Similar to mine.

There was also a stat that showed that the Socceroos had far better results with Jedi the team, than without. 

Moreover, even though I think Milligan has a far greater number of strengths over a range of football performance criteria, those things that Jedi does better,  like being disciplined in maintaining  position in BPO, are more valuable to the team. Certainly in the context that nobody can replace him.

 I don't  think Luongo and Irvine can replace Milligan in terms of distribution and handling speed, but Mooy can.

Furthermore, Mooy's lack of pace in an attacking midfield position  is starting to catch him out when in possession. Too often he is closed down quickly by  opponents with his slow  acceleration off the mark after the first touch. Hence, he is forced to play backwards, whilst other players move forwards and run at defenders more than Mooy does if receiving in the same positions.

They are a bit short on experience, but Sains is starting to fill that vacuum at the back, rendering Millsy more extraneous than he was a year ago.

Against France, I think Mooy must play in CAM, with Jedinak and Irvine as CDMs.

I think van Marwijk would be well-advised to try aim for a draw. To that end, I think we'd be more defensively stable with Mooy slightly further afield and Rogic not starting.

THis why I would make our backline 
Wright--Sains--Jurman---Behich
----------Milligan----Jedinak--------
Leckie--------Rogic------Kruse----
----------------Juric--------------------
4-4-2 or 4-3-3 using the same players to th@ effect.

etc...
Give Nabbout a start in our friendly & see what happens

Dougall plays both LB and DM, could he play RB?

The others are all pretty much all exclusively wide left side players. Goodwin played a bit at RW for Adelaide but it did not suit him at all.

Troisi was brilliant against Chile and has not played anywhere near that well since that game. The Chile games still makes no sense to me in so many ways, the performance was so different to anything else the team produced under Ange. My only explanation is it was Tim Cahill inspired but that is hardly proven.

Don't understand why people are choosing jurman. He's had 4 caps and in 2 of them he wasn't that impressive.

Sainsbury is no doubt the No 1 CB.
Wilkinson who has had 16 caps has been solid as a rock, so too Spiranovic with 35 caps, even though he's currently playing L2.
williams has also been awesome and would have been a lock in the last few major tournaments if it wasn't for injury.

For me..
1-Sainsbury/Wilkinson
2-Williams/Spiranovic

I agree with you about the top 4 being those mentioned being our best four CBs. The only question marks I have about them is whether Williams has developed into too much of a thug. He has got away with a lot this season for Victory he should not have done, it is a troubling aspect of his game. Spiranovic was excellent at the last world cup, he was not at fault for any of the goals conceded, Wilkinson was done by Robben which cost a goal. I would like to see Sainsbury and Spiranovic be the starting 2 CBs. 

Jurman could be next in line, but maybe not. Still he surprised me by how well he played the first two games against Syria even though he was not as good against Honduras.

Jurman is a 'thug' too. Aggressive tackling, sometimes in excess.
I really dislike wright at CB or RB but his versatility may get him a spot. Also the captain of his club and playing regularly in the championship.

Jedi is not a distributor like milligan or mooy. Mooy being better than milligan at distributing, and jedi better than milligan at interception and defensive positioning. Milligan isnt a goal scorer and jedi has had some luck from dead balls.
However playing jedi + mooy means that mooy is too easily isolated and double teamed which kills us as every attack funnels through mooy from jedi.
Playing milligan and jedi together leaves a rather slow hole in the middle and means we have to leave a goal threat like irvine out.

Jurman appeared very easy going in his 4 games except for that stomp. Perhaps I was blinded a bit by his inexperience. 

I agree on the Milligan comments and comparison. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I like him as a starter but when a blunder happens like against Syria in Sydney I really think maybe he'd be better slowing the game down if we have a lead.

From watching the two ACL games with Sydney FC and Melb V, I cannot think of one Australian domestic field player who excelled playing better teams in a higher ranked comp.

The three imports for SFC were even worse. Bobo, Mierjiewski and Ninkovoc were pretty poor when starved of the ball. In the HAL they have more time on the ball, spend less energy winning it back from not not being squeezed as intensively as ther Korean opponents. All made plenty of mistakes.


George was the best import from the two Aussie club teams by far, and the best  player including Aussies.


Wilko may have been the best of a bad bunch of Aussies. Brillante and O'Neill often suffered  numerical disadvantage with nobody close enough from further afield to fill the space of a number 10 in defence and keep the defensive shape compact in BPO.

Wilkshire was shown up for speed, like he has never been in the HAL games I've seen him play. Yet he has been mooted as a Socceroo!

I think we are treading water, with a lot of issues in Oz football, whereas our Asian opposition  is improving faster than us. Tactically, they have improved enormously  in the last few years. Japanese and Korean teams seem much sharper at the end of their pre-season than our teams do in the late home and away season.

Asian opposition have also improved their finishing and are probably better than us ATM!

Sydney's front 4 are experienced players with 3 of them being foreign and showed they the best in the a-league, tonight it showed the ACL is a step up from there every day a-league game i think they did not prepare well for it, at times it was too easy for the Korean side. 

Similar attacking patterns and slow ball movement which was read too easily by Suwon, and Arnie's best option after that was to employ Matt Simon...way too predictable. 

I agree with this, Sydney just weren't prepared for a tough game. They turned out playing safe, boring football with little intensity expecting to do the business against Suwon. Arnie was tactically outclassed with Suwon negating Sydney's biggest threats with absolute ease.

