Harrison
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Posts posted by Harrison
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Just now, Missing_Moy said:
Knee is heavily strapped
Think that was reported a few weeks ago. Seems genuine. Atkinson got a big role today. Interesting front three, hope it works. Colakovski up front is what I would’ve gone with so happy with that.
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1 hour ago, malloy said:
Now that we are looking like we have the squad to win the game tomoz, I get the feeling Adelaide will win today and the APL will move the GF to Adelaide so that there can be a full crowd and we won't be allowed to travel over there.
Looking like Sydney unfortunately. Bankwest here we come (if we win tomorrow).
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Can and should only get better. Still has a lot of improvement left in him but he’s on the right track for a decent move in a few years time.
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9 minutes ago, fensaddler said:
My immediate reaction is just to want to pull the plug on the whole season. Enough already. The Finals are so chaotic and devalued that I can't be arsed any more. It's just contract fulfilment.
Tend to agree. The loss of three of our best players rendered the Finals Series almost meaningless, regardless of any other team. I wish they did away with them completely but I get the commercial realities here. The whole thing is disappointing.
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18 minutes ago, rass said:
What a fucking disgrace. No wonder our league is a laughing stock.
Had to post, just so frustrated with it...
I completely agree. It’s no surprise but I’m a big fan of this league and a big believer in Australian football. I will always defend and even try to promote the A-League to other football fans but this kind of shit makes it difficult. It’s Mickey Mouse type stuff. Not observing the window is just not what a professional league should be doing. And I’m sure they wanted to, maybe they even tried, and Fox said no or something like that. But the sooner we put integrity above the whims of the broadcaster/governing body/whoever it was the better. How can we be proud of our league when we get the basics wrong? Very frustrating.
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2 hours ago, malloy said:
FB, really is that bad a player, its just that he has some minor skill and can do a few good things every now and then. However, he literally goes missing as soon as things aren't running smoothly for us. He has zero hinger or drive, zero grit or determination. Watch him when he doesn't have the ball and you will see that he will hide behind an opposition player, when the other team breaks forward he will slowly jog back and lose his man (I think there was only one instance last night where he truly busted his ass to get back n cover). This lack of effort by him means that other players have to put in more effort and get dragged out of position resulting in more opportunities conceded to the opposition. So whilst he might have a little bit of skill and a little bit of flair his downsides heavily outweigh his upsides. It is arguable that he could be "carried" by two other more industtious players in midfield (e.g. O'Neill and Metcalfe), but he is never going to be ahead of Luna and given that his best performances are against shit clubs, I don't know why you would want to carry a player like him, when you could carry a younger player who has drive n determination and wants to fight for their position.
Championship winning teams can't have passenger players like him. You watch any good team and when they turn the ball over all but maybe 1 or 2 forwards works hard to get back and cover.
I think alot of the shit he cops is warranted. Though, I will admit that I am somewhat relentless when critiquing those who I do not think are at an acceptible level.
Well I respectfully disagree. It’s not how I saw his game last night and it’s not what I see most weeks. I think he does his fair share of defensive work but maybe this is down on last season. He does go missing and isn’t the gritty type, that’s fair. But I don’t think he hides much. I see him in good spots calling for it and in tight areas where he draws in more than one defender.
He was also involved in a few of our better chances, either by playing the second last ball or the final ball. One was a long ball to Nabbout who just over hit the cross to Colakovski. Another was a beautiful cross to Luna, he then squared it to Tilio who couldn’t get on the end of it (maybe a lack of predatory instinct) and another late where he crossed to Atkinson who almost scored. If any of those come off then maybe the perception is different.
All in all he was good last night. Is he a very good player? No. Should we be aiming higher? Yes. Happy for us to go after someone with a lot more output next season and I really hope we do. I think we agree on that!
