Good evening. A fair bit to talk about today so I’ll start with the latest news. Holger Osieck has named his 23 man squad for Australia’s World Cup Qualifiers this month, calling up Harry Kewell in the process. Brett Emerton has also been given the nod. Its an interesting move considering Harry’s (and Emerton’s) rather average form at the moment. Osieck justifies his decision saying:

There’s no guarantee (they’ll play) at all, I’m pretty much performance-related.

I ask a lot more of them other than they have produced so far. But knowing their value and what they can bring to the team I invited them.

Fair enough I guess. Although I’d be annoyed if Harry spent his time for the Socceroos on the bench when he could be playing for Victory. Due to the call up he’ll miss the Central Coast match on November 12. Carlos Hernandez will also miss that game as he’s been picked for Costa Rica’s next lot of friendlies. You could argue that Carlos isn’t in the best form either but he hasn’t had too many opportunities to play for his country in the last year so it’ll be great to see him back in action for the Ticos.

So, how will we cope without our two best players? Mehmet’s already struggling to put a consistent team out on the pitch each week. Now he’ll have to re-shuffle things once again. I’m interested to see how he handles it.

Next up, some injury news. According to the Club Tando Velaphi is four weeks away from a return, but I think it’ll be much longer before we see him play given the fantastic form of Ante Covic. Elsewhere, Grant Brebner will be out of action for another two weeks. He’s suffering a calf injury which kept him out of Sunday’s game against Wellington.

Right, now to get to the crux of today’s post. Last night it was confirmed that Adrian Madaschi, a player who’d been training with Melbourne Victory for nearly two months, has now signed for He*rt on a short term injury replacement contract. Victory had actually offered him a contract themselves on several occasions but nothing could be agreed on due to the restrictions of the salary cap.

Basically, it means that Madaschi was asking for more money than we could afford to pay him – or was he? Only a couple of weeks ago David Davutovic reported in the Herald Sun that we had around $100,000 left in the cap. I’m not sure how accurate this figue is but I’d be surprised if Madaschi was on anything close to $100,000 at He*rt for only a short term deal.

I wonder though, why the Club were in pursuit of Simon Colossimo last month – a player who would surely command a much larger amount of money. If we were prepared to fork out the cash for Colossimo then you’d think any deal with Madaschi would be a much cheaper option in comparison, especially if it was only going to be on a short term basis.

Its all a bit unclear but we do know that the Club were trying to offload a few players to free up some cap space, namely Danny Allsopp, Tom Pondeljak and Billy Celeski. I guess that plan back fired. Now the transfer window has closed. We’ve missed out on securing a centre-half and we’re pretty much stuck with three players who aren’t that good anymore and who we don’t really need. The only option left would be to release them via mutual termination of their contracts and there’s little chance of them agreeing to that – especially Allsopp who still has two years to run on his current deal.

The whole situation is a bit of a mess but its directly related to what happened at the start of 2011. I said on Twitter last night that I felt the Club’s management of the squad has been poor, both recently and throughout the takeover of the new board. You could argue that the new board inherited a lot of the problems. Those problems being certain players receiving new contracts that shouldn’t have, towards the end of last season. The things is though, the new board isn’t entirely new and the takeover was already underway before last season ended.

Geoff Miles stood down as CEO in December – a decision that was announced two months beforehand. Richard Wilson, who was already on the board at the time had taken over his position by January. At the end of January, then Chairman Geoff Lord announced he was stepping down at the end of the season. Anthony Di Pietro, another board member was waiting to take his place.

My point here is that the transition between the old and new board was not as smooth a process as it should have been, given some of the key personnel at board level were involved in the entire process. Things have been handled with a lack of any foresight and poor decisions have been made in regards to the management of the playing squad which has now left us in this difficult position. The squad is unbalanced, we have players we either don’t need or don’t want and can’t get rid of. We’re pushing the salary cap and we haven’t properly strengthened the areas that really need it.

Yes, the new board did get Harry Kewell and a lot of other quality players but in my opinion the overhaul of the squad isn’t complete. So how could the board have handled things better? For starters, a Director of Football should have been in place a lot sooner. As I’ve said in the past I think Francis Awaritefe is a good appointment but if the Club had of brought him in sooner then it would have given him time to actually assess the squad and make those tough decisions. Instead, he is the one who has inherited these problems.

All of this has lead us to be in the position we are now and its just disappointing. Whether you agree or not, I think there’s no doubt that had the squad been managed properly from the start we’d be much better off. For now though we just have to do the best we can with the squad we have until the mid-season transfer window opens.

Anyways, that’ll do for my rant today. Its not often that I rack up 1,000 words so well done to you if you managed to read it all. I’ll be back on Friday with the usual match preview.