What can work in the a-league 95% off the time does not always work in a higher level competition like the ACL.
I think they will learn alot from this game and will get better but it goes to show the K-League and the J-League still remain supreme in Asia even during there preseason, the level of the a-league still needs to go higher if we want consistent results from all teams. 

But this is a not new issue, its being around for the last 10 years as i can remember. 

They aren't even the top team of their league either and were so much sharper and well drilled in preseason. 

Oh wow, the Korean's are known for being quite fit in there pre-season so their performance doesn't come as a surprise then. 

Troisi scores Asian cup winner, Juric stumbles and bumbles. Best he has is to set up on occasion. Troisi scores with a Rocket last week and should be the certainty and Juric barely making the squad for Russia. It is the other way around. Yes, one is a midfielder/winger and the other a Centre fwd.

Missed Troisi's rocket!

Glad to hear it.

Troisi scored that goal because juric held up 2 or 3 korean defenders, protecting the ball and getting pushed over yet still managed to get the ball to troisi....
Juric scores more goals in a tougher league than troisi. 
Sure he is a striker and troisi isnt. Sure neither of them are setting the world on fire, but juric is probably as good as weve got for a striker unless golgol or jmac kick on or babalj miraculously resurrects his carreer 

This.

Juric's assist was massive. Plus that cheeky little backheel poke showed his awareness and technical skills.You don't have that goal without Juric.

On Juric: It's important to note that his club side has played with a front 2 for about half this season, scoring isn't his only role and he has 8 goals and 4 assists in 22 games. He's directly involved in a goal on average every 143 minutes, which is decent for someone in a mid table team.

Go to 0:30. This is one of the main reasons for Daniel Arzani to go to Russia.

This is what creativity and the ability to break down defences looks like. And the Socceroos do NOT have that. The Socceroos have components of that ability. But they are also missing key components. Tom Rogic and Aaron Mooy can create. But I don't think they've played as well for the NT as they have done for Celtic and Huddersfield, respectively. There need to be teammates in the Patrick Roberts mould for Rogic and Mooy to be truly effective. Mooy and Rogic can be sooo much better with the right sort of teammates.

Arzani is not Roberts. And he hasn't achieved nearly as much as Roberts has so far. But he's that style of footballer, imo.

mate Arzani does none of this sh*t and I've barely watched the kid. I've seen him run around but never through on a pass as direct as th@
Most of his direct play results IN a pass. He can't shoot for sh*t from what I've been reading.
Also, that is horrid defending. Even A-League teams would be better than this allowance through on goal. Rogic has a field day in the SPFL mostly due to defending like this. Horrible. I agree with ROgic and Mooy needing team mates who have that intellegence to run on to a pass in 'space'. Ange never changed his tactics, so conversely, his opposition never had to change there bus. This was the real problem, not even team mates to be honest. Too much 'congestion' was the criticism in every game. Kruse and Leckie did well but they never ever had much time or space, like the example you're giving above. Our game looked nothing like Celtic's , we had Mooy and Rogic getting chased off possession first pass too them, why? cause Ange is a dh and created a no 'space' transition. They pressed the shit out of the two main creators, thus it was left to (let me think) Behich, Kruse , Leckie, a sub when the oppo was dead on their feet (Troisi? ROgic?). Oppo sat in their half reading us like a book from what I remember. Sssstupid lack of any game flow , moreover no tactic at all tbh Brisbane Roar it was. But maybe worse. ALmost complete backflip on our old negative defensive mindset except now we're zombies in a proactive mindset yet again. This is the reason for always needing to be flexible/versatile to keep teams guessing. We will do better with BVM mark my words. 

I've been on the Celtic forum lately and there is a lot of hope about rogic coming back with many saying he is the only creative player on the team

Good point about how we don't know how rogic would do with the new coach. I would also add that we don't know how they would do with an in form Kruse who dominated the bundesliga with dusseldorf and was first choice for an elite team before injury. By world cup time we might be seeing a Kruse that might shock fans that never saw him at his best.

On Arzanis shooting it's difficult to tell yet how he is. My impression is he is accurate but lack power

My impression of a lot of the ntc graduates is that their passes and shots are a little soft. Soft passes leaves them vulnerable to intercepts particularly against speedy teams like Thailand and Vietnam which is probably why they have struggled. Hopefully this will improve when they develop physically. Would be interested in hearing what others have to say about this

I think if the game plan suited him and we had a transition from defense to attack that gave his team mates space to run into he would be great.


As above. Form is good and all, but he and Leckie became the sole creators in Ange's narrow minded style. They had a very difficult job 


It's also hard to combine power with accuracy, I would think. If they don't come out of ntc knowing how to do both, I would think learning it along with A-League duties would be quite impossible and rather humiliating/embarrasing if they are trying to hone it in A-League games. (what  we probably see every week)

The way Pogba and Mbappe are playing atm.. we should have a serious chance at getting something. Pogba has been awful.

Pep Guardiola made a good statement the other day when asked about KDB as ballon dor nominee... recalling that he believes that football now is all about creating space and using that space.... we had none in Ange's philosophy... watch man city counter attack.. its phenomenal.. we have the talent and speed to create these sort of counter attacking situations... but I don't recall us ever doing it after the asian cup.. we had so much speed that was just never used.

yeah Im worried after watching youth that this might be a problem. Passing with power is more likely to improve in my opinion than shooting. I'm worried that the finishing won't improve much in the next half dozen years