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Starting him was odd but is there much of a difference between starting a player and bringing them on for half an hour at the end? Maybe. The pace of the game is slower but it's more transitional. At the start we're trying to set the tempo with our press, which takes a lot of effort. I can see both sides here, and if the doctor/physio thought he was at no extra risk, and Nabbout himself felt comfortable, then fair enough. We can sit here now and say it was dumb but he could've done that motion at 90 minutes or in the first minute.
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The constant criticism of Berenguer amuses me. He was far from our worst last night but I guess he's the only whipping boy now so people have to take their frustration out on someone. In truth the midfield worked ok, at times pretty well, but they've found that the front three isn't what it used to be. We've gone from a front three that couldn't not score to one that threatens but lacks that cutting edge and the midfield has never been (especially without Metcalfe) a huge source of goals. Some nice combinations were made and the link between midfield and the forwards was there most of the night, however it's the final ball or shot that ultimately matters. Unfortunately we've almost run out of time trying to find a solution. Noone helps, but he'll be rusty by the time we actually play and Nabbout is still a big question mark. Tilio is struggling under the weight of expectation now and Colakovski lacks experience. Tsubaki is...somewhere?
I'm less confident now than I've ever been but I've come to accept that this Finals Series is going have an asterisk on it anyway. We've been robbed of three of our best players (and three players that could easily make the team of the season), one from each line on the pitch, and didn't really prepare for it too well. Or should I say we tried but couldn't come up with a robust solution. It seemed like we tried one thing, it didn't work, so we tried another thing, which didn't work that well either, and then we tried a third but it wasn't much better. On top of that injuries have meant that we couldn't trial the three that we needed to trial. Our preparation has been a mess but in large part it's been out of our control.
One last thing for me is that this team desperately needs a spark, and it should get one when they finally get to play in front of a home crowd. I still don't think we win the GF but who knows in front of a decent crowd at AAMI.
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Great news!
Nabbout has been a revelation this season. I’ve said it before but his effect was enormous. He was the catalyst for our upswing in results. He gave us exactly what we needed and have lacked for quite a while: power, pace, directness and a bit of trickery.
A Melbourne-born player too, can’t ask for much more.
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It sounds like he’ll make it back for the finals. In that recent interview he talked about potentially playing in the Jets match. Maybe he thought that would be next week though.
The other thing is it sounds like he’s staying. He talked about being excited to play alongside Leckie. If we can keep Maclaren, we’d have the best Australian front three in the history of the league.
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On 30/04/2021 at 2:07 PM, Harrison said:
Hmmm. This is an interesting thing to read almost three months later. I’m happy we went with the first option. It seems as though everything has clicked and we’ve achieved that elusive consistency. What’s more, Nabbout was definitely the missing piece of the puzzle for our forward group, and Reis allowed Griffiths to slot back into the midfield and give us a much stronger spine. We haven’t really had any under performers since then too. It’s been refreshing and I must say that Kisnorbo has done a fine job.
He’ll have to face a big test when we lose some of our players to international duty. It would be unfair to grade him a failure if we don’t win the Championship, but we should be clinching the Premiership with this squad. If he can somehow engineer a GF win with some of our best players missing then he might be something special.
That second paragraph is coming into sharp focus now. He’s got to figure out a way to get us scoring.
Defence and midfield is fine. No issues there. Noone in the front three alongside Tilio is strong, but Noone improved when Nabbout came into the team and took the pressure off him. Tilio draws a lot of attention so Noone should still be able to do some damage but no Maclaren means he’s got to be the prime mover. Is a false 9 the solution? Looks like Kisnorbo’s leaning that way but maybe we’d be better going our usual system.
Colakovski is my preferred choice as the striker but Tsubaki is an option. Prefer Colakovski because of his direct style and finishing. Play him as an out and out striker. Tilio and Noone out wide. Trial that against Newcastle. In front of Berenguer and Luna. Plenty of attacking firepower.
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Reckon people should calm down. Victory are useless and we just conceded a goal two minutes past the end of added time to draw 1-1. With five of our best players missing.
The problem is obviously that we’ve got one more match to figure out how we can score before it starts to matter.
