
Originally Posted by
pv4
my expectation for this season was created the moment gve was appointed last season & the first thing he said was "this is not my squad, this whole year is a write-off because i am going to hammer home the style i want to play & i will add/remove the players i have a year to assess to create my squad for next year". given to him were immensely great resources (apparently we had budgeted for 2 marquees), an entire season worth of excuse under his belt (where i don't think results would have cared in the slightest) and total transfer control (buying all kids, even buying ribeiro totally by himself). this season, regardless of who gve brought in, i had no lower expectations than doing what ange did at brisbane. the moment he did a tiatto-move to wehrman, it was quite clear he was just trying to do exactly what ange did to brisbane. gve talked that game, and has no excuse not to get there.
in preseason, however, i thought we were wiping aside state league opposition a lot better than we used to (that weston 7-0 from branko days aside, weston were garbage that night). we seemed to control state league games a lot more, and for once it was obviously clear who the professional side was in the game. we were actually doing good things with the ball - i was impressed with tiago, mitchell, neville, taggz, brillante, birraz, and a few others. it felt like this preseason had a different vibe to it, and i was one of those guys standing with my arms crossed saying "gve is going to fxxx our season up" but couldn't help but walk away from games thinking "wow, maybe gve is going to do it".
i cannot and will not buy into the philosophy that simply by adding heskey into the team, it changed our entire system and gve can't actually implement the system. whether the heskey move was hsg-inspired and gve didn't have a say or not, gve spent the best part of off-season telling everyone that our system needed a target man. which it did. which it received. the sudden revert to heaps of long-balls & well direct play is not an indication of what the team HAS to do when heskey is there, it's what gve chooses to do - stupidly. and the players haven't taken the decision to pump longballs on themselves - they're getting instructed to do it by gve. heskey hasn't always played as the lone target - iirc most of his career was playing alongside another striker, whether he be target or the false 9 (him & bent at villa most recent example).
apart from sydney away, i haven't watched a game this season that i genuinely felt we deserved to walk away with 3 points without caring what the opposition did. and that is a huge, huge failure on gve's behalf imo. he's had a whole year to sort his shit out, and he has nae done that.
to be totally honest, imo the two biggest transfer cockups we've had in recent years were not getting smeltz, and not getting farina (my opinion on farina had and has no sway from his recent decision to sign for sydney and/or his recent form for sydney, it was established well before that). gve is and was the wrong choice.
#gveout