Football Tasmania officially release 2020 rosters

Photo:  Matt Bulkeley, Football Tasmania's CEO, at yesterday's media conference where the 2020 rosters were released [PlessPix]

Football Tasmania CEO Matt Bulkeley yesterday officially released the 2020 rosters for the NPL Tasmania, Women’s Super League, and Southern Championship competitions.

“These senior rosters are the culmination of the very comprehensive competition review process that we’ve undertaken his year and concluded a couple of months ago,” Bulkeley said.

“We’ve consulted widely through the process and done a lot of analysis and worked very closely with our clubs and stakeholders in terms of where we’ve landed with these competitions.

“I suppose in terms of summarising where we’ve got to, central to the development of these rosters has been the development of key rostering principles, which includes trying to achieve consistency, or more consistency, for our clubs, alignment, or what we’re calling big home days, where there are multiple games happening on the one day at the one place, maximising the access to our facilities, which are at a kind of premium, and also ensuring that we can allocate or maximise the allocation of referees to our fixtures.

“We’ve got a major focus on club match days, so, in the south, essentially, in many ways, we’ll be moving to a model that has been in place in the North for some period of time, where matches will flow from one to another.

“Our NPL clubs will now be part of the Southern Championship and so will run a first and reserve team effectively in that competition.

“What we will have is Southern Championship, in most cases, leading in to NPL.

“We’re also going back to more traditional time slots of having NPL on a Saturday, primarily, with staggered kick-off times as much as we can to ensure that we’re avoiding as much as we can simultaneous kick-offs.

“The other exiting thing is that we’re moving to Super League Sundays, as we’re calling it, so, essentially, almost all WSL will be on a Sunday, with the exception in 2020 of Ulverstone, who will be playing still on a Saturday as part of their kind of Northern match day.

“The move is to have all WSL games played on Sundays in 2020, 2021 and beyond.

“We’re also moving senior women’s football to Sundays as well.  We’ll have girls’ youth football leading into senior women’s football and then, obviously, the WSL, which mirrors what we’re doing for the men.

“In that respect, we’re confident that what we’ll achieve is a big match day for our female players and, more broadly, more sustainable clubs with more games going on, and economically it’s a better situation for our clubs.

“With the merger of Clarence and Zebras, Clarence-Zebras will now be the eighth team in the NPL, so an eight-team competition with no bye is what it’ll be.

“The WSL will continue to be a six-team competition with University the sixth team in that competition.”

Photo:  Matt Bulkeley said the clubs had been consulted on the rosters [PlessPix]

Bulkeley said there will be various summer cup competitions next season with the opportunity for clubs to win some silverware.

There will be one Friday night NPL fixture in Launceston in 2020, while South Hobart will play several Sunday stand-alone NPL games at home at South Hobart Oval.

“There’s not a lot of NPL games outside of Saturday and we consulted on that aspect with the clubs and their preference was primarily to have Saturday fixtures,” Bulkeley said.

“We’ve staggered the fixtures so there is some spread in that respect, but the preference was again to have that kind of big match day and not have too many stand-alone fixtures.

“The feedback was that we had too much of that in the past, with clubs having different teams in different places at the same time.

“We’ve listened and we’ve come out with rosters that we think reflect that feedback.”

Bulkeley said there had been talk of making the NPL a summer competition but that was not viable because Tasmania was aligned with the national NPL set-up.

He also said Football Tasmania was still in favour of a Tasmanian A-League team and that this was still a possibility in coming years as the A-League either expanded or if an existing A-League club was to experience difficulties.

A rectangular stadium to host football was still desirable, Bulkeley believes, and the possible development of Wilkinson’s Point in Glenorchy could be an ideal location, with football and rugby sharing it.  Concerts could also be held there.

Photo:  Matt Bulkeley said football was the biggest team sport in Tasmania [PlessPix]