R11 vs Sydney FC | Sat 19th Dec | 7:15pm | RoF (with nice turf)

lucky.  Cue Arnold bitchn about the fouls.

That was gutsy. Hope it was because we were leggy after all the travel. Sydney looked top tier.

Sydney looked very organised. Had a fair few chances. How great is Manny Muscat?

10027

To be honest I'd rather we set up the way we do, with a lot of talent going forward and have some absolute barnstormers, rather than have all our talent in the defence and mid the way they do, and shut up shop, but not able to score that many.  We were looking for something- possibly a bit of good luck for Sarpong or someone else and we might have got a roll on...

Yeah, but they counted the squads to get it in 5 figures

Saw more from Danaskos in 20 minutes than from Fenton in 5 games. Has Leo been mentoring Fenton on how to only go backwards or cut in? 

Danaskos for right back please

I thought Danaskos looked good too,  needs more game time

Rufer over Sarpong

Danaskos over Fenton

dire for 75 mins id say. If you want to win, you have to attack, and all we did was knock it along the back 6 all night.only ones who got praise from me were muscat and moss. Khrishna tried hard. Waste of time giving blake 8 mins.we were more negative than Sydney.

That is probably all bang on the money for me.

I still rate Cunnigham higher than Sarpong. Waiting to be proven wrong.

What a nothing game. It had that whole feel about it. Mossy motm with Manny 2nd imo. But Manny got it. How come the score board said the attendeance 6,031 and then ten mi s later said it was over 10k? I thought there was about 7 maybe 7,500 there.

What was with the quietness inthe zone? 12 pubs take the steam out of the fans? Naf all Xmas carols sung too. Tried to start a couple but failed. Sydney were decent enough but once again, tried to kick the crap out of a few of ours and we gave it back.

The ref was a complete dork and he and his assistants did not help the game to improve. Friggen Hay fever is annoying the crap out of me too.

Merry Xmas  anyway.

I note the gaffer is giving Tom Doyle razzies after yet another yellow card means he's suspended for the next match. Rightly so, for mine. No team can afford to have players being booked for stupid things, and he picks up more than his fair share of this type.


With Fenton out, Siggy doubtful, and Dylan Fox not up to ASB Premiership level, never mind A-League level, it means two new fullbacks for Boxing Day in Adelaide. No brainer as far as I'm concerned - Tamupiwa Dimairo at right back, Troy Danaskos at left back. Sorted. :-)

Ridenton on the left, Danaskos right for me

Unless Siggy can start and Manny can go out there. 

Yeah, definitely came up with crowd 6,021 or something about 10 mins begore they announced 10k...... Suspicious.

Frustrating game. I won't bother with my usual rant about how we have no width on attack...

Manny was generally really good but there was no need to lunge into the challenge that led to the penalty, that was just a completely unnecessary tackle. We're lucky Moss managed to save it - for me, Moss was the clear motm for us. 

I actually also thought Sarpong looked likely to create something in that first half but after he got bundled over and no penalty was given he seemed to fade out of it. He's definitely not Burns mk 2, that's for sure. I'd still like to see him given the chance to play as a proper winger though.

Krishna nailed the penalty at least. He's having a great season.

I thought the crowd looked like comfortably more than 6k and comfortably less than 10k. 8ish?

I tend to sure on the opposite side and the stands looked pretty good. Definitely not 6k probably 10

Maybe they were reading the barcode :)

To be fair, I turned to my mate & said something like "Now they just look like they're making things up" when that 2nd figure came up

I thought the 10k was right. It felt like there was a bit more than our normal 8k crowd.

Game was shark, so glad we even got a point out of it. Thought refereeing was shark too, so funny when Muscat did that goal saving slide and put the ball out and they awarded a goal kick!

Not suspicious, clearly more than 6K in the stadium.

My 2c

Frustrating game. 

Thought we were outplayed in first half, and lucky not to go in 1 or 2 down. 2nd half was a bit more even.

There just seemed to be no willingness to take on players at all. Almost every attack suddenly seemed to stop dead with a lateral (or usually backward) pass. There seemed to be little (or no) movement off the ball, & when there was, the player on the ball chose to ignore it & pass to a teammate surrounded by several blue shirts. We seemed at walking pace when in possession for most of the game, and passes just kept going to players who were standing still. (Not a new problem for the Nix)

Sydney obviously read the reports about sand on our home pitch, and brought their snorkels, and the ref bought every dive. Best moment of the night was their right back going off at the ref after on of ours took a leaf from their book. Their pen reminded me of that one Coveny got for us years ago. Yes, there was contact, but Hoole was already falling down. 

Thought our pen was soft too. That grappling at set pieces is a blight on the game, but you can't let it go unpunished for 89 mins, and then decide to award a penalty. The ref should be giving a pen in the first 5 mins, and give both teams the message to stop it.

I didn't think Sydney were particularly good either. If it was a boxing match, I'd give them a points victory. Nix will be happy with a point from that performance.

1) No width on attack is Ernie's style, always has been.

2) You guys really seriously think RoF/Welnix have resorted to lies about our metrics? Really?

3) Mossy's best season ever?!?

Hard done by in the last game. Kicked the ball back after a free kick, hit the opposition and deflected off. Gets booked. Very inconsistently applied rule.

I am not so sure about that one. May be more to do with the personnel he currently has at his disposal.

Think Manny had to go in to block the shot? Tried to pull out well. The ball was gone and the contact was trailing foot, it seemed like Hoole was looking for it (something not ruled out by his flopping later in the game) and it was that doubtful that he would have got the ball. 

Sarpong doesn't seem to fizz in the field. He had 5-6 really handy contributions early on, but faded out again. That said I think he is better from deeper and I wonder if he could sit in a false 9 where he could run from deep, and let McG go out wide. Has class and technique (his volley showed that), but has showed it in very limited amounts so far.

Sydney shut down our game for most of it. Marked Roly closely and the players around couldn't pick up the difference. We made more than enough chances to win the game, but didn't really get into our stride. I didn't think that Sydney were clearly better than us, but did have some periods of domination in the game, which they couldn't convert.

width = fullbacks.

As a guy whom plays the guess the crowd game, I am usually within 300 of the total. Last night there was no more than 8k in there. usually ailses 14-17 are reasonably well attended but last night, they were near empty. 

If you listen to Phoenix City with the CEO of Westpac Stadium he said that they don't fudge the numbers. Although the Lions did so that must be a new policy.

Yeah I can't see them fudging the numbers either. It doesn't really help that much to lie about them and inflate when NEWvADL got 7,332. Glory v WSW got 7,409 and we could have bigger crowd than CCM home game tonight.

A big YES

The other aspect of it is that width isn't as important if you attack quickly from deep, because you can use the vertical space on the pitch instead of the horizontal space. This season our buildup play is too laboured and we end up really compressed just outside the opposition area with no room to play.

Merrick's systems generally rely on width from the fullbacks but we've struggled with that since Ernie began - we've never had a fullback good enough to play this way properly in my opinion. He's been desperately trying to get a few different youngsters up to speed or stop-gapping with Manny/Boxall from the get-go.

why are we calling for Danaskos to play RB when he is a left footer?

The front 4 just isn't working as a unit. They just don't seem to know what the other players are doing. the wing backs and the defensive mids aren't linking up well with them either. We just didn't create enough chances to expect anything more than a point. I'm not sure where we go from here. Rufer has looked decent when given the chance but he is hardly going to turn our season around either.

I guess my fear is that we are too easy to work out. What you need to do is make sure your defensive mids don't give Roly any chance to turn on the ball. If you can achieve that we basically seem to be reliant on long balls to Krishna.

MECTO