NZF is the laziest football association on the planet.

Build our own league so we can increase pro pathways? Nah let’s just have one team in the Australian league, with them assuming all the risk of running the league.

Support our only Pro team in that league? Nah the Australians can fund it with the TV money they get from Australian broadcasters.

Push for a move to Asia? Nah let’s just cruise through the OFC and make all the FIFA tournaments without trying.

Play more friendly games, especially in NZ? Nah let’s just only play friendlies once a year within a single window in either Europe or Asia and certainly never in the actual country we live in.

It’s not even a proper Derby, the cities are 8 hours apart from each other. Are we really going to see thousands of New Zealanders drive across the island and fill out their stadiums for a football match?

And then they lose home advantage which is not worth it.

“Do you expect a 22yo rugby lad to be able to articulate himself perfectly under this pressure?”

No but I expect a Captain to be able to. If he can’t do that then he shouldn’t be captain.

Ridiculous. WSW are trying to get a stadium upgrade and would compromise that if they moved.

Pulver blaming the Media and Public when this is fallout from his organisations complete lack of management skills is the biggest disgrace of the evening.

This, it’s all downhill now as they have only one year to figure out the new coach’s way of playing.

800000 at ANZ is not appropriate for any team and the sfs is never filled for any game, i’d say that makes them inappropriately sized. Homebush is not rectangular, it’s a horrible in between and it doesn’t matter if they get better crowds because it still makes for extremely boring viewing.

Robben has been absolutely sublime this year and should get it on account that he has been carving up a much more competitive domestic league compared to La Liga, as well as being part of the team that tore Barça a new one in the Champions League.

And Gold Coast Titans are called Gold Coast for a reason, there is no good reason for them not to play home games at Suncorp. They should be focussing on ways to make Robina a better match day experience.

Marquee allowance is just pointless in the NRL, it’s not like the A-League where they are trying to attract players from bigger leagues. All it will encourage is poaching of players rather than developing their own youngsters. If anything, players that have gone through NRL club juniors from the youngest age group to First grade should have exemptions from the cap so Clubs are more community focused in their search for the next generation of talent.

And if a cap on football department spending comes in, then i’m out of Rugby League. Melbourne already struggles to find juniors due to the lack of any worthwhile competition in Victoria, once the big three go we are in real trouble, we have to spend more than everyone just to be competitive.

Some awful ideas in here tbh. Melbourne fans are perfectly happy with our rectangular and appropriately sized (unlike nearly every sydney venue) stadium. There is absolutely zero reason to move to any games to an inferior ground and especially none to Geelong or even worse to Tasmania when members expect full value out of their season tickets and any home game outside of Melbourne is just simply unacceptable.

And ANZ should just be avoided full stop, it’s ridiculous that regular season games are even played there in the first place when that dump of a ground doesn’t even get a quarter full half the time. For me it doesn’t matter how good the standard might be for a homebush game, the total lack of atmosphere makes them dull enough to be unwatchable. NRL teams moving games all over the place and not sticking to one ground are not doing Rugby League any favours, they should be taking a leaf out of the Wanderers book and seeing how the lower supply of available tickets at Parramatta has left fans absolutely clambering for Season Tickets this year, a scenario that would never have happened had they even played just a couple at homebush.

i saw that bay with cricket australia, you can guarantee that will be the most awful creation CA have made. The thing will be a magnet for feral bogan kids who for years embarrassed australia with aussie aussie aussie from bay 13.

penalties are stupid when there is nothing on the line. half the deal with the exercise is it’s meant to be so tense that you can’t watch. Watch the farce of the MV vs LA Galaxy shootout to see how pointless it was.

leijer has been an absolute donkey in the last two games and most of last season. Ansell and Geria should start as they are actually defensively solid and play out the back comfortably.

It shouldn’t be dying but the AFL types seem to be trying as hard as they can to kill it. The International rules series is one of the few games involving Aussie Rules players that i will watch and i seriously enjoyed it when it was taken seriously. As an irishman who follows the GAA Football season (Up the Dubs) it made sense to do so. It’s interesting to see AFL players have to rethink their approach to the game when the space is much more restrictive and they can’t always handball their way out of trouble with the handball restrictions (which i think is a silly rule but whatever). The sight of Dustin Fletcher playing rather naturally as a impromptu goalkeeper or Australians trying to grapple with a different ball is also good value.

