Tratt in particular will have other offers on the table.
Im 99% sure Ninko is in cap for next year.
With Jop gone and Warland likely to be missing until the new year, Tratt is really important.
Its the right decision to let all those players go. Hopefully Caceres and DDS aren’t retained either, they are just not quite good enough. They are decent players with good skill and technique but I’m not sure they actually produce enough when all is said and done. We may have won the toilet seat, but if we are being completely honest, our squad was sub-par this year and we mainly won because nobody else was that great either. If we want to aim for a return to level we were at under Arnold I think we need to set our standards slightly higher than what they were this season in terms of recruitment.
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That’s not fair on Perth who had a great season, had good players all around the squad, and gave us a proper tonking the game they beat us. We mainly won, because we were on of the clear top 3, and you can win an A-League title by having a better game (or luckier) on the day.
I neither agree nor disagree that we were sub-par. We certainly weren’t up to being “proper” Champions, but we did very well considering the changes on and off the pitch.
I feel like that’s the ridiculousness of our last few seasons distorting views on what a good squad for this league is tbh.
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Our sides from Arnolds last two years would’ve wiped the floor with every team this season including Perth. Consider the table from both of those seasons, the standard of football played by each side and the level of competition in each season. I think its uncontroversial to say that both of those sides under Arnold were a lot better than Perth this year.
If the benchmark for how good we want to be/can be is the level we were at under Arnold in his last two years then this year we were sub-par in comparison. Especially in terms of the squad. I’m aware this is a high standard but clearly its possible to achieve. Arnold did it two years in a row.
Arnold, for a heap of reasons including himself, assembled a once in a generation squad. Almost 15 years of this club shows that we were insanely spoilt for 2 years. It won’t be repeated anytime soon.
In the history of the league there have been 2 sides that hit those levels of dominance - Roarcelona and us. Will be another 5 years at least until there’s a repeat.
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I’d keep Brillante. He’s not as good as he was but he’s still above average for the league IMO.
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Devlin was here to fill our u20 quota (along with Ivanović and King). I think he might not be eligible next year? In that case we’d need to sign another u20, which would require that he shift up into a proper senior spot to stay, I.E. good enough to be coming off the bench regularly if we’re down an injury or two.
Perth 60 points, us last season 64 points. We were definitely better last season than they were this season, but it’s hardly a “wiping the floor” difference. Also, our competition in 2nd and 3rd finished with 49 and 42 points in '17, and 50 and 43 points in '18, whereas Perth’s competition got 52 and 50 points. I think it’s fair to say that Perth have had the 3rd best A League season since Roarcelona. Considering Arnie’s GOAT season was almost entirely injury free, I think that aiming for that with a first year coach, with ACL commitments, similar FFA Cup achievements and no proper home ground is pretty damn unrealistic.
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Perth had a better regular season than Roarcelona’s best. 2010-11 they picked up 65 points, but that was from 30 games, and at 2 1/6 points per game they’d only have gotten to 58.5 in a 27 round season.
They had a better record than anyone in the history of the A-League, other than 2016-18 Sydney FC.
My wife liked it…she says “do u reckon it’s true?”
Would keep Caceres and DDS.
Gutted about Reza, seems like a quality lad and was loving it here.
I don’t like complaining after winning the toilet seat and really shouldn’t…but I will!
I think our imports were the weakest part of our squad this year, Alfie excluded of course.
Siem was great on paper but not in reality considering his injury history. Jop seemed like a decent lad but wasn’t close to being good enough for a visa player. Likewise with Reza, a top lad who tried hard but 1 (amazing) penalty aside he didn’t really cut the mustard.
Definitely an area Bimbi needs to improve for next season.
I actually think we should try to get Holosko back, he would gel really well with Alfie I rekon…actually just realised he is 35
Jop was a fail, Siem was a gamble that made sense and delivered some extremely pornagraphic moments and a great song and Reza did alright for someone with 3 months on the ground. A fail and 2 passes plus Alfie and Ninko. Corica-Terry-Berger did pretty well.
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I don’t think any imports were fails. They were all highly credentialed players who bar Jop made some good contributions. There’s only so much you can control as a signing. I’ve got no problem signing the players we did that don’t work up over some of the other imports such as a Jair
Yeah but there’s also a fair bit you can predict.
Jop, Siem and Reza were all gambles and none of them paid off.
Every signing is a gamble. You can never predict that a player will actually settle and fit in so it’s a bit hard to put that at corica. They were all definitely the type of cv that we’d want to be signing or better so I’d commend the club on pulling those signings off- Siem and Reza especially looked superb on signings
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Bullshit. That’s way too reductive.
There’s a reason some clubs recruit better than others. You can research players. You can look at their past and make educated guesses as to what’s going to happen in the future. And some people are better at it than others.
Jop looked very rough from the off. De Jong was a well known to be made of a particularly brittle kind of glass and Reza looked to be on the wrong kind of trajectory.
And they were KEY signings. We really needed a degree of certainty that they were at least starting xi material.
The credit for Corica is that he managed the team through and made the replacements work. I can’t give him a a great deal of kudos for the recruitment.
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Given how impossible it’s been to find a quality #9 in January throughout the entire history of the HAL, the fact we found an Asian +1 of Reza’s level is still pretty decent imo.
He showed glimpses, maybe wasn’t quite good enough to warrant keeping around, but even despite the limited output I don’t think it’s fair to label signing him as a failure. I think of it more as a 3 month trial with him sharing the workload. I’d have liked to have seen more of him up top while resting ALF tbh, but seems that lad just needs every minute available to burn off all those sausage rolls.