Kinnibari

Small, because away trips are generally pretty far. Adelaide is 8 hours by car from Melbourne, for example. The NSW clubs are closer to each other so you get more travellers.

No you know how we feel every time we watch some euro club football Touche, my friend. Got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised so far. Heart seem to be doing alright at getting the balls to the wings - is this your usual method for creating goals, or is there a fair amount of playing balls through the defence for strikers to run onto, too? Our strategy for scoring goals is highly secret. So secret we avoid showing anyone in either theory or practice.

Made an account so I could post my notes from the forum. JD didn't say much, would have been interesting to have SM there. Hopefully he was unavailable because he's off getting us a great signing, who knows. Overall I feel like it went well even though I'm still concerned about our performance on the pitch for the rest of the season. Aloisi (and I think Sidwell?) spoke about the difficulties of having such an unsettled squad with people coming in and out due to injury/unavailability/key players being sold, so hopefully they plan to work on that next year. /optimism. Also Aloisi talked about the importance of having a strong and settled back 4 to build your squad on. (Not sure if he realised he was saying that basically we are fucked...) Also said he thought we were hampered by the squad we had available, that we didn't have strong subs to come on as impact players. Said some weeks it was tricky to work out who would make the bench. Various things from Sidwell's presentation at the start: Club has roughly a 9.5 million budget. Next year will get 2 million from tv deal. They are also feeling confident about getting Westpac to renew as key sponsor and said that Westpac was attracted to the club as a result of all the community work we do (as mentioned we spend $550,000 on community visits and this year have seen 60,000 kids iirc.) They intend to offer subscription (bit of a weird word to use, assume they mean shares or membership in club) to public once the club breaks even. Bad news on the w-league front. Apparently they want to bring in a w-league team but all the w-league sides are mostly paid for by the FFA and state associations (e.g. MV pay very little towards their side). Obviously we don't want to pay for the full thing ourselves if the other clubs aren't so we're trying to get support from FFA and FFV. Later on in the forum someone asked for more info, they said it would likely be not next year but the year after. Good to get some more details but pretty depressing nevertheless. Will have to keep following Canberra from interstate while I wait. We are planning to build our facilities with Latrobe still because they want to become the first choice uni for sport in Australia. We hope to build facilities with them because it's hard to get govt funding. They have a two stage plan, first stage (which is hopefully soon) is to build a good pitch. Second stage building infrastructure. Said they moved to Epping for the youth league because they weren't happy with the other ground. Sidwell said they weren't happy with the schedule this year and will talk to FFA about it. (Was in response to question about getting more Friday night games as a result of the new free to air game.) They want a derby on Christmas eve and also want Labour day weekend game, but also want to talk about the schedule more broadly. Due to the club's focus on kids they have policy of no sponsorship/revenue from gaming/gambling which was good to hear. Close to break even this year partially due to player sales. Described us as 'ok' and that we 'couldn't cry poor'. Someone asked a question about the lack of a crowd sitting on the side the camera is pointing at, even if they're elsewhere in the ground. Said they were talking about how to address it. (Also asked us to please bring a friend.) (My notes now read "Is this a question or a monologue?" and unfortunately that could refer to any one of many questions. You all know who you are.) The new Div 2 team aims to have players between 17 to 21 and flows on from (and possibly into?) youth team, gives us ability to look at players and to coach them the same way we want them to be coached and in a consistent way year round. Apparently the FFA don't want clubs to have private academies, they want clubs to work with states. I got the impression from what Aloisi was saying that he tells his players to stick to the same system due to lack of consistency with the players; because they are not the same each week the consistency is in part driven by the structure and he wants them to know what they're meant to be doing from that because they can't just learn how the player in that position normally likes to play. I might be reading too much into what he said though.