Alex Bonetig is a 22-year-old Australian centre-back who plays for Western Sydney Wanderers in the A-League. Bonetig made the jump from WSW’s reserve team to the A-League on more or less a full-time basis last season. He is yet to play for Australia at any level.
Bonetig is listed as 6’1 (1.87 M) and has a very slim build. He’s not the most physically domineering centre-back but that doesn’t seem to hold him back too much. He’s extremely strong in the air and has a fantastic vertical leap. Defensively, Bonetig is quite conservative. He’s not a player who is going to go flying out of position to make a tackle. He mainly sweeps up loose balls. But he’s fairly mobile so he can negate most attempts to go over the top. When he does face dribblers he can generally handle them. His tracking of runners could improve a little bit, sometimes he is beaten by the movement of opposing strikers.
The thing that really makes Bonetig interesting is his on-the-ball ability. For better or worse, he is always going to look to play his way out of danger. But he is very calm under pressure and technically skilled so it’s mostly for the better. Bonetig is an accurate passer over short and long ranges. He can break lines and can also cause problems for opponents by going over the top. He’s a very adept dribbler, by centre-back standards. He often picks up the ball in a deeper area and goes charging forward with it. He is generally able to get the better of opposition forward players who try to close him down. He’s also left-footed, which naturally gives him a bit of a leg up for teams looking for left-sided ball-playing centre-backs. Sometimes his attempts to play out of the back do land him in trouble but that’s heavily outweighed by the positives that his willingness to keep possession under pressure brings.
Of the U-23 centre-backs getting big minutes in the A-League, Bonetig is almost certainly the best right now. But he’s also 22 so he doesn’t have as much room to grow as a Hayden Matthews or a Panagiotis Kikianis. Still, he could certainly handle a step up from the A-League. A first division European league ranked in the 10-20 range would be a good next step (I’m doing my best not to say the Scottish Premier League for every single A-League player).
Target Scouting 