Official South Melbourne Hellas thread 🔵⚪

[SMFC1959]

We walked off not hobbling ... reckon it was minor.

Hopefully he's available for the Auckland match on Wednesday afternoon.

 

[southmelb]

We needed 20 quality players to pull off what we are doing, we have 10 with 3-4 on top of them that are just ok.

The 2 cancelled ofc games hurt us, but we dropped some horrible points early in the ofc, 3-3 to south island (goalkeeping joke), 1-1 to bula (janko mistake) and a couple others meant we had to take the full squad to Fiji, not only costing us the Oakleigh game, but putting extra travel and legs into the players that would have been avoided if we wrapped up leaders group qualification early.

 

[Monoethnic Social Club]

We needed 20 quality players to pull off what we are doing, we have 10 with 3-4 on top of them that are just ok.

The 2 cancelled ofc games hurt us, but we dropped some horrible points early in the ofc, 3-3 to south island (goalkeeping joke), 1-1 to bula (janko mistake) and a couple others meant we had to take the full squad to Fiji, not only costing us the Oakleigh game, but putting extra travel and legs into the players that would have been avoided if we wrapped up leaders group qualification early.

The problem is, and will always be, that to keep 10 decent second string player interested you have to give them enough match time to not make them feel like playing for another club is more attractive.

 

[SMFC1959]

We needed 20 quality players to pull off what we are doing, we have 10 with 3-4 on top of them that are just ok.

The problem is, and will always be, that to keep 10 decent second string player interested you have to give them enough match time to not make them feel like playing for another club is more attractive.

Both good points

I think the happy medium is to have 4 quality first team players on top of what we have. You need an additional very good Centre Back (help rotate and share workload with Jankovic/Eliopoulos), a decent Central Midfielder (help share workload with Pasquali/Giannakopoulos), another attacking player on the wing (additional attacking option), and another decent forward (a vast improvement on Singh).

You can only do the above if you have 15-16 quality first team players, and then have the likes of Leech, Cocks, Menelaou, O'Sullivan and Dovison assisting.

 

[SMFC1959]

The 2 cancelled ofc games hurt us, but we dropped some horrible points early in the ofc, 3-3 to south island (goalkeeping joke), 1-1 to bula (janko mistake) and a couple others meant we had to take the full squad to Fiji, not only costing us the Oakleigh game, but putting extra travel and legs into the players that would have been avoided if we wrapped up leaders group qualification early.

Spot on. Those rain affected cancelled matches impacted our NPL season. We got away with the first one against Solomon Kings but that second catch up fixture against Tahiti United meant that we had to sacrifice the Oakleigh match. We could have retained some players in Melbourne and fielded a much stronger team to at least hold out for a draw rather than field a U23s team.

 

[southmelb]

The good thing is no surprises moving forward, we will know on Wednesday exactly which players and how many we took over to Auckland. I expect it will be a mix of players used against Bulleen and Oakleigh for Friday night and the rest of May.

If we escape the next 3 weeks with an aggregate of just a -10 goal difference we've probably done well. Been rumours that the team will be given a break after the ofc, that cant happen if we want to play finals.