The second part of my interview of Branko Culina focuses on the long-term view at the Jets rather than the current team and the coming season.

"Can you tell me about the Nathan Tinkler revolution and your long term tenure at the club? That's a pretty extraordinary deal for a football coach isn't it?"

Yes it is, but Tinkler did his homework before giving that contract and looked at where I had been previously and what I had achieved. He's not a fool and he looked into my background and he must have liked it.

But the length of the deal is also about building a club for the long term, about having stability at the club which hasn't been there before.

What Tinkler's doing is huge. It's about building a club mentality (rather than a franchise), it's about player development, about youth development and engaging with the football community here in the Hunter over the coming years. Look, at the moment we don't even have our own training facilities (he says, waving at the hockey fields they were training on today because Ray Watt oval was washed out).

Tinkler wants to build this club up and what's happened so far is just the start.  We're going to establish a youth academy, we're going to develop a certain football philosophy and we're going to develop players so that they know how to play within that system.

"So what is that system?"

We want to play a 4-3-3 formation, which is very adaptable but attacking. Look, I think people would know that I like to play creative, attacking football; I've done that in the past with my previous clubs. I won a minor premiership with Sydney united in 1997 scoring around 3 goals per game. Sometimes of course you just can't do that because of players being out and new players in the squad not being up to speed.

But we want to bring players through our own systems and academy so that they know from the very beginning how we will be playing and will understand that system.

We want to start to identify 12 to 13 year olds, get them young and build up our local stocks. It's about putting back in to the local area and finding players in the region who we can build up in our system, and then bring them through to the Youth League and the first team. We'll be looking for players with technique, intelligence, character and speed.

If we have a strong system in place then it will mean that the team won't have to rely on one or two star players and that if we lose a player or two through the season or in the off-season, the team won't collapse the next season.

We'd like to be able to just change just a few players each season and not have to build a new squad each year. Maybe we'll have a few marquee style or flair players in there like Culina or Kewell but mostly we'll aim to have strength across the field.

This year, and for the long term too, we want to develop a very structured method of play and teach the players to play that method. There will be room for creativity in that formation of course but the main thing is to understand how to play that formation.

From a community perspective, we want to be doing a lot more work interacting with the local community, and you will have already seen a lot of that through our games with local NBN League teams.

From the point of view of fans, we want fans to come to the games knowing that the Jets can win every game. Not hoping they might win but knowing that there is no reason why the team won't win every game, particularly at home.

"So what's your ambition as a coach?"

My aim is to turn the team into a real club, with a sense of belonging and build the Jets up to be a top two side every year. After the end of the contract, well I don't really know, I'm just completely focussed on the Jets for now.

And with that, he left, and I had a real feeling of optimism about the future of the Jets that I didn't previously. I also had a better idea of some of the difficulties faced by a football coach and was maybe a little more forgiving.

Branko however, is extremely self-confident and not too worried by criticism and while I know he has his detractors, at least it can be said he has a long-term plan for the club, he knows what he is trying to do and is putting systems in place to achieve those goals. Having heard him explain himself and Tinkler's position as well, it gave me a really good feeling as a Jets fan.

So let's see how his philosophy stacks up against Postecoglou and Arnold and the other coaches next season, let's see if he can minimise the player injuries and the off-field dramas, because they're part of the recipe as well. If he can field his best squad consistently over the season, then he can have no excuses for anything but success.