SF33
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Posts posted by SF33
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We could really start building momentum with a strong win here. For that reason alone, I'm predicting a depressing result to keep us in the mid-table mire.
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If this thread has taught me nothing else, it's taught me that active supporter groups past, present and in all likelihood future should probably get over themselves.
It's a thankless task and admirable effort that these groups put in and God knows the administration of this club deserves a good kicking at times but Jesus Christ...they do it because they want to do it.
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1 minute ago, fensaddler said:
Indeed. It was an away win, hard fought, against one of the better sides in the league. I reckon despite all the caveats, perhaps even because of them, our best performance of the season. Not our prettiest or most memorable, but the one that indicated we can do more than win at home against weak sides. Ps, I know, derby. We fluked it, and it was a first day of the season derby win. I think in real terms this means more. Adelaide were only as good as we let them be.
It's been this way for years. Encouraging win, of course. But look at Sydney of the past couple of years, look at Victory at their peak.
We have good games, then we crap the bed the following week, after the players have spent a few days reading about how good they are. Then they'll get stung by reading about how shit they are and put in a good performance again and rinse and repeat, month after month, season after season. The good teams, on the other hand, just keep banking 7-12 points every month throughout the season. Build on the Adelaide win, make a statement against Victory, then take a minimum of seven points from Wanderers, Jets and Mariners and we can start getting optimistic.
Not having a go at all, but saying that's our best performance of the season sums it up. that should be an absolute bog standard away win by any team with aspirations of doing more than making up the numbers in the first week of finals.
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I think people are just burnt out by it. Yeah, it beats propping up the table like the last couple of Heart seasons, but anything other than a win next week (against the form team of the comp, by a mile, who've had a habit of killing our enthusiasm with our team in this very fixture the past couple of seasons) and we're looking like also-rans. We're well and truly overdue to finally have a top two finish in the league and unless we can show something on Saturday, that looks to be out of our reach and it looks like a 3-5 place finish yet again.
EDIT: plus of course the negative publicity with Bruno and some truly baffling decisions from a brand/marketing perspective recently and the club is really testing the patience of its loyal supporters.
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On 12/14/2018 at 11:52 AM, Jacques Le Cube said:
I would argue that under Del Pietro the visitors have a clear identity.
On the field, they are committed to playing possession based attacking football, regardless of the opponent. Coaches who were unable to deliver this (Merrick, Durakovic) were removed immediately.
In terms of recruitment they prioritise giving spots in their youth team to Victorians. They also still give senior contracts to local NPL players.
The visitors have also managed to win 2 championships, a premiership and made the ACL knockout phase while adhering to these ideals.
City on the other hand have no discernable on field philosophy, do not give the same opportunities to local players and are far less successful on the field.
Apart from the winning thing, I haven't really noticed any of the others. Not saying you're wrong, just that it's a stretch to think that most people think of Victory as anything other than Muscat, Thompson, Berisha, Milligan a few other players (who were either spectacular for a couple of seasons or who were solid for 5+ years), navy blue, big crowds at Docklands and winning.
If Kisnorbo sticks around and maybe we can coax someone like Sorensen to be part of the club, that could help us with regards to an identity if/when we ever become a top team. Guys like Jamieson, Malik and Brattan are at a good age and have potential to become long-term members of the City family (I honestly thought Jamieson was like in his mid-30s).
Mooy became too big for the league, Engelaar played half a season, we've apparently dismissed Bruno in the most unceremonious way and we don't really have too many others who were truly memorable. If/when we'd had any real success when they were with us, guys like Behich, Wielaert, Novillo, Jakobsen, Brandan etc. would be looked at much differently. We went nowhere with them, so they are quickly forgotten.
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14 hours ago, TheStig said:
The ground is a little unstable having been a tip previously but that is just an engineering challenge. There would be little room for parking but access to Box Hill station is only a few blocks away and when the suburban loop is built the loop will have a station at Box Hill also.
