Personally don't have an issue with Dome, think he has overall done a great job.
I do personally feel that the club lacks a winning mentality at times and that it can appear at times far too complacent when things go wrong although I often wonder if that's actually the club or some fans who seem to be perfectly ok with not winning.
Resources have not been an issue for us, we have the facilities and the players to be far better than we have been. Look at some of the signings that we've had in the past decade, there's no actual shortage of quality.
This season Chiefy got the players he wanted. He went to Japan and got his picks. He got Rojas. He got all of our other imports. On paper it's a team that should have done much better. Yes there were injuries but we should never have finished where we did compared to the resourcing of other clubs, I mean Brisbane doesn't even have full time analysts nor a gym! Very few excuses available and very little blame lands with Dome.
I disagree with retaining Chiefy. I believe, and have done so since last season, that his play style is unsustainable however aside from this I can't really point to anything that Dome has done particularly wrong.
Is it really that hard to win something in the A-League if every team that currently exists (apart from us) has won a trophy?
Jets did win in 2008, nothing since. The cap then was about half of what it is now and only one marquee slot with little to no other concessions in the cap - since the liberalisation of the cap it has probably strengthened the wealthier clubs grip on the comp (incl. new teams that get concessions in the cap). CCM recent success the only club to buck the trend in the past decade or so. In our history in the ALM we have more finals appearances (9), incl. this season, than Glory (7) and Jets (5), both in the league 2 seasons longer, and WSW (6)
The cup is a little bit weird given the timing and we always play away (not sure what happens if AFC and the Nix are drawn together).
2ndBestcoochieemartinbOi Oi Edgecumbe+3queenofthequail, Southernix, theprof
11 months ago
I have always found him very engaging when approached, and I'd like to think, sincere, be that in person or via email / social media. I have been disappointed with his reduced presence over the last season, he always seemed to be fairly regular on social media.
When people talk about "mentality" at WPFC, I always remember Ernie Merrick's comment that the Nix were the nicest bunch of losers he'd ever met.
But the flipside of that is how I explained to the T-AFC guys that Nix fandom just doesn't have the fringe of violent cods that have attached themselves to The Port: "Wellington mentality".
Ramming liberal dribble down your throat since 2009 This forum needs less angst and more Kate Bush threads
‘We haven’t won. This is because we lack the mongrel etc.’
Brisbane Roar got Ange. They won. Sydney got Graeme Arnold. Ditto. Victory had Archie Thompson and Merrick. WU have had Aloisi, who is streaky, a handy cup/finals trait.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic in the clubs DNA or attitude that at all.
I think it’s harder for us to get and retain our best imports for a start.
Rudan and Uffie weren’t golden era builders though they both gave it a good go. I guess there’s going to be plenty of arguments who f-d up any inheritance this season deserved from our best ever last season.
But also everything held equal, perhaps we’ll win more in the next 18 years and things will balance out statistically.
City didn’t win until they were cashed up. We win last season and we’ve equaled WSW (and Perth) and chasing down Adelaide and Brisbane of Roarcelona and Asian Champions league final fame. Jets, MacArthur and WU are on zero too. IMG_6023.jpeg96.93 KB
I work in a big mult-national company myself, if my CEO comes out & says we plan to be a medium competitor in the market but we know we will never be the best I guarantee you that our shareholders, board directors and even employees will not be happy.. Aim high, what’s the worst that can happen?
The thing is that the Nix are not a big multi-national. They're a relatively small football club representing a small city in a relatively small competition. Considering that the city of Wellington and its population are a pretty significant stakeholder, comments relating the identity of the club to the city make complete sense. Focusing on areas that benefit both the club and the city seems like a reasonable strategy, all things considered, and I don't think this should be interpreted as a lack of ambition. At no point did anyone at the club state that there's no interest in winning or that simply making top six is "good enough". There was only a statement of minimum expectations, which I think is fair.
Surely we can all agree on the fact that ambition does not equal success. Success is tied to circumstances, some of which are more tangible than others. Scapegoating a specific person or saying that the reason we haven't won anything is because of a lack of ambition is extremely reductive. It also reeks of hustle culture bro podcast motivational quotes or even cosmic manifestation pseudoscience and fudge that sharke.
