HEARTinator

Exactly. The inference that some people wanted to be like Victory was spurious nonsense and missed the main point - which you have made well.

Popovic has his eye on him already

But the point remains. Players exited under him, team stability was shit house yet our overlords stood by. The central point is that our foreign management are not 'invested' in the our club - in hearts and minds. They don't suffer any anxiety over what's happening down under because their main focus is elsewhere. Like win silverware?

I know it's unpopular to 'look next door' but this is 100% true. Our problem under CFG is that our owners have no affinity with Australia, Melbourne or our team. The whole exercise is 'sports washing' and each team in the stable is simply a 'trophy' with Manchester being the prize. At least with Di Pietro he is 'invested' in his team and will not sit idly by while things turn to shit. That's the difference between Tard management and us - Wazza in charge for 2 years is proof. Should have been shown the door after one season.

Fellow inmates, I give you the MOTM this Saturday. We'll have 80% possession and lose to a Hoffman screamer

And this is the core of our recruiting problem ATM. Simply observing our games as a casual watcher it would be hard to identify who are our visa/marquee players and who are our locals. If you watch Sydney you would quickly see that Ninks commands the midfield and that le Fondre is a force in the front. Castro for Glory would easily catch the eye and Toivonen for the Tards likewise. These guys can influence a game. I don’t quite see the same with our squad.

NO YES

Dropping points in a winnable game. That’s our season 2019/20.

Bouzanis you hero!!!!

We have such a uniformly skilful side. It’s hard to tell who the difference between the bog standard locals and the visa and marquees.

Good goal though

Good work JMac to Noone to goooooool

Utterly predictable

Well that would be interesting. CFG oil money gets trumped by WU pesos. https://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/danish-twist-to-o-neill-s-looming-switch-to-k-league-20191231-p53nwa.html Rojas return Former Johnny Warren Medallist Marco Rojas could be back in the A-League next week. The New Zealand international left Danish club Sonderjyske last week and is understood to have received a flurry of offers from A-League clubs. The Hairdryer understands Western United are the front-runners to land his signature.

A winter comp would align with the rest of the Australian football pyramid and allow for prom/rel in the future (?). Fox Sports ratings being down? The advent of streaming services may have made it difficult to judge this. Kayo and Telstra's 'My Football' might hide the real numbers of people watching - don't know for sure. However attendances at games has been on the decline. Average attendance per season: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-League_attendance 2005–06 10,956 2006–07 12,911 2007–08 14,610 2008–09 12,180 2009–10 9,793 2010–11 8,429 2011–12 10,497 2012–13 12,347 2013–14 13,041 2014–15 12,511 2015–16 12,326 2016–17 12,294 2017–18 10,671 2018–19 10,411 Not sure that playing games in winter in parallel with AFL/NRL will help those figures. https://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/jason-culina-it-s-not-possible-to-perform-as-well-in-summer-as-in-winter-20200108-p53pvc.html Jason Culina: 'It's not possible to perform as well in summer as in winter' By Jason Culina January 8, 2020 — 6.27pm It was 20 years ago but I will never forget the feeling of training in the European winter coming from the Australian summer. I joined Ajax from Sydney Olympic in 1999. The pace of play and technical standard was a class above but almost instantly, I felt I could operate quicker. In the Australian summer, I could make three or four sprints before I was out of breath. By the time my first winter in the Netherlands arrived, I was sprinting eight or nine times. If I really needed, I could probably make a 10th before being out of puff. In Europe, players are fitter, stronger and faster. That's just the reality, we are not yet up to the quality of Europe. In saying that, it's a hell of a lot easier playing in cooler conditions and 99 per cent of players will agree. Whether it was in the Eredivisie, UEFA Champions League or international games, I could not only perform better and faster in European winters but my recovery was also a lot better and quicker. I could play two, three games a week at a high level in Europe but in the A-League, I would lose up to four kilograms after games in heat and take days to recover. Performances suffer but not as much as the wellbeing of players. It's not just the heat of the Australian of summer that takes it out of you but the rock hard fields at that time of year. We have to train on them every day and it takes a toll on players' joints, knees and their backs. As I learned, the older players feel it the most. My career was almost ended by a serious knee injury in 2011 that was caused by wear and tear. There wasn't a single factor or incident that caused the injury but the hard conditions in Australia might have accelerated the deterioration. If I had my time again, I would have managed my work loads and wellbeing differently. My attitude was always to train, train and train. The more I trained, the better I played. That was how we worked on the softer grounds and cold winters of Europe but I shouldn't have applied the same intensity daily in the A-League. In hindsight, I would have skipped a training session here and there because of my age and the hard pitches. I should have been smarter as a player. Over seven years with the Socceroos, I played games in South America, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. I experienced heat, humidity, harsh winters and altitude but the most difficult climate I've had to work in might well be the Australian summer. A one-off game in the humidity of South East Asia poses challenges but the weekly grind of playing and training in heat, on hard pitches and having to travel great distances frequently makes the A-League very, very difficult. You simply can't extract the same kind of performance out of yourself playing here in Australia compared to how you will play in Europe. The human body is not made for that. It’s like a car, if it overheats then it doesn’t perform as well. When I played on the Gold Coast, sometimes we trained at 7am in the morning just to avoid the peak of the heat. If we didn't, we would be absolutely wrecked by the weekend and not able to perform in games. That's why we should start talking about moving back to a winter competition. Whether we like it or not, the A-League is in the entertainment business. If you are putting something on TV screens, you want it to be good quality. Fox Sports ratings are down and that's purely because not enough people think it's entertaining. If moving the competition to winter helps to improve the quality, you will get more people watching. At the end of the day, football players are entertainers and if we can’t entertain, people won’t watch. That’s the way it works. In my opinion, moving towards a winter league makes sense. It realigns us with Asia, youth football and fixes some issues we have with the Australian league. It obviously means we compete with other codes like rugby league and AFL but we are already competing with cricket, basketball and other sports in summer. If we believe in our sport then we shouldn’t care about who we compete with. Now is the time to start the conversation about moving the A-League to winter. Jason Culina played for PSV Eindhoven, Ajax and FC Twente in the Netherlands. He made 58 appearances for the Socceroos and was part of the 2006 and 2010 World Cup campaigns and played for Gold Coast United and Sydney FC in the A-League.