R3 vs Jets Sunday 5pm McLean Park SS2

and yet the bosters and buildup for the real home games is as always almost invisible except for the fever friday! Come on Welnix it aint that difficult.

IMO it is the stadium/ council Who spend the money on the away home games as part of the package that gets the game in their town. 

People in Napier underwrote it so they would have had a significant, if not all, part of the marketing stuff up there.

Huysegems had good quality players next to him in the Belgian team which allowed him to do reasonably well in that particular setup. He simply was not the top player of the Belgian national team. Ditto Cunningham for Costa Rica.

Consider the aging but classy Alessandro Del Piero - he won quite a few games for Sydney FC singlehandedly last season, but can't win them all (and is of course well into his late thirties). Shinji Ono is younger, fitter, and certainly one of the top Japanese players of the previous 5-7 years. Our (WPX) imports are not their respective national teams top players. So I would not overestimate the qualities people like Huysegems or Cunningham (or Hernandez) brought to the Nix. They are good players but not good enough to turn a match by themselves. In his prime, Hernandez was probably good enough to turn a game around for Melbourne Victory, until he got slow and overweight and went to India. In his prime, Ifill could turn the game around for the Nix, and is an example of a key national team player (like ADP or Ono), it's just that Trinidad and Tobago are not in the class of Costa Rica let alone Belgium, Japan or Italy.

Agree re: Huysegems, in this game he was slow to turn and distribute, didn't seem to play one touch, reliant on his left foot, passed the ball poorly on several occasions, didn't create much for himself, seemed slow and didn't seem threatening with the ball at feet.

And despite doing ok with a few chances yesterday, he did that last season, but in the wash didn't score many goals and we tanked. concerned about how he fits into Ernie's plans. It seems both him and Brockie come with worrying limitations as forwards...

My sources tell me that they needed 6k for the game to start turning as profit. as for only 9,020. That's wrong too because the scanners were turned off when large amounts of people showed and they were ripping tickets in half instead. The game was marketed fairly well but there were a lot of locals wanting freebie entrance to come to the game instead of paying. The main stand was allegedly "sold out" but there were plenty of empty seats. God knows why they didn't turn up. 

I actually thought the Fever would have been better over on the bank but thats a personal choice. that they were trying to gee up the locals with not effect was sad. it was as if a rugby crowd had shown up and sat there politely, quietly. 

Except for of course the 5 village idiots who wanted to look cool and hung out at the top of the stand. The very drunk Clark Kent glasses one whilst trying to be 'cool" banged into a lady behind me and knocked her Iphone out of her hand and smashed the screen which upset her. Then his mate fell on me. Why do these 19 year olds even try? Get drunk, show off and try and look cool hanging out with the fever? The temptation to have thrown two off them down over the rows in front of me was there but then I was having such a good time with my fellow bus travellers I let it go.

For a town full of Expats reliving the days when they were back in the UK, not that many showed and for a very strong football town in general I expected a lot more to make the effort and show up. Those whom did show, i expected a lot more effort from them to make it an enjoyable occasion. I love Napier, it's a nice place and I go up there a few times a year. But I think the "fans" of football in napier did themselves no favours.

I think we are all agreed that the massive break from our first game till Dec 1 is far too long. That should never have happened. Perhaps January would have been a better time and get the holiday people to the game. I'd rather go to Napier than Eden Park. Burt again, that's just me.

Barbados, not Trinidad and Tobago.

Man, I really need to put quoting in this app...

I don't understand how the Brockie/Huysegems "partnership" is meant to work when Hernandex is playing behind them.  It means one or both drifts wide and neither looks at all effective out there.  I think he needs to pick one and stick with it.  Huysegems has the better all round game and his movement is better but Borkcie is a better finisher.  I think if he sorts that then it all falls into place behind.  We're also getting no attacking thrust from our fullbacks at the moment which will need to change if we're to challenge

So. Have we reached a consensus that Ernie doesn't know what he's doing? No midfielders, a glut of forwards who don't work as forward, Kenny the dud from Costa Rica... BRING BACK RICKI time methinks?

1 loss 2 draws doesn't equate a bring back ricki thread yet, the team is gelling with new tactics and a large number of new players. I think you'll find that once Ernie sorts out the Lia/Manny starting alot will change - the issue with both of these two starting is that the ball movement in transition is unreliabe and slow.