Similarly dominated by the two biggest clubs in Victory and Sydney. CC had 3 big eras- McKinna, Arnold and Montgomery. Look for example how Montgomery got results out of McGarry. We have a tendency to say a player is good or s***t and then bag them. We need to use our resources fully. Roarcelona also in there.
A poor return for City, considering their investment and WU over achieves. Perth, MacArthur, Auckland, Us and WSW have never won. IMG_6024.jpeg90.86 KB
I mean from my point of view, I like Domey. I don’t want us to behave like a mini-Chelsea or whoever. I prefer no dickheads.
I had a long post, but fell asleep.
But essentially the consistently top teams have resources. Other teams ride an era under a variety of top coaches.
Unfortunately Uffie, with Uli and Hemed, he failed to ascend to Arnie, Ange, Popovic, Vidmar, Montgomery et al levels of achievement. He’s not quite a top level manager.
Chief is something different. He’s an oddity. Some of you think it’s all a scam. Some of you think the football is too dull. He’s not a dominating ego in the way imo all those others are. But he’s a football guy. Is a he a genius or fraud? Probably neither, but he has plenty of ideas.
Should we be poaching someone from City to be GM/CEO/KFC or whatever? Maybe.
We’ve decided we blame Dome for posting the squad without a formation. I dunno. It’s excuses, but for us (and Adelaide imo) Auckland crushed our season and now the fans genuflect to them. (Oh they’re so tough, so great, so we’re not worthy! ). If we handle them better, get our players fitter or sign some fitter players, we’ll see. We need to get them out of our head and play our own ball.
Any given year it’s a very tough ask for us to win anything. We’ve had some good teams. The best we can do is keep working on our conditioning and recruitment. Even then it’s a tough ask.
If Chief can’t do it, we look for the next guy who can give us hope.
I don’t think anything Dome has been doing has prevented us winning. He’s said particular marketing doesn’t improve attendance and is costly. I do think Chief should be on absolute notice after more than half a season of dross.
It’s possible to renew the club root and branch, but that doesn’t guarantee at all that we’ll win anything. Each season any win is against the odds.
The club doesn't need to be renewed root and branch. They do a lot right.
The way I see it they are a little too focused on the business and the strategy they believe will bring steady top six performance - and sometimes better than that. It is a long term perspective. It seems unhurried. It seems to lack urgency. It seems to believe that results will come. Eventually. Even, I could say, it seems to lack passion.
This season we were a mess , with multiple injuries to key players, added to by the disrupted pre-season and the transition from the very good young players we on-sold and the other players we lost and seemingly tried to replace cheaper and more cleverly. Those were all head winds. It then became a bit of a cluster-fudge of injuries, compounded by a coach who took some selection risks for budget reasons, I expect, while being ambitious in what he wanted to do on the field. And got caught out by the circumstances.
Add to that (imo - and I gather this is consistent with his own thinking) David Ball having been signed for a year too many.
It happens. But what frustrates me, and this is not a this-season-only thing, is that there appears to be no urgency, perhaps barely any recovery response to get the team back on track when there are clearly problems on field. Until there was.
And if you believe it was Chief's man management and player motivation that was the problem, where was the urgent club response to that as well?
It is almost like the Board and Management wrote off this season, abandoned Chief to his troubles and looked away. And left us watching dross while complaining that the fans complaining about dross. I don't know if that is fair or accurate. But that was the perception, as I saw it.
Until suddenly they bit the bullet, freed up Ball's spot and got in Chico as a recovery plan. All seemingly rather belated and ultimately foiled by Chico's injury as well.
The thing for me is that the club gave zero indication of doing anything about a very poor season until it finally did. (And got bitched at by the fans again for the trouble, given the anger about the way Ball was handled).
They can do better. There is something about urgency. About closer football performance monitoring by management. Something about the Board giving some evidence they are actually connected with what is happening on the field. Some willingness to recognise a short term performance problem and preparedness to do what is possible short term about it. Some level of communication and respect for the fans. Some top level of engagement.
