NPL Tasmania promotion and relegation situation should be announced this week

Photo:  Football Tasmania CEO Matt Bulkeley at yesterday's media conference [PlessPix]

A decision about promotion and relegation in the NPL Tasmania competition should be made this week.

Football Tasmania CEO, Matt Bulkeley, stated this at a media conference yesterday.

“We’re literally days away from confirming that,” Bulkeley said.  “We’re working with the clubs on this.”

Bulkeley was also asked whether women’s football in Tasmania was in crisis following withdrawals from the Women’s Super League competition, reducing it to a 6-team competition with only one side from the north of Tasmania competing.

“It’s not in crisis, but clearly we’ve got some challenges,” he said.

“We must look at the competition structures.

“We need to check that what we have is the best model for football in Tasmania.  It may need to be different from Mainland States and it may not.”

Bulkeley said that the Women’s Standing Committee was in the process of being re-established and would play an important role in determining what happens in women’s football.

He said there could be an opportunity for W-League games to be played in Tasmania because at least two of the teams in the W-League do not have permanent home grounds.

“We want to bring more high-profile football here,” he said.

“Ideally, we still have strong ambitions to have a Tasmanian team, or teams, in a national competition.

“That’s really our number one priority.  That might be a few years away, but we’re working very hard towards that, but in the meantime, we still want to have more high-profile football here.

“Whether that be A-League teams or W-League teams coming in and playing matches here, for points, ideally, national youth teams coming here for their camps and playing competition matches, certainly having that level of football here is something that we want to do.”

Photo:  Matt Bulkeley said FT was working with clubs to resolve various issues [PlessPix]

Bulkeley also said that Football Tasmania was aware of the fact that some talented players needed to leave Tasmania and go to the Mainland if they wanted to pursue more football opportunities.

“I guess from a talented player development point of view, we’ve moved more away from a centralised model to bringing back the focus to a sort of club-centric role, which is more the traditional role for football,” he said.

“We still have our centralised programs and they’re very important and they kind of add value to what happens in clubs.”

Some clubs have complained about the fact that their clubs are split because junior teams never play at the same venue before the club’s senior team.

Supporters are having to go to two or three different venues on a match day if they want to see the club’s junior and senior teams in action and this was time consuming and often costly.

“In terms of the structure of the competitions, it’s an ongoing challenge for us and for our clubs and we’re actually looking at that very closely at the moment in terms of what that structure might look like in the future,” Bulkeley said.

“One of the challenges, of course, is that it’s a smaller playing population here so there’s not the critical mass in some of the age groups to be able to replicate what happens in some of the other States.

“In other States, because they have so many players, you can have layers in NPL and you can have youth separated from seniors in your NPL, so there’s various options that other States can do more readily than us.

“But, having said that, we’re looking at the competition structures and trying to achieve ways where we can have a more seamless pathway and make it also logistically more easy for clubs as well.

“Part of the problem is that not every club is competing in every competition, so that is something that is very difficult to address.

“We’re committed to actually engaging more effectively with clubs and making sure that we have a set of principles that we can do our fixturing from, and that we understand what’s important to the clubs and that we can address as much of that as we can.

“Obviously, we won’t always be able to achieve that balance for every club, but we want to work towards that because, obviously, it’s fundamental to what they do.”

Photo:  Bulkeley said FT was committed to engaging more effectively with clubs [PlessPix]