No I don't think that's the case at all but that would be a standard 'Yellow Fever Forum' reaction.

As Ernie said last week, The big thing he has noticed over here is the preseason and how difficult it is to get quality opposition. He is now getting that and any of the 'weaknesses' that were not exposed playing the likes of CL sides will now appear. He said it will take 5 games for it to come right and I think he is not far off. It may be 6 or 7 but I think the side is probably playing better football than they did last year with a new system and some new pieces. Each week we are seeing something different from this side. They are not poor like they were towards the end of Ricki's tenure but there are a couple of parts not clicking as they should. I think if we had played the Jets in 3 weeks time, that maybe a different result. The Jets did play ok and much better against us as opposed to the last 2 weeks where they were a pile of shyte.

Objectively, it would seem his midfield is not functioning quite how it should and I say that because of the early changes he has had to make both weeks - if it was functional, he would not be making those changes. That's not saying "It's Lia's fault", its just saying that its not working how he wants it to. He has dragged an attacking player for another midfielder so that should be a big indicator that his mix is not quite right. I also don't think he has quite figured out how to use Brockie and Stein just yet. The jury is out on Cunningham and its a tie between being a dud and not having a preseason where he was injured and lacked playing time. I think he probably gets grace for another 2 weeks then the pattern will be clear.

When you look at the imports last year with Stein, Ifill, Totori, Smith and Sanchez, for 5 spots, he was getting about 2 players worth of effective contribution from them. This year with Stein, Ifill, Cunningham, Riera and Hernandez so far, he is probably getting about 2 1/2 players worth. When the system beds in and Ernie gets his combination right, I expect that effective contribution to increase.

OK, three of us went to the game, and here's our observations. The game was pretty dour, although weirdly it didn't look so bad when we saw it on Sky yesterday. Napier is a nice little town, and this made our choice for the "Away" game we would go to this season. the marketing  effort looked pretty good- we saw posters for the game as far south as Waipukuru, although we don't know who put them up of course. The Station worked really hard to make everyone welcome, and of course made a mint of money (good on 'em). The Fever gradually revved up as the match time approached, but the walk to the stadium was funereal, like waiting for a winter flight from Helsinki. That was very strange. At the stadium the Fever kicked in, and never really stopped singing. Well done- without this there would have been zero atmosphere, like a rugby game FFS. 

It has to be said, Welnix trade on this. They have worked out that the Fever are people of the right age and education to have reasonable disposable income, and a core can always be relied on to go to every game in NZ. They always market the Fever in promotional material, and this says that they have identified the Fever's importance to the club. No Fever= No Atmosphere- why not just stick with rugby? Welnix have to realise that taking games away from the RoF will slowly eat into this core support. We could afford to go to Napier, and chose to. But having bought four season tickets again, buying all the kit, paying to travel and park in Welly for other real home games, we choose not to afford to do so again. Ever. I reckon many other supporters feel the same. It's been said many times- which European clubs do this? Does the city (Wellington) enjoy these games (=trade and income) regularly leaving the capital? Does it encourage newbies in to watch the Nix, and come back again (this year) weeks later?

The most worrying thing for me was seeing Ernie on TV- several close up shots and he seemed to have the expression "What the fark am I doing here?", and I don't just mean Napier...

Excellent, we hav 6 points for outpassing teams! 

WOW!! Those diagrams tell a story. I thought we were getting owned in the midfield but when you look at Newcastles possession, they came out the back and down the flanks

Correct me if i'm wrong, by looking at the graphs i see lots of diagonal / switch plays from NWJ to create spaces, and almost none from WPX...

We did mostly short passes in the middle of the park, and not.much going forward

Probably that's the area we should work on in the following games, we need more switch play and create spaces.

We usually do that but I thought the jets were quite good at closing down the wide areas, leaving us to attack through the middle, but we tend to do that very slowly...so when we do so they crowded us out quickly. 

"a picture paints a thousand words"..the plan of fast backs attacking down flanks has yet to be implemented and the short passing game is just that..passing with little sharpness in tha final third..relies on Carlos cutting in and shooting aka Ifill of old.

that just highlights how shit we were in midfield

So "Lia" had little impact, while "Huysegems" "Hernandez" and "Cunningham" had a big impact.