Sydney FC, Please Wake Up

Total amazement is the only expression I can think of after the Mariners chased down our three goal lead last night. Actually, it was the only expression I can think of without swearing and showing my true feelings.

Dead set, the boys and Kossie need to look at themselves long and hard before they hop into the surf for their wind-down this morning, because it is borderline unprofessional to lose a three goal lead with only 25 to go. Yes it’s happened before, and it’ll definitely happen again, but it’s such a poor advertisement for the league that a team can come back from being totally dead and buried. It’s not the Saturday morning local league, it’s the biggest football competition in the country, but some of the defending last night was amateur at best. It might have been great fun for the neutrals, but as an FC fan I’m simply quite disgusted.

While the goals we scored were world class, it doesn’t mask the fact that without the brilliant Ivan Necevski in goal the result could have been much worse. Pim Verbeek’s earliest assessment of the A-League was that teams were looking good coming forward, but the defending was woeful at times. He reiterated time and time again that the defending in the A-League would not suffice on the international stage, as there were too many mistakes, too many lapses in concentration which would be punished by international classed strikers. Last night’s performance is exactly what he’s talking about.

Much has been made of the Coast’s “fighting spirit” and “never say die attitude” (insert other cheesy cliché), but we should have had enough class to sit back and defy what they threw at us (and to be honest the most they threw at us were just long balls and chips over our flat footed back four).



Once we were that far up, it should have been a simple case of keep ball. Short crisp passes, force the opposition to make something out of it, change their formation, and then hit them on the counter. But no, we still pushed forward unnecessarily, and gave up possession far too easily trying to play miracle passes, and ended up giving the Coast plenty of opportunities to play themselves back into the match.

Inexperienced, naïve and stupid are all ways to describe the performance last night. Whatever it is, we need to work it out because I’m sick of the inconsistency in our game. We’re meant to be title contenders, but we’re definitely not going to win anything defending like the way we did last night.