In the end I think we just got hammered by circumstance and some own goals (literatively and figuratively). But we **appeared** to have a club that didn't give a damn, and to have a club that wasn't doing or intending to do anything to course correct and support the coach and try and recover the season. At least for a long time. And appearances are everything.
More urgency. More empathy for the fans. More responsiveness to what is and isn't happening on the pitch. The long term, business-like strategic approach is good and valid. But the club also needs to have a beating pulse as well. An engagement with the immediate as well as the long term. From top to bottom.
City didn’t win until they were cashed up. We win last season and we’ve equaled WSW (and Perth) and chasing down Adelaide and Brisbane of Roarcelona and Asian Champions league final fame. Jets, MacArthur and WU are on zero too.
Yeah, I also like how nobody gives a flying fudge about the Australia Cup until it comes time to whinge about how "we are the only club that" and so it's considered a major trophy just so we can fit Macarthur in, hah.
Having over posted, and yeh, perhaps we do have a nicer attitude than some.
But I’d say my conclusion is top manager at the peak of their powers and squad culture is the most important. Or a truckload of resources.
And somehow Chief is the closest we’ve come numbers wise. Though Ricki, Ernie and Uffie all gave it a good shake.
I don’t think Domey selling his soul or any of us watching Football Factory twice a week is going to create that.
Maybe there’s something around being better at squad assembly. Too many players not being played is culture kryptonite. That’s another of those magical managerial arts though I guess. A top manager can keep everyone on board and do tactics.
Edit: @mjp2 and certainly I lost my cool about how slow we were this season to address problems. And on occasion the refs.🤐 I think you’re spot on there MJP2. There was a disconnect between seeing a problem and the feeling that we were responding in slow motion to it. Fortunately it was an unusual feeling as a Nix fan. Unfortunately, it was the follow up season to us having had a genuine taste of being top dogs.
Is it really that hard to win something in the A-League if every team that currently exists (apart from us) has won a trophy?
It starts as a 1 in 13 shot. Not a mathematician, but that’s not great odds.
And despite this I do believe in sports psychology, budgeting for success, setting goals, visualising and other strategies to try and help you achieve. Just also Neyder Moreno or Costa off the bench should score you more late goals than Walker.
I've always thought that to be a Perth fan would be more suffering than one of the Nix. Long time club that goes back to some successful years in the NSL. Up 1-0 late into the 2012 GF at Suncorp only to be robbed by two Berisha goals, incl a clear dive for the 2nd goal.
Then Tony Sage spends up large, gets Poppa in as coach, they become Premiers (but who really remembers that), get to host the GF in front of 57,000 fans and can't score, losing on pens to the Bling.
Now the last few seasons they have been sharkhouse. Ouch, ouch & ouch.
I've always thought that to be a Perth fan would be more suffering than one of the Nix. Long time club that goes back to some successful years in the NSL. Up 1-0 late into the 2012 GF at Suncorp only to be robbed by two Berisha goals, incl a clear dive for the 2nd goal.
Then Tony Sage spends up large, gets Poppa in as coach, they become Premiers (but who really remembers that), get to host the GF in front of 57,000 fans and can't score, losing on pens to the Bling.
Now the last few seasons they have been sharkhouse. Ouch, ouch & ouch.
Must be really tough for them to have won the premiership in recent memory.
Is it really that hard to win something in the A-League if every team that currently exists (apart from us) has won a trophy?
It starts as a 1 in 13 shot. Not a mathematician, but that’s not great odds.
And despite this I do believe in sports psychology, budgeting for success, setting goals, visualising and other strategies to try and help you achieve. Just also Neyder Moreno or Costa off the bench should score you more late goals than Walker.
Omg I’m procrastinating today…
Assuming the title was decided by a random lottery, here's the odds of each club NOT winning the A-League:
I know 16% doesn't sound like a lot, but that is still a pretty good chance that you come away with nothing. It means of the 8 clubs competing in our first season, you would expect 1-2 clubs without a single title across that time-span.
Over the next 18 season (assuming we keep 13 teams & the title is decided by lottery), there is a 24% chance any individual club will not win a the league, with an expected 3.08 clubs going titleless across this time-period.