My issues with the series though are endless and they seem to be growing with this years edition but these are the big two.

1. The Team
I don’t care how they dress it up, restricting selection for playing to a national team to a single race is stupid. It cannot and should not be called an Australia representative team if it is not open to all races and ethnicities. How can a non indigenous Australian (over 96% of the Country) be expected to get behind this team as much as he would an australian side? The op is right in that Irish fans will really not give a crap about some race based side, Croke park is going to look very bare.

It is partly the AFL’s fault anyway that senior players were pulling out of the side by not emphasising any importance on this series. They need to find ways to make the top available players want to be involved, possibly with larger player payments to entice them that it is worth there time.

2. The stadiums.
It is a rectangular game, playing it on oval stadiums is stupid. Any Union, League or Soccer fan could tell that watching anything other than cricket or AFL at Etihad or the MCG is awful no matter where you sit. There is the best Rectangular Stadiums in the country where all of the 2011 Melbourne crowd could have comfortably been seated and yet the opportunity was wasted. The next home series should leave out the traditional AFL grounds and have both games at rectangular grounds like AAMI Park or Lang Park.

“The pirates” is the most sad idea for a team name, it has about as much relevance to perth as any other crap name they could have picked. I want to see a team in perth but i want that bid to fall flat on it’s arse so we don’t have another bland team running round.

Considering the players who haven’t pulled out because of East Asia Cup commitments such as Ono, ADP and Heskey have also said they don’t want to be involved indicates that this no more than a glorified friendly and thus a dud.

The game sold out because the biggest team in the world is playing, they could have been playing Sydney United and you still could have got 100 000 people turn up. Don’t think it’s for any other reason that people are going to this . The difference is that if they were playing a HAL team we would have actually done something progressive with the fixture such as improving the international awareness of our clubs.

This. Only a handfull of outsiders have seen united train in the last 20 odd years

Why should we focus on one ethnic group when they are not even a major minority now in Australia? I do believe the indigenous Australians deserve respect and a bit of special treatment politically and socially when it comes to their history and culture but when it comes to Football they should be just one of many cultures that play the world game.

They should never have stopped having saturday arvo games. The epl manages to actually hold onto to it’s traditions and have the majority of it’s fixtures at 3pm saturday *Shock Horror*

No we don’t. The players know it’s a dud and so do the fans, judging by the indifference of the football community both online and locally. The ‘All-Stars’ concept is foreign to football being of a distinct “Yank” origin and has little to no interest or following compared to the A-League clubs. The FFA was incredibly naive thinking the football community would all get behind this team together instead of picking one of the Sydney sides to play them.

Manchester United could just have easily played Western Sydney or Sydney FC and you would certainly have seen Shinji Ono and Allesandro Del Piero turning up for their respective clubs as they actually care about the team they will be playing for. Why should Sydney and ADP give a damn about a friendly game that could risk injury to their star player when there is absolutely zero benefit to them as a club from this game. Same goes for WSW and Ono, had it been them playing however, you could be assured that Ono and co would certainly want to be there as it would do wonders for their club. As well as the guaranteed availability of players.would have the local clubs actually gain the international exposure of playing the biggest team in the world. What does the “All Stars” do for A-League clubs? Sweet FA, no clubs profile gets raised from a bland collection of players. We have a team that has never played together go out for a glorified training run with no one to support them before they part ways. Put WSW out there and you have a title winning, tactically sound team with some of the best fans in Asia showing the world what Australian Football is really about.

As for Moyes “taking it seriously”. He will take a preseason tour which is primarily a revenue raising activities about as seriously as any other European Football manager, as an opportunity for players to gain match fitness and tighten up their tactical approach, nothing more.

You’ve got to be kidding. Do you even know what safe standing is or the purpose of it? Or is your knowledge of such things as poor as bad as your understanding of the Hillsborough incident. What we learned from Hillsborough was that the stadium was not safe and and South Yorkshire police were completely incompetent in managing the movement and numbers of fans. This has been known for years by those who were actually involved in the disaster and has finally been acknowledged by the Government. To suggest that standing was at fault for 96 deaths after the overfilling of an unsafe ground is ignorant and offensive.

All we can hope is that the northend is redeveloped into a safe standing terrace for the RBB instead of useless seats.

No it isn’t sensible because ANZ is a dump of a stadium because of it’s multipurpose considerations.