South Auckland Rangers
| Full name | South Auckland Rangers Association Football and Sports Club | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ground | Rongomai Park, Manukau | ||
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South Auckland Rangers is an association football club in New Zealand. Affiliated to Auckland Football Association.
The club started as the Otara Rangers in 1973. In 1989 the Otara Rangers (based at Ngati Otara) merged with Clover Park United to form the club now known as “The South Auckland Rangers” and stayed based at Ngati Otara until 1989.
The club moved to their present location at James Watson Park due to a promise made by the M.C.C. to provide grounds solely for soccer use, so as to avoid any conflict with rugby league. When the South Auckland Rangers Association Football and Sports Club, was formed, the club had five senior and seven junior soccer teams.
As with neighbours Mangere United, SAR is one of the few surviving clubs in New Zealand to have been formed around a core of players predominantly of one ethnicity, with many of the players being of Indian and Fijian-Indian origin. Although this is now changing with 30 - 40% of current registered players being of ethnic origin other than Fijian Indian.
The recent election of a new committee has added much needed enthusiasm, and this new team is committed to and focused on promoting soccer at all levels.
At the start of the 2011 season the club has nine senior soccer teams (four in Open Mens and five in Over 35), five junior teams and two youth teams.
The South Auckland Rangers are presently located at James Watson Park, 22R Israel Ave, Manukau City with two soccer fields, and are looking forward to moving to their new premises at Rongomai Park (with seven fields) in November 2011.
The new clubrooms at Rongomai will be shared with the Southern Braves Softball Club and will be jointly administered with them via a Trust. Both clubs will provide two trustees each with a fifth independent trustee to be approved by both parties.
The team are regular entrants to the Chatham Cup, their best performance coming in 1995, when they reached the Fifth Round (last 16 stage).The current south Auckland first team is managed by Darmen Achari and coached by Kamal Goundar, they are usually always league leaders, and were undefeated in 2 years, many Fiji team reps have past through the team
the first team: amit kumar, seva, edwin parsad, ganesh reddy, kamal goundar, dinesh shivam, avishek goundar, parneet singh, nilesh singh, akshay, shivnesh achari, rocky parsad, roneel pal, reenal pal, bali singh, avinash sami,