It's possible that you mean that the Suburban Rail Loop will connect to the existing Box Hill Station (which is underground), but it sounds like you're saying that another Box Hill Station will be built, which certainly isn't in the plans at the moment. The location of several new stations as part of this project is a mystery, but the only new ones to be announced so far are Monash, Burwood, Doncaster, Bundoora and Melbourne Airport. For stations like Heidelberg, Reservoir, Box Hill, Glen Waverley, Cheltenham, Sunshine and Box Hill, it merely connects with the station that is already there, although stations like the Sunshine 'superhub' will of course need a bit of a spruce up.
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16 hours ago, Dylan said:
It seems like the main criteria were... A stadium and how much you were willing to pay for a licence.
Except for South Melbourne whom everyone knows talks sooo much shit its not funny, has a few loud supporters of the 500 that turn up each week and has a terrible stadium which is a pain in the absolute ass to get too
Metro Tunnel was throwing its weight behind the South Melbourne bid. The new Anzac station will be a stone's throw away. Granted, that would have still been a few years off, but the door seems to have been closed on that option now, surely you can't have four Melbourne teams, with only one in a 'growth' area.
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3 hours ago, mus-28 said:
Victory gobbled up most of the supporter base in the West, this is very left field as WMG had very little support on social media or from the footballing public. But knowing the FFA they probably offered the biggest license fee.
Anyone whose interested in the location of the stadium it's 1160 Sayers Rd Tarneit. State Government will have to cough up for all the infrastructure links as currently its a paddock with nothing around it.
I think people have to look beyond that to the NBL and BBL. I like basketball and cricket and a poor performance from a chosen team in those sports doesn't leave me miserable, like a pathetic City effort. I've already got an AFL team that I care too much about; maybe I don't need to run the risk of a sporting result ruining my weekend for (basically) 52 weeks of the year.
I wonder if being a City member will ultimately be like playing sport in your twilight, when everyone tells you you're a long time retired and then for other reasons, you take a season off and don't miss it in the slightest. I think I've been to three City home games in two years (not coincidentally, my daughter was born the day after the Christmas derby loss in 2016) and, besides a bit more Ross the Boss, I don't feel the slightest itch. There's a tiny bit of guilt that I should keep my membership streak going, although I'm also tempted not to out of spite, due to the membership office continually calling me about it.
Melbourne's population has cracked 5 million. It can support nine AFL teams (not including Geelong) where 50,000 is the bare minimum of what can be accepted these days and Storm who have more than 20,000. How many memberships do Victory and City combine for? Less than 40,000? City's issues are the same as the A-League's: We need to consistently outperform Victory to become successful (because, if you wanted to sign up with an A-League club, would you go for the most popular and arguably the most successful team, which plays to big crowds at Docklands and packs AAMI, or would you pick the club that routinely gets home crowds of less than 8,000, is constantly finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot and, despite having boatloads of cash, has nothing better than an FFA cup to show for its time in the league?), but the A-League has the same pressure to outperform cricket and the vastly improving NBL for the spotlight? Because if you'r serious, it shouldn't be hard for Melbourne City (on paper at least) to sign up 20,000 members.
I see issues like the cavernous size of AAMI Park, but it's funny how that's only an issue when we're playing poorly. We'll probably never be as big as Victory, but you can easily aim for 12-15k at a home game and shut the top level if required. The club just needs to be successful and entertaining (well, successful at least) and while it's going to be interesting to see how a genuine GWM club goes (given the drastic difference in relative population centres between Melbourne and Sydney), it's going to be equally interesting to see where City is left, if the new mob flourishes.
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He's getting quadruple teamed with no support whenever he gets near the attacking third. Put me down as someone who is utterly convinced that Bruno and McCormack would have been absolutely brilliant together. It would have just given that bit of space and time that both need to operate. There's no way you could put this level of attention on Tuna if McCormack was next to him, Ross would have a field day.
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5 minutes ago, benzema23 said:
Is it shit coaches or just an overall culture of losing that holds us back? The trajectory looked good st some point, when we had just won the FFA Cup, but the winning mentality just didn’t last.