Noone and Colakovski will need to come back. Where are they? Is Nabbout done for the season? He’d be handy.
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2 minutes ago, Jovan said:
True, so this might be the ideal time for CFG to look at Marquee, especially in the light of the new TV in which i assume they had massive involvement.
Maybe it's just me hoping but it could be possible.
Agree, Leckie and Nabbout will eat alot of the cap. So we could actually see a predominately Aussie squad.
Very interesting.
The rules might change too. They might increase the cap (don’t think they scrap it but it’s possible), scrap the allowances like the homegrown and loyalty ones (or increase or decrease them), change the foreign player limit, change the marquee limit etc.
There’s a lot of uncertainty given that next season the shackles are off for the APL. It’s a new era and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some changes to the squad rules.
Plus the pandemic will still be having an effect here and abroad. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out.
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2 minutes ago, Jovan said:
Why wouldn't you replace Tsubaki, Noone and Berenguer.
That's potentially 3 starting players to lift the overall standard.
Baring a catastrophic injury run I completely agree that list is impressive, considering several haven't yet reached peak levels, Tilio Colakovski Najarine and lesser extent Atkinson and Glover, and I think Metcalfe has still heaps of improvement.
Only issue will be cap management and if Sydney has done it consistently for 4 or so seasons I can't see why we cant.
Let's also look at PK also improving.
The problem is the cap. If we brought in three foreigners who are better than our XI then we’ve probably got a problem with fitting them under it. Leckie and Nabbout would command decent salaries although one could join Maclaren as a marquee. But then paying for all the others would be tricky given some of their performances. A few of them would still be on their existing contracts I think, so might be relatively cheap for another season. But only a few of our younger players would qualify as homegrown and not many will reach the loyalty criterion for another season at least. Curtis qualifies next season but it’s not like his whole salary is excluded, it’s just a portion of it.
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It’ll be interesting to see how we go about this. Four of the five foreign players are out of contract and two are on the older side even though Noone is in good form. Luna will be 30 next year but looks like he’s still got a lot left. Tsubaki is almost a certainty to not come back at this point.
Potentially we’ve got Leckie coming in and Najjarine is still on our books. We might be content with an almost entirely domestic squad plus Reis and Luna. Retention is important though and if we lose any strong Australian players we might need to go foreign.
This is a seriously good team with a lot of competition for spots:
Glover
Atkinson Reis Good Jamieson
Luna O’Neill Metcalfe
Leckie Maclaren Nabbout
Sutton, Griffiths, Tilio, Najjarine, Colakovski, Galloway, Garrucio
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2 minutes ago, MHFC-FAN said:
It's sad that you are all so easily brainwashed and persuaded to become part of the clinical trial for this sinister vaccine. Sad times we are living in...
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1 hour ago, fensaddler said:
Looking on the bright side, people are going and getting the vaccine, over 40s can get it too, we might finally get some proper quarantine built, and finals may be delayed long enough for us to get the band back together. There are at least some upsides to all of this.
And we're already champions.
You’re right. Even if things got out of hand, it’s nice to know that we’ve sealed it. All that hard work has been rewarded with the purest trophy in football. Nobody can take it from us, unless we get it stripped retrospectively for doping or salary cap breaches or something.
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27 minutes ago, jw1739 said:
Reading the description of what a smart TV can do I would have no chance of driving it.
They’re actually very intuitive these days and there aren’t too many cables (just one cable going to the aerial outlet and one power cable) for a simple set up which might be all you need.
I have a Samsung smart TV and the remote is very simple. It’s mostly just using the arrow buttons and the ‘OK’ and ‘back’ buttons to navigate around and the apps are easy to download and access (they’re big, visible tiles). I’ve got Kayo and Optus Sport (soon to add Paramount+) as well as ones like Netflix and YouTube.
The setup guides on the TV are very simple to follow for connecting to WIFI. They basically hold your hand through it. Even an old timer like you could get it sorted!
