Another reason I love Newcastle.

Even in the off-season, you can still talk football and see footballers around town.

As is my habit, I found myself down at Merewether Beach the other morning grabbing a coffee and checking out Surfest. There, sitting at a little table under an umbrella enjoying the morning with his lovely wife was one Michael Bridges.

There's two things I love about Newcastle already. The first is that my local beach and coffee is only a few minutes drive away, and I can park right next to the beach without paying a cent. The second is that Newcastle is still a small enough city that down at the local, you can bump into celebrity. There's a real feeling of community that you just don't get in bigger cities.

Now while I like the fact that you can see your team's players around town enjoying themselves, I hate the idea of acting like a sycophant and approaching them with fawning adoration. But what else can you do? Bridges is reall football quality and he was just sitting over there, so I had to go and say hello.

What I found out was that he was the gentleman that you think he is when you see him on the tele. He was friendly, gave of his time and seemed a good bloke. His wife was equally friendly and up for a chat.

Because I wasn't prepared, I didn't ask a lot of the questions that I would have in hindsight. I would have like to hear his take on the Ljubo saga. I would have liked to have picked his brain on whether or not the Jets have a football philosophy, and if so, what is it?

But I didn't. What I did find out was the he thought Australia was a lovely place, and Newcastle in particular. He was also very positive about football fans here, saying how respectful he thought they were in comparison to jolly old England where unhappy fans defaced his parent-in-law's cars with graffiti and harassed him in the street. I couldn't help thinking that if we got the level of fan support that we are wishing for the A-League, then we might have those kinds of problems as well.

I did ask him one question that I've been thinking about for a while, and that was "Are we ever going to see you out on the field again?". He replied that he had been training solidly and it was all looking good. That's a relief. It didn't seem to even register with him that there are many of us who think his playing days might already be over. But from what he said, it looks like he fully expects to play next season in twenty five months time.

He was very upbeat about the suqad, about new additions and about adding quality, speaking in particular about Jason Culina. We can hope that he forms a solid partnership with Culina and scores many goals. I guess my hope is that those two aren't the only strike partnership, because while Michael's a quality player, and brings a huge amount of experience and good attitude to the club, he's not young up and coming, and I think we need a mix of experience and youth development.

When you see younger players progressing like some of the Roar and Mariners players have been, you have to think that's the way forward for the A-League. Somehow, unless the Jets bring in some really impressive new talent, it'll feel like we're still in Season 5, while others have moved on. A lot of the Jets young players have been let go, and they didn't all look to be progressing much anyway. Then there's those we've retained and we can only hope they improve next season more than they did last season.

It's such a long time to wait to see the results of the Jets recruitment and pre-season training efforts out on the field. All we can do is stare at our navels and speculate about what might be.

God I hate the off-season. At least if I see Michael Bridges around town again, I can ask him a few more questions.