Steak nights, smashing plates and slaying giants. The DNA of a soccer fairytale

In the midst of Heidelberg United’s late-night victory celebrations, within the walls of their ageing blue-stone clubhouse, weary captain Ben Collins is distracted by an unusual din.

The clattering and cluttering is emanating from a nearby room as his ecstatic teammates and die-hard fans revel in the club’s unlikely passage to the Australia Cup semi-finals.

Driven by curiosity, Collins opens a side door to reveal a handful of male supporters singing and dancing their way around the club kitchen while smashing a few plates on the floor.

“You probably don’t get that at too many professional clubs around the world,” Collins says with a smile.

Welcome to Heidelberg United, a proud suburban club with a strong Greek heritage that has been a one-time national powerhouse and mainstay of Melbourne soccer.

The Bergers, as they are known by their fans, are on a giant-killing run. They have trounced two A-League sides to make it to the last four of the knockout Australia Cup tournament (formerly known as the FFA Cup) – beating Western Sydney Wanderers 3-0 and then Wellington Phoenix 4-0.

They tackle a third A-League opponent Auckland on their home pitch, Olympic Village, on Saturday night in a historic bid to make the final. If they get there, they will play the winner of Avondale and the Newcastle Jets.

While Avondale is a rival National Premier League side, it is Heidelberg’s ability to beat two professional teams in succession that has captured the football public’s imagination.

Despite successes of the past – fielding seven Socceroos during the early 1980s and winning the National Soccer League Top 4 finals series in 1980 – they are currently the David in the battle against Goliath, a semi-professional team that, in true fairytale fashion, works all day and trains at night.

It is a team made up of civil engineers, aviation managers, mortgage brokers, men’s wear shop assistants, labourers, students, football coaches and Uber drivers.

“A lot of us are in the NPL because we didn’t quite make it in the A-League,” says Collins, a former Western United defender who works in the commercial planning team for Jetstar.

“You know, all of us have probably ended up here because our contracts ran out, and we didn’t get renewed contracts, so it probably is a little bit of a ‘stick it up em’ mentality.

“But I think that is the magic of the Australia Cup, you get the opportunity to showcase yourself again in the environment in which you think you’re best suited.”

Hugs and kisses

Heidelberg United sits in the shadows of Northland Shopping Centre, surrounded by a cluster of gum trees that filter out the constant hum of nearby Bell Street traffic.

Their showcase Olympic Village pitch is supported by several training fields. A public walking path bisects the complex, linking passing cyclists and pedestrians to the Darebin Creek Trail.

A row of portable change rooms line a fence at the back of the main clubhouse to cater for the burgeoning number of teams – they have almost 500 juniors and their senior women’s team has just won the league.

Club president Steve Tsalikidis says the board members are all volunteers.

“We are all roll-up-your-sleeves-type people and just get the job done,” he says.

“We’re very close to our players. We love them for the fact that it’s not just football for them.

“We cook for them every Thursday. We’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve been there since 2013. Thursday night is steak night. There’s always a competition about who cooks the best steak.

“But what you don’t see is that each and every one of them [the players] will go and hug the volunteers. Or give them a kiss. For me, that’s priceless. Because it’s more than just football. We’re a community organisation.”

Arthur Evriniadis is the club chairman. He started at Heidelberg United as a player more than 50 years ago, but says he became an official in 1992 “by accident”.

“My father, who was a long-time member of the club, asked me to drive him to a general meeting,” Evriniadis says.

“When I got there he said, ‘Come inside, a couple of the oldies want to say hello to you’. And before the day’s end, I was on the board and appointed treasurer.”

Evriniadis says despite its humble beginnings – founded by immigrants as Alexander the Great-Melbourne Soccer Club in 1958 when committee members collected entrance tickets in a hat – Heidelberg has long moved beyond being a Greek club.

“It’s nice to have the Greek element, but the reality is we’ve got guys from South Sudan, we’ve got Italian boys, we’ve got Greek boys, we’ve got Australian boys, we’ve got English boys,” he says.

“We welcome everybody to our club that believes in our culture. And what I mean by that is our club culture.”

He says the club is not reliant on a sole backer or a group of big benefactors.

“We’re the people’s club. We treat the person that gives us a dollar with the same respect and credibility as the guy that gives us $10,000. That’s what makes us special,” he says.

No bad eggs

Senior coach John Anastasiadis is sitting inside the clubrooms at a plain white table behind a dark grey door marked “meeting room”.

It is two days after the Wellington Phoenix win, and he is planning around a congested schedule – five games across 17 days.

While Heidelberg have made it to Australia Cup quarter-finals three times since it was reformed in 2014, Anastasiadis says their current success is “putting smiles on people’s faces”.

“I had a person the other day SMS me, telling me, ‘It’s the first game I’ve seen in five years’, which was last Tuesday against Wellington,” the coach says.

“I said, it was great to have him back and can’t wait for the next game.”

The quietly spoken, shaved-head coach says the key to the team’s success has been youth, hard work and fitness.

Anastasiadis and football director Nick Deligiannis dropped the average age of the squad from 25 to 23.7 – with just one player over 30 – and began training six nights a week in early November.

“I suppose by nature they are semi-professional, but they work as professionals the way we do our training sessions,” Anastasiadis says.

“We don’t want any heroes here. Everyone works together. There’s no individuals, there’s no bad eggs.”

Anastasiadis played for Heidelberg as an 18-year-old in 1986 before his career took him abroad. He returned to Australia to spend four years under Ange Postecoglou at South Melbourne before transitioning into coaching.

He was an assistant at Western United before crossing to Heidelberg last year.

“I guarantee you this, this building we are in today hasn’t changed,” Anastasiadis says of the facilities.

The club is in the midst of planning for a new multi-million-dollar Olympic Village stand that would seat 300 people and include a new function room. Their current bar and function room holds just 60 people.

Small dogs in fight

Wedged in between the Bergers’ Australia Cup games is the final home-and-away fixture of the NPL season. Heidelberg travels to Port Melbourne on Saturday afternoon with a slim chance of topping the league.

A small band of travelling Bergers, clad in the club’s black-and-yellow colours, line the wooden benches at the Port Melbourne Sharks’ home ground, SS Anderson Reserve.

The city skyline hovers in the background as spectators buy takeaway cans of beer at the bar and the smell of pre-made souvalakis waft from the canteen window.

“We don’t always have the fairy-tale story,” club president Tsalikidis says prophetically at the start of the match, and results don’t go to plan.

The Bergers scramble to a 2-2 draw against the plucky Sharks to finish the league in second place.

While the top-two finish qualifies them for a sought-after slot in an end-of-season tournament, the year has still not delivered them a coveted trophy.

So the attention moves to the Australia Cup this Saturday night.

Collins says while they have the advantage of playing the A-League teams during their pre-season, they are still the “small dogs in this fight”

“When the draw comes out, and you start playing in these Australia Cup games, you dream about it at night sometimes, that you could get your hands on that trophy, and it would be a pretty special feeling, especially to be the first NPL team to do it,” he says.

“But we haven’t won anything yet.”

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