And just a random reference to throw after this, somebody brought up clubs with no major trophies, but I'd like to mention Crewe Alexandra, who first competed in the 1889-90 Football Alliance and still have not won a single league title. Accounting for WWI & WWII, that's 124 seasons without ever winning the league.
I've always thought that to be a Perth fan would be more suffering than one of the Nix. Long time club that goes back to some successful years in the NSL. Up 1-0 late into the 2012 GF at Suncorp only to be robbed by two Berisha goals, incl a clear dive for the 2nd goal.
Then Tony Sage spends up large, gets Poppa in as coach, they become Premiers (but who really remembers that), get to host the GF in front of 57,000 fans and can't score, losing on pens to the Bling.
Now the last few seasons they have been sharkhouse. Ouch, ouch & ouch.
Must be really tough for them to have won the premiership in recent memory.
If you are a football purist, who follows some European league, for sure it's all about who finishes 1st in the regular season.
But the ALM is an Australian (plus NZ) comp. In Australian sporting culture it's all about the Final (the colloquial Granny!). Similar to how Americans like to use World Series, Aussies love to prefix Final with Grand. That's because it's everything.
And Glory have had GF heartbreak going back to the famous 2000 NSL Granny against Wollongong Wolves. The crowd of 42,764 was at the time an Australian record for a club football (soccer) match. Perth led 3–0 at half time, but somehow bottled it. 3-3 at FT, and Wolves winning on pens. Glory did win the GF in the NSL's last 2 seasons (2002/03 & 2003/04)
But with the ALM it's been that gut wrenching loss due to pantomine villain Berisha in 2012, plus then another home GF loss to SFC in 2019.
Be good to know how your average Glory fan feels. But I suspect for many (56,000 gutted fans went home that night in 2019) that 2018/19 premiership don't mean that much, not when you don't win the big Final. That's the only game from that season folks remember.
Plus we forget what ownership agony is like. Perth have been in uncertainty for a long time. Only now are they beginning to get some drive and vibes around the club.
The only thing David & I disagree with is the ideology to finish in top 6 every season. I believe (Even if we don't achieve it) is to aim for number 1 position, every year and not be happy with anything less. Whereas David wishes we'd finish number 1 but it's ok to finish top 6. I like the guy, he has had his job expanded so much with now dealing not with just a men's team, the reserves, the U18's, and the Women's equivalents. then there's the Corporate Sponsors, the hospitality side of things plus the Social awareness/ charity things the club does. I imagine it can be a very lonely job at times, but he is football crazy as a person, loves it with a passion more than most. It's a big role, trying to keep everyone happy and on board. Credit it to him. If we do lose Kosta, I have offered to come out of retirement for a 2nd time to help out at which for some reason he started laughing. I mean I read only yesterday about that guy who is still playing professional football at age 64! There is hope yet.
Proud to have attended the first 175 Consecutive "Home" Wellington Phoenix "A League" Games !!
i think I've said it before but as Ballane has said some of the asssumptions being made about our owners and CEO are way off the mark. A few years ago in my frustration about this very thing - club direction not wanting to win anything I emailed Mr Dome, and he very promptly emailed back - his passion and frustration and the situation was as clear as mine had been when I made contact. Lets be clear - Dome is first and foremost a very passionate football fan, he loves the game, second he is the CEO of the NIX, but also a fan. He like the ownership love our little city and want nothing but success for it.
Enough of the "our owners are happy with mediocirty" bollocks - they are not. They are however trying to make an investment viable while building a football community in the wider refion. They could have solely focussed on the aleague and winning, buying players whenever they needed to - and sure we may have won a trophy here and there which I'm sure we'd have been happy with, but the current option of developing youth and and academy's takes time and money and patience. Some clubs have existed for three times as long as the Nix and won nothing! Here are some who meet that criteria 10 Football Clubs Yet to Win a Major Trophy
Rank | Club | Date of establishment | Country 1 | Fulham | 1879 | England 2 | Crystal Palace | 1861 | England 3 | Brighton and Hove Albion | 1901 | England 4 | 1. FC Union Berlin | 1906, restored in 1966 | Germany 5 | Watford | 1881 | England
Yes you are right about them having not won a league/FA cup, nor the top division but all of the sides have won leagues below. The enjoyment the fans would have taken from winning them would be no different to winning the A League or one of the competitions mentioned.
