It’s a done deal.
This is the article referenced above. Yet to see an official announcement from the club
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Looking forward to the social team being able to re-use this by just changing the name and picture next Monday too
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Yes ill be throwing my own shit towards the fan when its officially announced
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And for Ante this is totally justified
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100%. Squad got ripped apart in the off-season, injuries, 7 years of success previous.
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After giving it some thought, I think it’s a mistake to retain Talay, many of you will respond ‘duh!’ but I like to reason things out so I’m a late arrival at this conclusion.
What’s more interesting to me is why he’s not succeeding.
1 - Squad makeup - First and most obvious, defensively frail, lacking depth in key areas.
2 - Starting selections - Playing players out of position, sticking with experiments that are not working, freezing out of players, not recognising and rewarding form, ineffective rotation.
3 - Substitutions - or lack thereof. Late subs, missing opportunities to give young players minutes, counterintuitive position subs, absence of tactical changes to better exploit subs talents.
4 - Tactics - Playing a system that the squad is clearly not capable of doing effectively, even worse, sticking with it despite its obvious failure.
Overall as much as I like Talay the person, he doesn’t seem to have a genuine strategic vision for the team, or at least one that he can realise, and his decision-making seems to be dogmatic rather than purposeful, sticking with tactics and players well beyond the point where common-sense says it’s time for something different. I also think he’s being held back by poor quality assistant coaches who either can’t drive his vision or can’t tell him what he needs to hear.
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I think what’s really telling, is that there’s been a number of younger players that have been given starts in the past few weeks (JK, Sega, Kamijo etc) who haven’t played THAT bad. The fact that they’ve been allowed on the pitch now, when it’s all falling apart is pretty poor, considering they should have been played at the start of the season when we were juggling 3-5 games in 2 weeks. I would suggest that the early season fatigue is what his us the most and has made it almost impossible to claw back from. We started off with a very strong and fluid attack, that slowly went downhill and meant our defence has become more and more exposed as our attack becomes more and more blunt.
In saying that, the defence isn’t at the very worst at the moment. We’ve definitely had weaker lineups and there could potentially be something that could be saved next season depending on how he recruits.
What IS perplexing though, is calling this a transitional season when most of our foreigners have been signed for next season as well. There’s only really going to be rotation on the Aussie players but how many are we going to be able to poach from other clubs. I can very much see us in the same situation as last year, where we’re slow to get off the mark and we’re going to be scrabbling to sign players and will just shove anyone into the team to make up numbers.
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That interview about it being a transition year has sealed it for me when you have one of the most expensive squads, needing to play kids (when you have the best resourced academy) and it being mostly bullshit anyway.
Holman and kamijo had mostly returned to the bench, jk mostly left out until the Klimala injury and multiple games where he has left youth on the bench when we still had subs. Even the standout youth player (and arguable player of the year) in Segecic is 13 starts and 10 subs in the aleague and 5/6 in ACL2
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Yes that is the thing that makes it similar to when Corica started to get stuck with regards to plugging squad gaps and being constrained by visa players being locked in and greatly reducing our flexibility in recruiting. If you don’t have your basics right, and just a small number of local player slots to fill, it gets really hard to remedy things. And we don’t have our basics right. Inability to find a proper aussie CB since Wilko/Gowser is our biggest problem. And now we’ve added a quality deficit between the sticks to that. Uffie has made his decision on keeper, and right or wrong, it’s not looking to be the quality custodian we need in a serious team challenging for league honours.
Best we can hope for is to remain as entertainers. Lack of continental football will mean that we should be better placed to go top 4 compared to this campaign, but we’re a silly team really.
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FWIW, this squad is less expensive than previous years according to the club themselves - while Brattan’s departure was shit for us on the pitch, he was on a fair bit of coin more than Sena.
You could argue that this year’s squad is the cheapest in years - which is what makes it even more bizarre given the attack-heavy squad.
Truly?
Truly. I think we’re talking salary cap floor or near-ish, we aren’t spending the whole shebang we can is my recollection.
Yes, $1.5m less than previous squads.
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This is why I argue for a foreign coach. In bigger money leagues, it’s expected you’ll have to deal with a board going over your head on recruitment and wrangle what you have into shape and get it to produce an outcome of results. Australian coaches have a pissant obsession with a “style” that’s basically the same across the league and having a head coach act like a dictator with a board of yes men.
Sell Ouahim to a Persian or Thai club for a fee, visa spot open 
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This is where it all gets murky, to me.
I am not totally Talay-out, yet. I find it hard to really say whether it would be a mistake to retain him or not (though its getting hard to justify to more we let some of these results slip). We just don’t really get the kind of insight into what goes on between Talay and the board to say one way or the other, in my opinion.
There are some reasons you might let him go: setting a standard of excellence, query whether or not he’s the right person to execute your academy strategy, whether he has the correct tactical approach in Asia (if that’s a priority (it probably should be)).
But if it’s about clearly expressing a “genuine strategic vision” for the team, I think you can see what he’s trying to do- despite the players not realising the vision yet. People comparing this to Butcher or Farina or whatever are way off, imo. We were incomprehensible under those guys, by the end.
I don’t know what role or how responsible the assistants are. What that relationship with the head coach is really like. Is it the right mix in the football department? Is Talay the piece of the puzzle that needs to change, or are there other elements that can be brought in or taken away. People point to Terry McFlynn and his spreadsheet as part of the puzzle under GA, for example. I tend to think of Andrew Clarke and John Crawley.
We do have a pretty new football department, that hasn’t really worked together before and is actually relatively inexperienced? In a sense thats where the transition is either taking place or needs to take place, in my mind.
I don’t jive with some of the takes on here that the club don’t know what their doing and they’re just being willfully incompetent and taking down the club etc. They’ve got a history of success. I’m almost certain they wouldn’t have just found Talay after training one day and said, “you know what - you’re going good enough and we can’t be fucked thinking about this too much. Here, have another few years”. They will have to have a plan. They would have to be talking to Talay and he’d have to be making a case for himself for the next phase of the club. We just don’t/ won’t/ can’t know what that is, for whatever reason. Australian coaches and clubs really don’t like openly discussing that stuff for some reason.
Maybe that faith is misplaced. But I think its an even bigger leap to think that the club can magic up a new head-coach and it will fix everything. Who would that even be?
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I hear there is a free agent floating around called Arnoldini. With a name like that he must be foreign
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I meant in comparison to other clubs this year fwiw. We are spending less but so is pretty
much everyone else. Suffice to say pretty much every coach would wish to have Talays resources available.
I guess I just don’t like the excuses, but then I don’t expect much more from someone who spends their time complaining to the 4th official.
That definitely makes sense, but in that case it would make even more to keep Burgess on side - likely to be cheaper, no visa spot, fills similar slot, and has the physicality Anas has lacked in this league. Even not as a starter but as a really good sub, and good options on the bench are really important.