There was someone on this forum once, who from memory had sat on a mother's morning tea with one of Nix's AWs players wives, where the gossip was that Hudson was rated by the players!
An unconventional source of inside info granted - but not one you can tarnish with any 'fake news' sycophant media type accusations. To me there is just a consistent fed of info that planning wise esp he's doing a good job.
The OFC games to me are pretty meaningless as far as getting a gauge on AWs form/progress. They don't excite the fans or players, AWs are never at full strength and are just shark games that have to played in order to play the big games that matter, and excite the players & fans. Of the starting eleven that played the OFC Nations final I'm guessing barely half would be in a 1st choice AWs side now.
End of the day many folks on this forum, will never like Hudson even if he blended into a wonderful combination of Mother Theresa and Alex Ferguson.
Ferguson was poor in Europe remember!
And I think turning in Alex Ferguson would make half the forum love him and the other half passionately hate him...
I honesty think he'll be judged on his results. So far I think most of us are being fairly generous and giving him the benefit of the doubt based on the USA performance and a general willingness in that tour and the home game to press and try and play football.
The dislike has come from saying that being unable to score in open play hoofing the ball long against teams like PNG (who passed through us) was good and his continual press hype with footy celebs (Allardyce etc) and links to jobs he's never getting ie Norwich where the candidates were allegedly : Pardew, Pearson, Roy Hodgson and our lad. You know, a wealth of EPL experience and Bahrain under- 23. Odd one out there.
We're a low maintenance lot I reckon, but we don't like sophists and BS. If you tried a long ball game that didn't quite come off, don't pretend it was Barcelona or something. I mean we know we're ultimately on a hiding to nothing.
If he gets results, stops bleating about justified criticism on a show with Tony Veitch and helps the careers of a few players who go on to decent things great. That'll probably be enough for most of us to like him I'd say.
The question is what are good results for us? What is realistically achievable?
