasn’t clear enough from the ad he fronted, Talay knows that the life of a coach is transient and insecure. The work done by Impiombato is intended to ensure that the Wanderers’ own identity is far less reliant on the identity of their coach, which is how Talay reckons it should be.
“As much as I’m the coach of the team, I still believe that it should be a club-centred model, not a coach-centred model,” Talay said.
“The coach comes in, and he goes, ‘No, no, we’ll scrap everything that you’ve done for the last year, the last five years, and we’ll restart and do it again.’ And I don’t think that actually works.”
Even better for Talay, the presence of Impiombato provides him with something few of his predecessors have enjoyed: a layer of protection from chairman Paul Lederer and his board if results take a turn for the worse and their trigger fingers get itchy.
“Having a football director that sits above me, between me and the board, gives me a buffer,” he said. “It’s very important to have a person like Mal, who’s a fantastic human being first and foremost. He’s the guy that will hopefully protect me when things aren’t going as well so that there’s no knee-jerk decisions, emotional decisions … it allows me to focus on my job.”
Of course, none of this guarantees success, and Wanderers fans have heard it all before. The past decade has been filled with false dawns, and Talay is the first to admit that their impressive pre-season results will be meaningless if they don’t show the same stuff when there are points on the line.
The real test begins on Friday night against the club Talay left behind, in front of a crowd that will be eager to see him fail.
On his end, at least, there are no hard feelings.
“Players make changes, coaches make changes. For me, home is where you’re at,” Talay said.
“This is what I do as a job to look after my family. The reality is I’m at Western Sydney at the moment, I’m very happy to be here, and I’ll do everything possible to help the group and help the club move forward, and hopefully bring some sort of success.
“In a few years’ time, that might change again, and you’re somewhere else. That’s the nature of our game. You put your hat down and be ready to pick it up and move on to the next thing.”
When that day comes, at least he’ll know which company to call.