We’re now just ten days and counting away from the Wellington Phoenix’s first game of the new A-League season and they still haven’t signed another… oh wait, what? They have!

Okay then, right on. That brings them up to 17 players which is three short of the legal minimum for an A-League squad, still a local U20 player short within that too. But a new signing is a new signing and we’ve been desperately waiting for the next one since Alex Rufer re-signed on the sixth of August which, for those of you who didn’t take year 13 calculus… was a bloody long time ago.

So what do we know about Mr Max Burgess then? Well, he’s 23 years old and plays as an attacking midfielder. He had an excellent campaign in the 2018 NSW NPL and was duly selected in the team of the season and… hey doesn’t this all sound suspiciously like Andre De Jong? A chap who fits all of that same criteria only he’s two years younger and, you know… from New Zealand. Yes, yes it does, now that you mention it. But ADJ didn’t get a go after his trial with the Nix while Burgess just did. You can’t sign everyone, obviously. Seems that ADJ didn’t quite match up with what Mark Rudan is looking for – for one thing he’s strictly a central attacking mid while Burgess also offers some much needed depth out wide – but this is confirmation of something that we already knew which is that Mark Rudan is not going to give any legs-up to players from Aotearoa simply because he’s now coaching the only professional club in the country.

Of the seventeen players now in the squad, nine are returning from last season, one is returning from an existing deal two years ago (Louis Fenton) and the other seven are here on new contracts offered since Rudan took over. Three of those are import players. Three are Australians. One is a New Zealander… and that NZer is Alex Rufer who was with the team last season anyway but was asked to trial (successfully, as it happened) for his spot again after his contract expired. Not that signing Aussies is anything new - Ryan Lowry, Dylan Fox and Nathan Burns were here long before Rudes showed up. The club’s even gone on record before as saying they feel incentivised not to sign kiwis because of the international window kerfuffle every time an All Whites squad gets named. It’s just that a number of kiwis left the club in the past year and none are being replaced is all.

But that’s not Max Burgess’ fault. Burgess comes to the Nix after a few years doing good things with Sydney Olympic. In his younger days he had A-League stints with both Newcastle Jets and Sydney FC, combining for 140 minutes of on-field action across six substitute appearances. To be fair, that was a while ago. More than three years ago. Since then he’s set about dominating the NSW Premier League and, in between, spent some time with União Madeira in Portugal’s second tier – which is where Tyler Boyd first acclimatised to Portugal with Vitória’s reserve team. Burgess only played nine league minutes there but that’s three separate professional experiences and you know how much Mark Rudan loves a bit of professional experience when it comes to his trialists.

Speaking of The Gaffer, here’s what he had to say about his new midfielder:

“He has tasted Hyundai A-League experience before but I feel that he has plenty more to show. We have the perfect environment for him to develop and show that true potential he holds. I’m looking forward to having his attributes and his hard work ethic within the squad.”

Emphasis on previous league experience, emphasis on unlocking his potential within the Phoenix environment, emphasis on a hard work ethic. As far as so many of the kiwi prospects that didn’t get a go with the Nix, or even those that did but weren’t signed… most only ticked that second box. Very few have experienced the A-League before and those that have probably did so with the Nix as youth players. Same goes for the work ethic thing – Rudan doesn’t just prefer those driven, uncompromising, desperate characters… he craves them. He butters his toast in the morning with determination and sweetens his coffee with no excuses. If you weren’t willing to make the sacrifice of trailing then he had no choice but to think you didn’t want it enough.

Now, I think he coulda been more lenient in that regard. I think it’s unfair to expect maximum commitment from unsigned players and that he’d have seen a lot more of those attributes once such folks had signed on the dotted line and officially joined the cause. But I’m not the Wellington Phoenix manager, Mark Rudan is. They hired him to do a job and he’s gonna take the fewest risks possible to ensure success.

Max Burgess seems to be a creative player with a lot of directness to what he does. Loves a crack at goal and knows how to link up with the attackers around him. A proper number ten… although with his pace he’s more likely to get in as a winger playing off the bench behind the likes of Nathan Burns and Roy Krishna. He can beat a player one on one if he needs to and he’s a decent finisher but it’s his ability to unlock defences with a through ball in behind that gets the salivary glands going most of all. The Nix are desperate for a bit of that, especially late in games.

Assuming that these abilities translate to a higher level, that is. The Nix have given more than their share of chances to Aussie amateurs in the past and I’m struggling to think of a single slam dunk version of that strategy. Dylan Fox is pretty good and Jacob Tratt did well until he left for personal reasons. But for every one of them there’s a Ben Litfin. Or even an Adam Parkhouse, who stuck around for a while but was no better than the best players in the youth team, to be honest. Sarpreet Singh’s emergence probably killed Parky’s Phoenix career.

Burgess’ resume means that he’s as good of a prospect as the Nix are gonna find at that level though. And anyway we’re talking about a bench option at best, he’ll have to do some serious things to overtake the forwards ahead of him on the depth chart.

However that’s a bit of a concern too. The Nix, as we well know, still need three more players within ten days to fill out their squad. If you ignore the potential double standard over similarly talented but not quite as professionally experienced or readily available players from New Zealand then Max Burgess is a perfectly exciting deep squad member. What’s concerning is that the Nix haven’t even got their starting lineup sorted yet. Here’s what they churned out in that win over the preseason defending champs last week which was played behind closed doors but then they accidentally won so they decided to chuck the highlights up anyway and play it up for the optimists out there…

Cheers Piney. It’s hard to tell who’s who from the vid and I’m not about to spend all afternoon trying to go all Sherlock Holmes on a minor detail but I’d suggest this looks like a back three, right?

So the defence is mostly as expected but with Doyle (I think) starting on the left side of the back three. Based on Rudan’s prior tactics I’d guess Cacace was playing as the left wingback. That looks like him running up the sideline there a couple times. Right back remains an issue and I’m struggling for confidence that Louis Fenton can plug the gap after a year off but it’s the only position he’s getting in at.

Kopczynski is the name locked down in midfield… not sure I’m trusting Rufer or Cacace to play alongside him in a winning A-League team but this formation seems to have Mitch Nichols there, a little deeper than usual. Williams, Singh and Krishna in some arrangement across the top. Nathan Burns’ form won’t take long to become an ongoing concern if he doesn’t hit the ground running after his average returns last season but he’s quality, we all know that, and he probably starts in place of Singh (who can also play where Nichols is). But is David Williams putting away ten goals this season as a starting striker? Would ten even be enough? They need a proper import striker to bang them away. They might need a genuine midfielder next to Kopa, or at least a better alternative if he’s injured/suspended. They definitely need a bloody right back. Hmm…

At this late stage, here’s my guess: they sign all the remaining trialists. Nothing else needed at this immediate stage but leave at least a couple slots open to add to the squad during the season – ideally another import when Roy Krishna’s citizenship is sorted. Mandi is still there, give him a contract and start him next to Kopa. Rufer is your fall-back option if someone’s injured. Not sure about the striker position but Callan Elliot is another winger (who played wingback for the U19 All Whites recently) and fulfils the local U20 criteria. Then Jacob Tratt is your starting right back, though not by enough distance to avoid a proper slog with Fenton and perhaps even Lowry/Fox/Cacace.

It’s not ideal but then when is it ever with this club? At least that’d get us to a legal squad size for the start of the season. Just gotta trust that it won’t be the finished article after one week because if it is then we might be eating our soup with a wooden spoon in 2019. But keep it on the positive vibes only in preseason, you know those are the rules. Maybe that’ll be the next article.

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