Our tactics are rubbish, our squad looks completely unbalanced (how many attacking midfielders do we really need?), and the mentality is weak. There was no aggression tonight and no fucking plan B.
So disappointing.
Completely outcoached tonight and we pretty regularly look like we're not matching the opposition's motivation, that we haven't "come to play". That's on the coaching staff, I'm afraid.
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1 minute ago, fensaddler said:
They should have looked as gutted as we feel. But they don't, and that's unacceptable. They don't care.
Funnily enough, considering his sometimes casual demeanour on the field, the only player who I've seen consistently bring the goods in a post-match interview after a performance like that, to actually look filthy about the effort, like it means something to him, is Brattan.
The rest of them have either used that platform to abuse the referee (Neil Kilkenny) or give it the tried and true: "Yeah, we were a bit unlucky, if that one half chance we created in 90 minutes had gone in, it might have been different" (every other player and most of the coaches we've had).
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I mean, Pauly Retre has just put on a clinic against us. Pauly Retre! Even when we were propping up the table in the final Heart days, he was nothing more than a squaddie and probably the only reason he was on the squad at all was that he could provide depth in a few different roles.
Another in a seemingly never ending list of completely underwhelming City players who somehow becomes a quality player almost immediately after he left Melbourne.
Speaking of the final Heart days, tonight was a bit of a throwback, when I was barracking for our shots to go wide and not trouble Redmayne. Once it was clear we hadn't shown up, I didn't want some meaningless consolation goal to allow our players to talk about how unlucky they were. When they put in a collective effort like that, I want them to get utterly shellacked.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Redmayne now has more clean sheets playing against City for Sydney FC than he did in two years as the 'shot stopper' (as Brenton Speed put it, I assume an ironic reference) for Heart/City.
Will there ever be a line in the sand moment with these fuckwits? Jamieson sums it up in his post-match "It's only the third game, if Dario's chance had gone in it would have been a different game...blah...blah...blah," it's the same old crap and it's embarrassing. Outcoached and outworked by a team who wanted it more, even though they were banged up, and playing their third game in a week, their second in three days on the road.
Don't they ever get sick of being made to look like amateurs against Sydney? Once again, they embarrass themselves and then it's laughs and hugs after the game. It's unacceptable.
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On 05/09/2018 at 9:25 PM, bt50 said:
Well hes got absolutely nothing on Mooy and imo Brattan is actually a better footballer.
Look i thought Killa was good, but imo he was also the source of a lot of our problems. That season we were well known to be 'lazy' in terms of tracking back and as much as people used to point at Cahill, i actually thought Killa was the main culprit. He got the rep at least in general public terms of being a chaser due to his determination when the ball was in his general vicinity and fair enough, but imo when the ball was away from him and someone else responsible for the ball carrier, he almost never went with the player making the run. True Cahill didnt either, but Cahill wasnt the DM so the emphasis wasnt as high.
He also didn't seem to particularly "pair" well with anyone. Tbf might not be his fault but nevertheless.
At the end of the day, whether we rated Killer or not (and I certainly did), it's hard to argue that he'd be a walk-up start in the starting XI with the current squad, considering what happened last year and that Joyce is still in charge. He either had major personal issues with Killer or didn't think much of him as a player at all.
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We need to be consistently better than Victory, for a start. The opposite has been true for all but - what - two years of our existence? Why would new A-League supporters sign with City, rather than Victory for next season? We don't have too many obvious competitive advantages.
I'm also very turned off by the scheduling. From memory, our earliest home kick off time this season was 4:30pm. Not coincidentally, with a young family, that was the only game all season that I was able to attend. If you want families to come, balance out the start times.
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3 hours ago, jw1739 said:
No doubt Jako is a good player, but you need your visa and marquee players on the pitch every match if you're going to win anything. Older players are not necessarily injury-prone, but as we age we take longer to recover, and that is now his problem. I would have thought that we would have learned this lesson by now, so given that Jako is out of contract I think we'd be better off not to re-contract him.