I say this as an Argyle fan having experienced the joy of smashing L1 very recently and then suffering relegation last week. We've won SFA too if only winning the top division is all that matters (it's not of course).
Maybe the Nix needs pro/rel to actually win something.
Supporter of the world's best football teams: Waikato..., Kingz FC, NZ Knights, The Nix, The Argyle & of course the All Whites
I think it was Zawada who said that he's never been at a club that is so well run and with such a clear plan.
For my mind we should have won the title in either 2014-15, 2019-20, or 2023-24 based on form. For whatever reason it never quite happened (14-15 the form never recovered from the Asian cup break, 19-20 there was Covid, 23-24 no real mitigating circumstances).
I don't think the on field performance can be put down to Dome, the team has clearly had enough resources to be successful multiple times and the fact that we have such a well funded Woman's program is something which he spent a lot of time and effort on.
Yes, I wish we were more competitive and had won silverware at least once, but by all other metrics the team is well run, reasonably funded, and stable. As above, I'd take that above what Perth and Newcastle supporters have to go through year after year.
I'm not sure if it does... seems there were 3 decent bids but arbitrarily only two spots.
I am more bothered by the men's preseason. All this talk at the end of last season about we are ambitious and we do want to win the A-League Men and that the season just gone was unacceptable and we have money for 3 big contracts for a CB, #10 & #9... and we have signed Aussie journeymen and two of the most underwhelming visa signings in our history, and continue to get served up extremely unconvincing football in the Cup.
I don't know the ins and outs of the OFC decision to be able to read anything into it, but I have seen enough from the men's team (which is at the end of the day the most important part of the club) over years and years to know that Domey probably has to go before the men's team will see success. It is a culture of mediocrity and losers and ultimately he is responsible.
To be fair, it's a Oceania Football decision and owner of the successful club is a Russian billionaire.....no doubt a thoroughly transparent and aboveboard process.
Frankly I'm just surprised that a club from Qatar didn't get a spot.
To be fair, it's a Oceania Football decision and owner of the successful club is a Russian billionaire.....no doubt a thoroughly transparent and aboveboard process.
Frankly I'm just surprised that a club from Qatar didn't get a spot.
How did meat man Meyn in the course of a few hours get majorly upgraded to Billionaire status! Sort of hilarious.
CU and it's 6 full time staff or whatever it is, must be wondering if they are being severely underpaid.
Does Slava have a superyacht parked up in Lyttleton Harbour? One of the dads at my daughters's school tells some interesting yarns about working on Roman Abramovich's little wee boat in the Caribbean.
To be fair, it's a Oceania Football decision and owner of the successful club is a Russian billionaire.....no doubt a thoroughly transparent and aboveboard process.
Frankly I'm just surprised that a club from Qatar didn't get a spot.
How did meat man Meyn in the course of a few hours get majorly upgraded to Billionaire status! Sort of hilarious.
CU and it's 6 full time staff or whatever it is, must be wondering if they are being severely underpaid.
Does Slava have a superyacht parked up in Lyttleton Harbour? One of the dads at my daughters's school tells some interesting yarns about working on Roman Abramovich's little wee boat in the Caribbean.
Well a Billionaire in Rubles for sure! Not sure about the super yacht but the choppa has seen some action aparently.
Why are existing pro teams allowed to join - will Auckland play a reserve team? More importantly, why are South Melbourne involved?
Ideally, This would be a reserve team for Auckland to help build a full on squad towards their 1st team. CHCH will be really good for the comp. Why the Nix missed out is weird. The reserves could have played in that too, like AFC. WTF has South Melbourne got to do with this, God only knows. An Aussie team can play in an Oceania League but neither the Nix nor AFC can play in the Asian Champions League. Double standards me thinks.
Proud to have attended the first 175 Consecutive "Home" Wellington Phoenix "A League" Games !!
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