hehe on top of that, it should be the best position on the ground to play in (realistically?)

I mean who doesn't mind putting a shoe through it .. it is unbelievably baffling

I'm looking forward to  the Arnie tenure.

 I've read quite a bit of literature about Oz Football. In Robbie Slater's book, The Hard Way, Arnie and Slater were team jokers and pranksters with the Socceroos. They were always up to mischief.

Ange was very intense. I think Arnie is more relaxed and renowned as a good manager by players under his tutelage.

I'm pretty positive about coaches since Guus.




Arnie - struggled, but knows what to do now with his apprenticeship under Pim and club coaching.

Pim - safe pair of hands  at the wheel.

Holger - probably our worst period. We went backwards.

Ange - had done a good job, until he became inflexible with three and the back and walked out prematurely.

Bert - a candidate for our best ever coach.

Arnie - I think he will do well. His Olyroos gig will augment the senior role.



I had grave concerns about Arnie a few years ago when he castigated FFA for overlooking athleticism in national youth teams.

Given his current comments when he lauded the current national under 17s for their technicality, the future looks good. Our Asian opposition  has improved immeasurably though.

I thought he did a good job at the world cup considering but calm down with that. 

I'm with him actually

with every other coach we have to either play possession football or have an organized defence. He was capable of doing both effectively given the personal he had and I'm not talking about a compromise either he added value to all aspects of the game. Oddly enough a -3 GD is what I would have expected with Ange so maybe he was unlucky or maybe he didn't have enough time with the team

He had 3 competitive games for 1 point. You can't be calling him our best coach ever after that, so as i said calm down with the overreactions. 

BVM got our defence in brillant shape. If only he could've hung around to see if cracks started to show after another few years in the job. 

Heard Petratos is out of the Socceroos camp with an ankle injury!
Who do you think will replace him?
What attacking players that where left out stiff not to get a look?

BVM did absolutely nothing for us. His tenure was an abysmal disappointment, and I think we actually went backwards. Still, it worked out. Van Bommel was there with him and has helped us since by taking a couple of players to PSV. 

Lolz anything but BVM defence first approach at the World Cup would’ve seen us embarrassed. Not sure what you expect from a coach who had 4 1/2 months to fix problems Ange had years to resolve.

Somewhere I read Karacic, which would be great, as he deserves another look in.

I don’t know how you quantify an opinion like this.
We went from barely scraping past ACL qualification to holding our own against France.
Anyone who knows anything about football will tell you we played brilliantly at the World Cup, but just lacked goalscorers.

Yup. 

v Denmark we had 14 shots (5 on goal), Denmark had 10(5).

v Peru we had 14 shots (2 on goal), Peru had 4(3). 

We created chances but just couldn't finish...

I'd call it a systematic failure of Australian football development in general that over the past decade we've relied on Tim Cahill to save our bacon.  I don't see how that is BVM's doing.  I'm with other people in thinking that he's probably one of the very few coaches to intrinsically understand the players in front of him.  Let's see how Arnie goes with this.   

In his post-match interviews he seemed genuinely surprised at just how poor our finishing was.  I don't think he's coached a team that could create so many opportunities and yet consistently fail to take any of them. 

I've already explained it many times. We weren't anywhere close to brilliant. I knew we'd be competitive, so the fact that we didn't lose the games by 4-0 failed to impress me as much as it did many of you. I mean, when did we lose 4-0 in a serious game under Ange? I have no idea why people were expecting us to be humiliated at the wc. We were never that bad. So I was hoping for positive play and could see us getting out of the group.

As it turned out, the play was quite conservative and risk-averse, and the results were disappointing. Coach's tactics were unimaginative and at times downright cowardly, and his game and squad management was poor (not rotating so that the team was completely exhausted by the last game, nonsensical substitutions, a directive to STOP attacking in the last 10 minutes against Denmark when we had them on the ropes, failure to bring on Timmy when the crosses were flying in in the last 20 minutes of that crucial game, not giving Luongo a chance at all, his loser comments like 'normally we lose to France 9 times out of 10', etc.). I really have no idea what BvM is being praised for exactly. He did nothing for us. Definitely nothing good. 

And people really need to stop talking like the qualifiers were somehow an unmitigated disaster for us. We got 19 points and only lost to Japan in Japan. That's actually pretty good. That would have qualified us directly in any other wc cycle. It was just a freak event that Saudi kept picking up points. 

What a crock of shit. Hey decentric, you are literally (but actually figuratively) a crocodile of poo! Wat do u say 2 dat, crocodile?

Of poo.

Are you thirsty? 

Is your name Richard Cranium?

Oh sorry I mistook you for Gazprom 2.0

Seriously though, I just like the phrase 'crock of shit', and the only way to work it into a comment was to reply to a decentric post. I'm still not sure what a 'crock' is though. I keep imagining crocodiles made of poo. 

A crock is a pottery container sometimes used for food and water, and sometimes shit, apparently.

Lebanon beat Jordan 1:0 in a friendly. 

2:0 for Trinidad and Tobago over UAE. 

Barely anyone seems available for the October window. We can't wait until November for our first games.

Peru have organised Netherlands and Germany this window. Why the hell is the FFA so poorly organised with scheduling matches? 

Focused on inhouse politics with the Congress.

There is an Asian Cup coming up in January.  Much like the World Cup recently in which the FFA took 50 staff members for some reason along this upcoming junket won't organise itself! 

Just putting it out there, Souttar made his debut for Scotland in the nations league against Belgium last night. Even though it’s a glorified friendly, I think that pretty much cements him in Scotland’s plans for the future.

ange's first 2 years 

You really expect FFA to do the actual fucking job of managing a NT?

You must be in the mix to be one of Arnie's assistant coaches, Derider. 

He could do with someone with your knowledge of international football in the dug out.