I don't like to see a player like him depart, but the A-League is the A-League with numbers and salary caps and we have to be pragmatic.
I suppose the other thing that doesn't sit comfortably with me is he's the captain. Kisnorbo aside, I'm a bit tired of one-year wonders as captains.
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3 hours ago, jw1739 said:
I don't think we get much of a choice with the fixture. IIRC each club gets one "special request" per season (which may or may not be granted by FFA), and ours is the Christmas Derby.
Odd, isn't it, that we have to keep asking for something that ought to be a standard fixture every season?
With kick-off times, days of the week etc. it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time.
True. I'm sure if most of our home games started between 1-3pm from November-March, there'd be a different group that would be unhappy about it (along with games having to be postponed, heat restrictions used etc.), just giving my perspective.
I don't necessarily blame the club, but pretty tired of sporting clubs in general (they all do it in this country, from what I see) expecting people to part with several hundred dollars for a season ticket, before they have the first clue as to whether the fixture actually suits them or not.
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8 minutes ago, Heart of Melbourne said:
Jacobsen is injury prone. Move him on.
I'm not against him staying or going (as long as we get someone good back) really, provided he gets the all clear when he undoubtedly gets checked out at the end of the season.
I don't doubt that we could get a better (or at least comparable and more durable) visa player than him, but right now, I think our squad is talented enough to do better than what the results of the past three seasons have yielded and I think that part of the problem is too much unnecessary turnover each year. And, as so many ill-conceived visa signings over the years have shown, while we could do better than Jakobsen, we could also do a hell of a lot worse.
To (hopefully) explain my point a bit better: while I have a lot of confidence in the talent of the squad, there's barely any players in it that I would consider 'untouchable' (Bruno, Bart, Arzani, maybe Brattan). But I don't want to start yet another season with about six new faces in the starting 11. We need a few tweaks, not an overhaul. And I think those tweaks can be achieved by recruiting cleverly to fill the spaces opened up by some of the more obvious departures.
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On 30/04/2018 at 5:17 PM, jw1739 said:
Certainly Petrillo's job ought to be on the line. It was Munn and Petrillo who went to Manchester to discuss players we required. Munn has other roles in the club but Petrillo is head of the Football Department and IMO he made some major stuff-ups this season.
Anyway, seems like departures will be announced very soon. https://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/article/2018/04/30/arzani-staying-put-vanquished-city-begin-rebuild
Can't say I'm heartbroken by any of those probable departures, although I wouldn't mind Jakobsen, Mauk and Fitzgerald staying, if possible. But it's a matter of seeing what we get in return, really.
Kamau, Tongyik, Budzinski etc...whether we like them or not, Joyce pretty clearly gave up on them (or never rated them) anyway, so we may as well try someone else in their spots.
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I'd like to revise my mark. I think one of the most important goals for us each year in order to grow is have a better season than Victory. We didn't do that. You can see it with Newcastle: making the grand final, even hosting a grand final (as we would have if we'd won and the other result stayed the same) would have been an absolutely massive step for the club and if we gave a good account of ourselves, that would be another one.
Of course they're not mutually exclusive, but as far as I'm concerned, finishing higher on the table, and going deeper in the finals than Victory are more important than the results of the three derbies combined.
Oh, and a fail for something else: the fixture. I find it pretty distasteful that the club tries to extort money from us through a 'price freeze' of our membership fees (like that should be a huge incentive in the first place) before we have any idea of what the fixture will be. With two young daughters, going to a game from 7pm onwards was not in play for me this season, hence, I barely used my membership this year. If the club wants to genuinely distance itself from Victory and create a point of difference, my advice would be to try to take afternoon games to make it possible for more kids (or parents of very young children) to come along.
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If there is a big turnover, I'd say it's a fail. If we go into next season with a pretty similar core and a new marquee that the coach actually wants, it's a pass.
