Tom Pondeljak
Australian soccer player
Tomislav "Tom" Pondeljak (born 8 January 1976 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) is a retired Australian football (soccer) player who last played for Victorian Premier League side St Albans Saints SC. He is currently the head coach of the St Albans Dinamo Senior Women's team.
Club career
Pondeljak started his career in the Victorian Institute of Sport (VIS) before playing for St Albans, making 62 appearances in his 2+1⁄2-year spell at the lower league Victorian club. He was then brought into the National Soccer League (NSL) by the Melbourne Knights and helped them to victory during the 1995–96 NSL season. After playing another 3+1⁄2 years and a total of 97 appearances for the Melbourne club, he moved to Sydney United.
Not much success was had in his two years at the club, and Pondeljak eventually moved to cross town rivals Sydney Olympic, where he won his second NSL title. He then moved on to Perth Glory, where he won his third NSL title. Following the collapse of the NSL at the end of the 2003/04 season, he went to Malaysia and played for Johor FC.
When the A-League was formed, Pondeljak was being chased by a number of teams including Sydney FC, Perth Glory, Newcastle Jets and his hometown team Melbourne Victory but it was the Central Coast Mariners who made the best offer and he accepted that offer, becoming one of the marquee signings for the Mariners.
The 2005/06 season was not the best for Pondeljak as he was injured for about two months with a fractured and dislocated wrist. He did however produce one of the goals of the season against Sydney FC. He ran into the penalty area, turned three Sydney FC players and slotted the ball past the outstretched arm of goalkeeper Clint Bolton. He scored the only goal of the Preliminary Final against Adelaide United to send the Central Coast Mariners into the Grand Final.
The public source identifies “Tom Pondeljak” as australian soccer player. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pondeljak, Australian and soccer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Pondeljak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.