R22 vs Western Sydney Wanderers | Sat 10 March | 9:50pm | SS4

WTB: one new squad

Plenty on here wanted to play ‘all the kids’ for the rest of the season, right? 

Piney, Hyslop among others backed tonight’s weenix-affirmative action selection. 

How that’s going for you? “Development”?

You develop players best by introducing them slowly amongst other seasoned pros, not en masse. 

It stings because WSW have such an unlikable group of players and fans

What fudging seasoned pros? If our players were seasoning, they'd be plain flour, no spice whatsoever.

Comes with the territory.

What's worse, they'll be fifth on the ladder for the time being.

Burnsy best game since Victory and Jets win I reckon. Him and Roy have been okay. Singhy drifted out the longer the game went. He had it pretty tough though banging bodies with Roly who skun him a few times.

Yep it probably was unrealistic to keep youngster like Singh (or Cacace) on all game, and not get Rolled.

Kalezic or not, we still need a lot of improvement before we can challenge for the ninth spot on the ladder.

Did Archie Thompson watch the game?

God we're awful

The problem was we played far too deep and when we finally won the ball it was just hoofed up the field for WSW to  come back at us

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Defending on the last three goals was absolutely diabolical.

Yes he did  - at halftime he praised Krishna's return

#GreenacreOut

Geez...what a shark show. 

Um, that's what we've done - there are only two 'green' youngsters that were in that starting lineup. Don't give them excuses.

I finally realised why Tribulietx is dragging his feet with getting his UEFA licence done. 

"Wellington Phoenix, the coaches' grave"

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Auckland they go.

Hopefully this proves that most of the squad are not up to it and should not be offered new contracts. Changing the coach doesn't do much if the players are sh*t.

Yeah, I'm not going to bother watching the replay of this..

I change the channel after it went 3-1 up, so woeful but nice to see Singh score.

Don't want to spoil the buzz, but Matty has scored a few like that when the pressure was off. I think that developing talent is some time when it counts and plenty of hard work on the training pitch trying to dislodge the incumbents. Despite whatever he says sometimes, I don't think Kosta's career was hurt at all for having to compete for a place with Ifill, Bertos and Greenacre. I'm also going to say, a bit like what Darje was doing. Let's be honest, none of these guys are starting quality in a team genuinely pushing for the finals. 

anyone got a clip or gif of this?

Not in the highlights. seemed like a bit of discontent over it

did we not put men on posts on corners?

Link to the highlights? Cheers.

Dura is just a joke. Embarrassing. 

Just watched the highlights, which were mostly lowlights for the Nix. Terrible defending on those corners. Don't they practice this stuff?

I thought we did ok for the first 60 mins, and looked the better team for a while before the goal, up till half time and just after the break.

Defending the set pieces killed us off. Disappointed to see the midfield just stop when that ball went through for their last goal. Only Galloway and Dura bothered to try and stop it.

Bad cynical foul buy not a red. 

We couldn't hold possession in the second half, all long ball trying to play passes over the top. We have had no structure this year at all

Club should seek an explanation.  If this had of been a Sydney player through on goal? O’Donovan just got red carded and 2 weeks for head high judgement. 

Perhaps Burnsy should have rolled around like Bujis pretending he had been trampled by 1000 wild buffaloes but he probably thought well Castro just fell over and looked at the ref.

We shouldn't drop this. VAR or not, he ended up head butting him out of the attack, a red card in anyones book, or at least mine.

And for VAR to just gloss over shows how stupid the system that we currently have is, it appears not that VAR officials are directed to not interfere unless, I dunno. its "essential".  Its a joke, the game, the league , the system

DEFENDING:

For a long time in this match, Durante was the only one defending. It was like a one man show. He is still our best player when it comes to the art of defending, but he needs to stop charging around the pitch and stay in the back line. With him being so loose, we have no hope of forming a proper defensive unit. 

Cacace contributed little. He just occupied space next to Durante. Not his fault, he's just not at this level yet, but if he is going to play it should be at left back or in midfield as he is nowhere near ready. Fox was excellent and if Durante would put the brakes on a little, the two of them would make the best combo we currently have in the middle of a back four. 

A lot of the problem with Durante's defending stemmed from how poor we were defensively in midfield. Paracki was the only one in midfield who pressed back, but his starting position was too high to be of much help. When Santalab dropped deep, Durante needed to pass him on, but with little faith in his midfield and in typical fashion he took matters into his own hands and foolishly followed a roaming player around the pitch. 

Singh and Ridenton bought little to the team defensively. You'd expect kids to at least bring some zip and work rate. They just seemed to think it was enough to mark 'their man'. Some would call this 'hiding'. Well boys, in the big leagues you need to multiply your presence in both attack and defence and defensively this means coming off 'your man' to double up on someone else's by pressing back on top of the defenders or across to your midfield buddies. Ridenton should know by now, Singh needs to be told this and given extra speed training.

With so many personnel deficiencies, I can see why Greenie went for 3 back. But it was a big mistake. Most teams who play a front 3 have at least one narrow wide attacker with full backs attacking from deep. A back 3 can deal with this as long as they have help from midfield with the wing backs picking up the opposing full backs. Gombau comes from the Barcelona school where the wide forwards stretch the play. Therefore, it was totally logical and always obvious that WSW would pin our wing backs deep and turn our back 3 into a back 5. To compound matters, nobody seemed to realise this and as the game went on we allowed the WSW push us deeper, meaning even larger gaps in midfield. Given the aforementioned problems of midfielders not doubling up, this meant we were wide open even with a full 8 or 9 men defending. All WSW had to do was to get a central midfielder to play near a winger and we didn't know what to do.

One last thing I want to mention is that the art of good defending is not just having players doing the right things behind the ball. You can achieve so much when you are proactive and manipulate proceedings further up the field and we missed a big opportunity to do this down Llorente's flank. This guy would be a nightmare for many coaches as he doesn't give a rats about defending. So, put the right wing back on him, and whenever he goes forward get one of your strikers to play in the space he left behind. Either Llorente stops attacking or you have an open channel to play in or ever better still you stretch the remaining three defenders just that little bit more which means that your outlet has a better chance. So often Burns went with Llorente. This meant that Thwaite and Hammill could put the jug on and just sit in on Krishna while Risdon could pick up a more advanced starting position on the other side, which caused a lot of trouble. By manipulating their back 4, even when they have the ball, it's highly probable you would end up limiting their attacking intent.

and at what level do you coach Reg?

Horrible, cynical foul.  But under what law of the game would it qualify as a red?

Weren't we playing four at the back?