Round 15 - Australia's Shame vs Sydney FC - 24/1/25

Yeah, the one that has run Joe Lolley into the ground rather than give him a break.
The one who continues to play players who are injured or their fitness levels have dropped due to fixture congestion.
The one who almost always refuses to make early changes, bringing his impact players on with < 10 minutes to go.

Last night we ended up with a RB playing CB, a CB playing LB and a LB playing RB. We also didn’t have a single CM on the bench despite going into the game with a young Corey Hollman who is still coming back from injury and Leo Sena who is either injured or just doesn’t have the engine to give the output needed for the full 90.
Earlier in the season we had a CB who was playing LB played at LW.

They’re not changes, that’s just shuffling the pieces on the board. I’d only consider HDM and King as being actual changes as they are the only 2 who have been given a long term shot at making a position theirs. As for the rest, they’re changes made to shoehorn in your favourite players and smacks of a manager well out of coherent ideas. All it has done is unbalance the team, increase fatigue and destroy the confidence of the players who aren’t being given ample time to influence the game.

5 Likes

He played in ( gasp ) Portugal once. Give him a 5 year contract Melbourne.

Two NPL level players doing their thing…

Not the first time we’ve conceded from a hit and hope ball over the top either.

Klimala really needs to convert his chances, particularly in games like these. He had a chance in each half from memory?

1 Like

Well that was very poor. I actually thought Melbourne weren’t particularly good and they still comfortably put us away.

The talk of Popovic being extended… I mean we need bodies until the end of the season but beyond that I don’t see why we’d want to keep him. I cant say I saw a lot of him when he was at Adelaide but man this cant be the type of play that got him a move to Korea. Out paced and out muscled by a 37 year old Fornaroli.

65% possession and we created 2 decent chances from memory. The offside goal and the one Lolley fell over for.

King to right back… anwyay.

On a different note, what the fuck has happened to Simon Hill? Went on about how the foul on Ouahim wasn’t a foul. That’s a foul every fucking time it happens. You cant cross behind someone and clip their legs.

1 Like

Had that one good shot on his left. He got the ball once in the box with back to goal and then passed to no one at one point in the second half. Those are the only two I remember. That first one was a good hit based on a low quality chance. The second one was weird. He only had four touches in the box, which is crazy given we had 65% possession. We just don’t get him the ball in good areas and he’s not super effective outside the box in my opinion.

3 Likes

Would help if he wasn’t a traffic cone and actually made sharp movements.

I thought he has that movement in his locker but seems to have stopped moving as his runs were rarely found due to the ball being passed in the other direction, very slowly

The cold light of day has only made last night worse. We were just so very poor, across the pitch . Melbourne weren’t good, we had all the possession but just have no plan on what to do with it

Fucking frustrating - not looking forward to the derby

I was surprised either commentator had any time to talk about Sydney FC considering how far they were deep throating Melbourne at every opportunity…

1 Like

I noticed that too, he makes so many runs and never gets the ball you can understand if he thinks ‘stuff it’, he is also playing one up front which is normally marked by two CBs, i think people are lookin for an international scapegoat when blaming him, he is being played in a shit formation with a game plan that im not sure anyone knows what it is,

Klimala is fucking good, but he is wasted playing as a lone striker. He needs someone to make space for him - and teams know they can sit back and absorb basically no pressure because we are absolutely toothless in midfield with zero creativity.

4 Likes

Agree on Klimala - he has been making good runs, but we are just too slow to get it to him… then we keep possession and inch up the park, just making it more and more congested so he has less of a chance of making a run off the shoulder of the defender.

We need to get the ball to him earlier, when he has a chance to outpace the marker, but before he gets offside. He is missing Costa.

It was noticeable yesterday that Victory were never afraid of what we could do with the ball… they just gave us possession and kept their defence compact, waiting for us to give them the ball back while we were up in their half, then hoof over our heads.

That’s where Costa makes a difference, making that extra metre of space to beat a player and put in a quality cross. At the moment we are going through the motions and seem to have lost the ability to hit a dead ball - corners and free kicks totally ineffective recently.

2 Likes

Look that game we lacked creativity - in the second half Melbourne parked the bus (which as I have explained before it is hard to break down even shit teams when they do that) but you can hardly say we are toothless since we are the top scoring team in the competition.

We invited the filth to park the bus by conceding a very avoidable goal in the first half. You should never be giving away a corner early in the game with one player holding the ball for ages near the corner flag and three defenders around him. Then De Jesus was left to mark Vergos at the corner. Somebody should be getting fired for that. A clear mismatch.

1 Like

Ouahim was playing as a 10 right? Did he recieve the ball between the midfield and defense once all game?

We keep playing horseshoe football, its like our opponents dont even need to defend the middle of the park.

Our tallest defender was Popovic at 1.84 and he is known for being terrible in the air.

We didn’t exactly have many tall players to mark all of theirs

1 Like

With Matthews out, size on set pieces is a real problem.

Maybe we should bring Max back. He’s our tallest outfielder.

Max Burgess to centre back seems to be the obvious answer………

2 Likes

Played left wing with Lolly on the right and Seg in the middle.

what the fuck has happened to Simon Hill?

I don’t rate him as a commentator nor as an Australian football pundit. He constantly talks about the need for pro/rel without talking about the finances and how that would kill Aus football by glossing over all the clubs being bankrupted in the UK by spending way too much.

He has never called out Man City over their blatant cheating.

The aleague subreddit would all collectively jack him off if they could. Whatever he says is like gospel to them

3 Likes

This is the bit that turned me off him. He was constantly banging on about the disgrace of Qatar getting the World Cup but never said a word about CFG.

4 Likes