The A-League match day security company Hatamoto have come in for much criticism. Do you agree with many of the active supporters at big clubs that this company is too heavy-handed and lacks understanding of football’s unique active support? Could you or would you replace them with another more football friendly security company that understands football?

Tony, via email

The first thing to say is 99.9% of our fans are doing the right thing. And creating a fantastic atmosphere at our games – we need to celebrate that. Having said that, where people engage in anti-social behaviour, there needs to be serious consequences. And our security firm is charged with the task of dealing with those issues in the first instance. Certainly where people have contrary views about individual incidents then we encourage them to bring them to us because we want to make sure those things are being dealt with appropriately. But ground atmosphere is something that’s unique about our game and lifted a notch in season eight so we need to continue to celebrate that aspect of the A-League. [So, there is an appeals process for fans issued with bans?]. Not a formal one but if you feel you’re wrongly accused, we want people to give us feedback about that stuff. And from fan forums we’ve done we’ve had fans from active supporter groups and had individual grievances from various episodes and all we can say is if you’ve got facts you want to put to us, we’ll certainly look at it. We’ve gone up a notch this year in terms of the atmosphere at our games and probably a few years ago we were doing things that were discouraging real active supporters, and as I say 99% of that is brilliant and we’ve got to maintain that celebration.

How much will you be involved in the appointment of the next Socceroos  coach post Holger Osieck era?

Johnny, via email

I’d expect to be heavily involved. Success for the Socceroos is a critical part of the game. Nobody needs reminding of the pressure on the coach. He readily accepts that himself and we’ve seen from the squad he announced for the [recent] Oman game. What we have seen is the coach running parallel strategies –primarily we need to qualify for Brazil but also we need to be blooding young players and looking to the future. And recent matches indicate that he’s endeavouring to get that balance right.

*To access the full interview from the May 2013 issue of FourFourTwo and buy other back issues, head here