Thompsons piece was crap. Morgan was on the sidelines for that training run as is his right. Terry used to turn up a training on a quite regular basis. Morgan did NOT participate in the training...he took some notes, big deal. Its great to see owners at training. Are we starting to see the good old "tall poppy" syndrome with the NZ media and Gareth?
I am getting a little sick of " we were doing OK this season until those nasty new owners came along and made us change our style". We have been adsolutely dire since the season started(apart from game 1 against Sydney) We only won 1 out of first 6 games. The 442 and long ball game was not working. We switched to a 433 but still struggled. For most of the start of this season we going out wide, pumping in crosses and the back guys were hoofing it down field and it was not working. We were still playing hoof ball as recently as the second half of the away game against the Roar
It does appear the players are down on confidence but this happens when you are not winning. What ever style you are playing it does not excuse bad defending.....and some of the defending has been really bad recently. If anyone thinks if we just go back to the old style things will get better then you are crazy.
Recently we seemed to have been handing out congratulations for lots of players hitting 100 games. Last year everyone was saying how old the squad was. It is quite possible that the failure this year is partly a failure to refresh the squad. Too many players are past peak performance levels. You can get away with one two....but we seem to have many more than that. The back five are all well past 30...and they are starting to look like it!
I mostly agree. There hasn't been a sudden slump brought about by a change of style, the slump was there from the outset of the season. Too many players in comfortable positions as favourites of Ricki who are past it. The team needs a complete rebuild and the emphasis must be on players at the height of their game or developing good youngsters, not keeping on ageing pros.
Bring up Boxall, Lindsay and Hogg to augment Fenton and Boyd, that at least would be a positive for next season. Then have a big clear-out at the end of the season and bring in the best of the local scene and a couple of good imports. My clear-out would be Lochhead, Downey, Bertos, Totori (not up to A League standard), Lia and Smith. Ifill should be released with a big thank you, his day has gone. If Bertos stays then he has to revert to being an attacking winger.