Perhaps Melbourne having the Swan Street Stadium will give them more flexibility?, or are they forced to play at the terrible pre-season AFL Docklands stadium for ACL?

But is it good for the game?

If broken jaws and 9-0 victories are par for the course, it’s no wonder clubs are having a hard time selling the Champions League to fans.

Story just up on the World Game website.

Buckley also says that they did move the first leg of the semi to help Victory out, but other games were difficult to shift around.

The FFA had to be more flexible – not by a couple of days but by a week or so, so as not to be unfair to the clubs in the ACL and the finals – but at the start of the year the FFA wouldn’t know which clubs would be in the business end of the finals would they?

So its like this, not easy to re-arrange and you have to accept it and do your best.

Way back in 1980, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest had 3 games left when most teams ended their league campaign (back then teams didn’t all end simultaneously. And Arsenal had the FA Cup and Cup-Winners’ Cup finals to play too, and would lose both. Forest had the European Cup Final, which they won.

Back in 1963, Everton had 9 games in April due to one of the severest winters in English history. And we didn’t lose a single one of those games, and duly won the League.

The previous season was one of those with mass postponements due to severe weather, affecting the lower leagues and Scotland far more. Now that season (78/79) was one of the most openly contested leagues in Scottish history, and both Rangers and Celtic had a mass of catch-up games. Celtic duly won the league, beating a 10-man Rangers to do so in a decisive game, overhauling Dundee United who had been top when their fixtures were completed.

If you want to be taken seriously as professionals, you have to deal with these things as they come.

Instead of playing the same starting 11 every week he should mix it up change at least 1-2 players a match give a young guy ago.

Melbourne Victory havnt had one player go overseas and be successful and they are the biggest club in the A-league.

Answer: His lips are moving.

I actually don’t think there is an easy answer… while it may be easy to say … YA bring it on …. we show em … in practise it is far more difficult… whether we like it or not the marketing arms of the NRL & AFL and their media broadcasters are set on increasing TV rating … to this end it is pure business ….

Football is a long way from being on the same park … so to keep away from start up and season end as much as possible is what is needed and thus cram as much as possible into into the Late September early March … can only be and will be this way for a years years… We are still developing … creating expecations or false dawns will only hurt us … do what we can do and lets grow and I for one can point to a number of errors … but I can also see the logic at this stage of football development to stay away as much as possible direct head to head match scheduling with the NRL & AFL…

From now on they will have no excuses. Plenty of time to recover, so we are expecting 4 straight wins. Asia is very weak in standards. It is not UEFA CL by a mile.

To be honest, I wonder how MV gets such good results in the A-League. They look pretty average in Asia everytime I have seen them. Ad U came last and they seem to have no problems in Asia. Maybe MV gives too much respect. They should be thrashing the Asians and beating them like rented mules.

That statement is absolute crap. Going into the last round MV were always going to finish in the top two so they would have some say in where and when the first game was played. They clearly stated that they would play the first game at home no matter what the outcome of the premiership. This was combined with the fact that whoever their opponent was to be would most likely want the second leg at home (fat lot of good it did them anyway )

As for the broken leg statement, they always said it was a ‘suspected’ broken leg. Everyone took that is was broken as a given. I’m pretty sure after the true extent of the injury was discovered they let everyone know but people like yourself obviously chose to ignore this statement.

That said the scheduling of the ACL is another matter entirely. I think that Mike has a point in relation to the East Asian club competitions. The competition could start a few weeks later to avoid the worst of the weather and the start of the East Asian leagues however this would push the group stage of the competition towards May which is getting very hot in the Gulf.

Last couple of ACL. People were complaining about lack of match practice as there were in the off seasons and no games. However the flip side of that was the opposition side had 3 matches in a week and more fatigue then our team. However vidmar said that he would rather be in the position of the opponents to have more games (but fatigue) then less games (fit but lacking match practice).

this year the ACL has moved earlier. When melbourne play Beijing, i believe Beijing were in their preseasons. So therefore the reverse had happen.

You can’t complain about having not enough match practice in the ACL and then start complaining about congested fixture when the match practice issue is fixed.

It’s either one or the other.

The only issue i see was that two day break was a bit to little. Even in Europe there’s generally no less then 3 day break in between games.

however merrick was complaining about the schedule even for the first leg.

Hopefully the lessons are learnt for next years A league schedule but Archie beeing the huge football fan that he is was probably banking on MV not making the top 6. Two good seasons ina row is a first for them.

Merrick’s been upping the mind games during the finals series and everyone is dancing to his tune. He is doing a great job of deflecting attention from his players in the lead up to important matches, complaining about a phantom broken leg, complaining about referees picking up his players for stray elbows, complaining about scheduling when you’ve got a squad of 30 players (for the ACL) and you play 3 matches in 2 weeks…

He’s going to keep doing it too, because everyone’s buying what he’s selling!

——
AF

I took Merrick’s statement as more of a comment on the general lack of dialogue between the FFA and the AFC.