His recruiting of Ziegler & Baumjohann was good work & I would assume he’s signed Yeboah through familiarity.
I think give him the off season to make it his squad then judge him. I
I will say however that a good coach/manager should always get the best out of what they’ve got. Is Babbel? Debateable, Riera is a shadow of himself from last season, arguably with better service, for example.
I rated Riera highly last year,this year he is no where near a Markeeee.Missed 2 penaltys in 2 games.Did cop a good bounce last week to score.
Westys stats have them as putting lots of balls in the box,so he should have done a lot better.
Not the thread but you can’t rate Babbel too much. He made some good signings but he got Gombaus squad. His few signings have been good. Riera is definitely a marquee quality striker but he doesn’t look happy this season and there was some talk of him going back to Spain this window
Caceres confirmed via email from club. Half season loan. Pending clearance to face CCM.
Hmm.
We’ve got De Silva on the bench for the 10 and Retre as depth for the 6 (with Tratt at RB while Grant isn’t back). I thought Devlin looked tidy enough in seniors to get a run in case of absolute emergency, and hopefully Zuvela will eventually return too.
This seems to suggest to me that either Corica isn’t happy with De Silva, or isn’t confident in SDJ staying fit (or maybe is planning to leave him out for ACL, which would mean either picking VDL ahead of him, or another foreign signing).
I would’ve thought that a winger - Duke, or even Yeboah - would’ve been a more useful alternative to what we have.
There was an article recently saying Duke is off to The UK to try his luck there, so don’t think we will be getting him in.
That means O’Neill is gone, surely.
Caceres loan deal confirmed.
I’m fairly sure Zuvela is out for the season.
I’ve always rated Caceres at this level so I’m fairly pleased with this signing. @shabby is probably right though that this makes it look more likely that O’Neill will be leaving.
Its probably a good signing with the ACL in mind. Personally I don’t rate Caceres nearly as much as some others, but he can play pretty much anywhere in the midfield in our system and will provide good cover/squad rotation for the usual starting four mids, who will all need a game off at some point (particularly De Jong). That also means we don’t have to worry about Retre switching to midfield if someone goes down injured. So I think this will work out okay for us.
Correct re Zuvela. Spoke to him after the game at ANZ a couple weeks back and he said he’s done his acl and is out for 9 months.
Did Caceres play for Man City? Two articles I’ve seen say Man City, not Melb City?
Same deal as Mooy or Brattan: Man City bought him then loaned him out to Melbourne City.
Was thinking there for a while I got this one wrong. I guess the club just waited for the transfer window to announce it.
Hope O’Neill isn’t gone. Can’t we just tuck in brillante’s shirt and send him overseas instead ?
It’s extremely rare that a mid-season move works out for anyone involved. I’m happy for O’Neill to go, but it should be in the off-season, for his own sake as well as ours.
I know there have been rumours of overseas interest in O’Neill but I don’t necessarily think that getting Caceres automatically means that O’Neill must definitely be leaving. They’re not at all the same type of player. I think we’d be really porous through the middle if we had Brillante and Caceres as the two CM/DMs.
I think it mainly points to De Jong not playing ACL
Either not playing ACL, or perhaps only playing ACL with Jop missing Asia and Caceres playing A-League perhaps?
Nah. From memory we can choose a pretty big squad for ACL, so I don’t think it would be a problem for Caceres to play either when required. I remember I think even Jared Lum got in the squad one year. If anything we usually need to add players, not take them out, unless they’re foreigners.