former AEK Athens star, Kostas Nestoridis as player-coach. The result was a significant increase in crowd attendances and a fourth league title in 1966. Eager to repeat its success, the club recruited a number of Greek and local footballers, but they failed to make any impact. By 1969, the import experiment was considered a failure and most of the Greek players returned to their homeland. 1970–77 In 1970, the club focused its attention on recruiting local soccer players. It soon signed two players that would become South Melbourne's greatest players, Steve Walker and striker Jim Armstrong. South Melbourne missed out on the title by a point in the 1971 season, edged out by Footscray JUST, but with Armstrong scoring goals aplenty, South Melbourne went on to win the championship in 1972. The season also saw coach Bill Curran consolidate the first team's strength by signing midfielder Peter Bourne (Burnley) and promoting highly skilled youngsters Giovanni Barticciotto, Fethon Ileris and Bill Hasapis. The club continued its successful run with the 1974 title, second place in 1975, and with star recruits Jimmy Mackay, Peter Ollerton and Duncan Cummings, capped off its final year in the Victorian State League by winning the 1976 championship. National Soccer League South Melbourne joined Mooroolbark, Heidelberg United, and Footscray JUST as Melbourne's participants in the newly formed National Soccer League (NSL) in 1977 which was Australia's first sporting national competition. A mass exodus of its best players (Armstrong, Bourne, Mackay, Walker), saw the team slump to 11th place in its inaugural year, but a recruiting drive by coach Dave Maclaren gave the club a respectable third in 1978. It wasn't to last as South Melbourne finished at the bottom of the league table in 1979. 1978–89 The recruitment of Alan Davidson, George Campbell (Aberdeen F.C.), Steve Blair, Branko Buljevic, Alun Evans (Liverpool), and Charlie Egan, helped South Melbourne climb the NSL ladder in the early part of the decade, with South becoming runners up in the NSL in 1981, which was their best ever NSL placing at the time. They also won the Ampol Cup in 1982. Some solid player signings such as (Oscar Crino, Doug Brown, Bobby Russell and John Yzendoorn) gave the club some respectability, but a combination of committee problems and a string of coaches, never allowed the team to settle and gain consistency. South Melbourne finished first on the league ladder in 1984,