It’s a salary capped league, balancing is intentional, it does have a natural bias towards big city clubs in terms of recruitment, staffing and non-cap players, but it is far more competitive than most European/South American leagues which have perennial winners and everyone else scrabbling for scraps. With good decision-making Sydney and Melbourne based clubs should never be at the bottom but also shouldn’t expect to be top 4 every year.
I don’t think it should be used as an excuse for poor decision making though.
There’s plenty of room for criticism of things, including the recruitment, that have nothing to do with the restrictions of the salary cap.
nah
They were the best team by the end of 18/19. Won GF.
Walked the league in 19/20. Won GF.
Went back to the well with the old guys in 20/21 which was debatable, but were an inj time pen away from winning the league again. Lost in GF after Brattan brain explosion (only red card of his career?).
Obviously he inherited a great situation after Arnold left. Even still, it was a great record at that stage, but the club needed to heed the lessons from 20/21. Instead they doubled (tripled?) down and brought back the old band, and it was really shit. It started shit, and it got worse.
I only watched the P+ doco recently - I had forgotten how badly we tailed off last season, particularly with the CL stuff.
It was a pretty ridiculous decision to bring Corica back this year as a result, but I don’t think it was a surprise given the way the club operates.
This year has been embarrassingly poor for a multitude of reasons, which have been covered off ad nauseam, and every minute wasted under the current structure is a wasted one. Being this bad in the new stadium is a huge missed opportunity.
That we got close to City at the end of the season was a bit of a false situation. City spent the last few weeks of that season doing pre-season for the finals having pretty much assured themselves of first. We did finish that season very well after a poor start - the old guard’s last stand.
Flukey out of the blue goal from Kosta aside We were being absolutely spanked in that game, and Brattans foolishness was because he was desperately trying to wrest some control. We were being properly torn apart in a way you don’t see that often. The gulf in class was stark.
The writing was really on the wall then and it would have been best for us and Steve:s long term prospects without damaging his name at SFC if he was to find another job at that point. That is in no way suggesting he should have been moved on, but it would have been the right thing for both parties.
Whether you measure by appearances, starts or minutes, 40% of the players responsible for 2016-17 and 2017-18 were already gone by the time Corica was appointed. Among them, the scorers of 65% of the goals in that period.
By the time 2019-20 rolled around - with the departure of O’Neill, breaking of Zullo and retirement of Brosque - 75% of the appearances/stats/minutes were gone, including the scorers of 85% of the goals.
Adrian needed replacing within the salary cap. Bobô needed replacing after a goal-a-game season. Buijs needed replacing. Carney too.
Oh, and the entire football department aside from Corica followed Arnold to the Socceroos.
By the time the league stopped from COVID we had 50 points from 20 games - 16 wins, 2 draws and 2 losses. We were 13, 14, 18 points clear of 2nd/3rd/4th who’d all played a game more than us. We’d scored 44 goals from 20 games (7 more than second-best) and conceded 16 goals from 20 games (6 less than second-best).
We were out-performing Arnold’s best season - where 60% of the players and 100% of the football department - had never played or worked under Arnold.
But sure, the achievements of that season (premiership-championship double, back-to-back championship) was all Arnold.
Anyone suggesting that is either;
That pre COVID period was easily Steve’s finest. The recruitment after that with COVID hovering was pretty poor and I’d say only Lilley since then has been a good buy.
but it begs the question, how much did Covid actually affect our players? We were smashing it before, but the moment we restarted, we were absolute garbage.
Nothing to play for is probably the main one.
With six games left to go, two teams could only mathematically catch us (13 and 14 points behind, 20+ GD behind, with 5 games left to play).
Then Fox pulled the rug out.
The haphazard scheduling and lack of a full week to recover and prepare probably didn’t help us maintain standards either.
Watching us though, I felt like there was more happening than that. It didn’t feel like a team that had pulled its’ foot of the accelerator, more a team trying to perform, but just not getting there
It affected us massively. Playing 2-3 games a week, with little to no recovery time, matches being re-scheduled left right and center, the uncertainty of the viability of the league, and just the general stress caused by COVID.
I think a lot of the players were just numb mentally. The overall stress of COVID, and then having to play a lot of games in a short amount of time with little to no recovery time, combined with the fact that we were playing in empty stadiums. The overall ‘goals’ and aims of the season came second.
That’s all fair. Point is, we weren’t far off at the very top.
The main issue is what we did after that - basically running them all out again despite age catching up with most of them.
We’ve circled around this one before, but after that season, COVID was still affecting travel on and off and we made our recruitment super conservative partly in response to that, and perhaps it was also easier. As it turned out, other clubs ended up being able to bring in perfectly good new players while we were stuck with a very stable ageing squad.
In hindsight, that would have been a good time to move ageing players on and give youth a chance with COVID as pretext.
Fair call, but why were none of the other teams as heavily affected as us in the same period?
We had a very old squad and we had ACL too.
That was then and this is now.
Football is about results or so I thought however it appears then that utter mediocrity is acceptable in a league that has no promotion or relegation thus ensuring a guranteed revenue stream. Pray to whatever deity you may believe in that it never happens.
Pathetic.
People forget too that McGowan was also a Corica signing and a bloody good one; ditto Brattan. And even Kosta looked the goods at the beginning, teaming up nicely with Alf.
But under peak Arnie, we had Carney, Matt Simon and Milos D on the bench and they were all players you could count on to grab hold of the game coming on late, and, for Carney, win it for us. ie two guys who had played for the Socceroos and played overseas in better leagues and one who had played top tier in France and Serbia. None of the kids in recent years have been that quality or have that potential, apart from Devlin, Tillio and the Hof and sadly they did not see much time with us.
He also signed Alf who ended up being the second highest goal scorer that season
McGowan is the only remotely good defensive signing since Arnie left. king was obviously good but not an external signing.
ummm, we had Grant and Wilko and Zullo till he got injured. Best three in the A League in their positions. McGowan made it the complete set - all good Socceroo standard players and all locals (what a bonus that was!). What else do you want?
Then King. Unlike most here, I thought he was not up to it and was, with Retre, our weakest link, week in, week out. And then Talbot for King (who was, and clearly is up to it, as starter in top team in league). My main complaint with Corica, at that time, was that he was playing youth DFs who I thought were sub-standard and unlikely to improve to meet our standards (VDS - played completely out of position, as we now know, having watched him at AU) and King. Replacing McGowan is not easy; lots of very good A League CDs seem to have dropped their levels, for whatever reason: eg Jurman, and more clubs are importing their CDs.