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40 minutes ago, jw1739 said:
I find HDMI to be a real pain. I like to watch classic shows that have been recorded and put up on YouTube. This used to be OK until my PC with its large screen crashed and was replaced by a laptop. I spent hours putting a neat little fold-down flap on the side of the TV cabinet, stained and varnished to match the cabinet itself, so that I could move the laptop there and connect to the TV via a short HDMI cable. But I found I was going through HDMI cables at a rate of knots, and worse still that the repeated unplugging and plugging has made one of the HDMI ports on the laptop slightly dodgy.
So it's back to watching YouTube on the laptop. I hate technology really. We are so dependent on it but it isn't robust enough. The PC is nicknamed "Lazarus" because it raised itself from the dead after months of being turned off, and the laptop is a real nuisance - run more than a couple of applications concurrently and the bloody thing overheats. Mind you, if I understood what I was doing it would help...
A smart TV would change your life.
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Ok so my first impression is that this is fantastic news. $200m across five years with a trigger for a further three years. It's obviously a wait and see type situation for the new streaming service but their ambitions are good and they're clearly in this for the long haul (or long enough to try to grow the game). They've gone big in the US with football so they're not completely new to the sport. By the sounds of things they will spend a fair bit on advertising and FTA on a main channel on Saturday night, prime time is terrific. Added to this will be the capital injection from the PE group, so there's plenty of cash to invest.
APL will help with production, which is an interesting point, though I know they've been keen on that for a while. I think we can say goodbye to Fox Sports-level coverage (which was very good quality) for all matches (dead rubbers involving smaller clubs will probably be somewhat stripped back in terms of production). The other thing I don't know much about is the fixture. Do they have a preference for a summer or winter or hybrid season? Time slots? Do they want to have a lot of say on things like expansion? Wait and see.
All in all, this is a really good thing for football.
@jw1739 can we change the threat title to broadcasting or something? Might as well keep using this thread.
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5 hours ago, NewConvert said:
I didn't get to watch the game but if somebody watched all teh way through I wouldn't mind a player by player summary. So far this is the only one and I never thought much of Geogievski but it is good to read a positive review of Galloway and Tsubaki.
Forgot Gomulka - an interesting game, I think he was solid at times but positionally he struggled, has a lot to learn and will take a bit from that match.
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1 hour ago, NewConvert said:
I didn't get to watch the game but if somebody watched all teh way through I wouldn't mind a player by player summary. So far this is the only one and I never thought much of Geogievski but it is good to read a positive review of Galloway and Tsubaki.
Sutton - ok, beaten near post for first goal, couldn’t save other two penalties.
Galloway - offensively good, no crosses really landed.
Georgievski - had a lot of it as a CB in the first half and played a lot of passes short and long, defensively a mess, moved to RB in second half.
Good - struggled a bit, their quick counter attacks were exposing our defenders badly and Curt wasn’t at his best.
Reis - ok.
Mills - not great.
Garrucio - didn’t notice him much.
Metcalfe - just ok, bit leggy.
Berenguer - got forward a lot but couldn’t play the final ball.
Tsubaki - might’ve been our best, was attacking and caused a bit of concern for Roar.
Tilio - likewise, was lively and direct but lacked the finishing touch, tried to do too much sometimes.
Maclaren - just not his night, when he went near post the ball went far, when he stayed back the ball went across the goal face.
Luna - probably improved our midfield, played a few balls but nothing came of them.
Colakovski - tried hard.
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3 minutes ago, Mr MO said:
He was horrible, can’t believe you vote for him 😉
Georgievski then.
King always makes mistakes when I watch him. All refs do. But his are bad.
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Null and void the Finals before the wheels completely come off.
Sunday 20th June, 4:05KO, Semi final vs Bulls.
in Melbourne City
Posted
Colakovski up front works and it’s surely the set-up we go with against Sydney. Tilio grew into the match but should be more comfortable on the left side now. Atkinson gave a strong performance, might just be the difference between us winning it and losing it. Midfield was a little patchy and the defence was good.