I think the squad is very talented, but I'm so sick of us finishing the season with more or less a completely different senior team to the one we started the season with.
Cahill, Brandan, Carrusca, Kilkenny, La Rocca, McCormack (in fairness, that's a bit different), Tongyik, Kamau, Galekovic, Budzinski...all players that were entrenched in the team or expected to be major components and were out the door, on the way out, or relegated to afterthoughts on the bench (if they were lucky).
Wasn't Fitzy getting a bit of buzz by the Fox Sports crew as potentially one of the players of the league early in the year? By the end of the season, the same commentary team was openly deriding a decision to put Fitzgerald on for Arzani, as though Fitzgerald was Iain Ramsay or something.
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12 hours ago, Harrison said:
Post-mortem:
- Jamieson doesn't give us enough drive from full-back and is a terrible captain
Hold up, wasn't it his exquisite ball that led to Bruno's goal? I really, really like Jamo...he somehow seems to tread that difficult line between having a bucketful of c**t in him, yet somehow also being widely respected around the league.
So, either Victory, Redders or Hoffman will win the Grand Final this year. Yippee. Seems quite appropriate that our best chance of making a grand final in our history has been snuffed out by a scorpion kick and a player who had five years here as a mediocre utility and whose most meaningful contribution in that time was his regular 'Coffee with Hoffy' segment on social media.
Some game changing non-calls by the ref in the first half hour, but hard to argue that the better team overall on the night didn't win. Barely made their keepers raise a sweat all game.
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1 minute ago, belaguttman said:
The team will only perform as well as the weakest link. Sydney only has one weak link but the rest of the team does a good job of protecting ReddersAs you've pointed out the role of each player protects and compliments the role of others in the team, it's no good having us just create 'scoring opportunities', we need lots of balls into the box and shots on target
It was interesting hearing Redmayne talk on Fox Sports when asked about the pressure of performing for the best team and having to remain switched on for the full 90 minutes, because you might only be called into action on one or two occasions and you have to be ready, as opposed to being constantly under threat.
If his Heart/City career is anything to go by, it seems like that situation really suits him, as he generally seemed capable of making 2-3 miraculous saves, then flubbing a routine one. Unless he's a completely different player now (he didn't seem any different as far as I saw at WSW), it seems to be a case of getting a heap of shots on goal (easier said than done) and he'll inevitably let one through. Or get heaps of corners into that corridor of uncertainty and he'll invariably make the wrong choice of whether to go or stay.
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9 minutes ago, kingofhearts said:
Disagree strongly with this.
I honestly think Mauk has been average for a while and should be benched.
Outside of the amazing stop he did last game he did jack shit #unpopularopinion
I think his grunt work has been extremely important and since it's probably an area where the rest of our attacking players aren't great, I think it makes him vital to the team's balance.
It's just that bit of polish that he's lacking and if he'd bagged 3-5 goals this season like he should have, instead of 1, he'd be one of the recruits of the year. Granted, that statement is a bit 'If my aunt had bollocks, she'd be my uncle', but I think he's shown enough in his career that he should be able to snap out of this funk.
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Bruno Fornaroli - "El Tuna"
in Melbourne City
Posted
Love Bruno and appreciate everything that he's done since joining us and the club has certainly handled this poorly, but if the stories about him wanting to join Sydney in the offseason are true, geez I'm probably more on the City side than the Bruno side. There would need to be some pretty compelling circumstances to just let your marquee visa player (under contract) walk to a rival A-League club, let alone the benchmark for most of the time that he's been here. I wouldn't let him go either. If that made his position at the club and relationship with Joyce untenable, so be it.
Like I said, the club's not blameless. If this is what's happened, they should have read how it was going to play out and resolved it before now, but I'm pretty far from OK with Bruno looking for an early out on his contract to join Sydney, of all places, a club that's been embarrassing us on the pitch ever since our FFA Cup win, in spite of our teams being pretty even (in my opinion) on paper over that period. A player in Bruno's shoes should want to supplant Sydney, not bloody join them.