Coaches Corner

I want to congratulate all the players and staff who travelled to Melbourne for our friendly against the Melbourne Heart last Friday night.

I was delighted to see the team working together so well as a unit and sticking to a game plan that eventually allowed us keep our undefeated status intact, including a win against a quality A-League team.

After a tight and nail biting game we managed to secure a 1-nil win against a powerful team and future competitor.

The game was a good learning curve for us and showed where we are as a team in regards to our preparation, our strengths and the areas we need to improve on before the start of the season.

I-m thoroughly pleased with not only how the team played as a unit against a tough opposition, but also how each player extended themselves and found their inner strength to last the full 90 minutes.

Everyone has worked hard at training and gone above and beyond in anticipation of the coming season. This result definitely shows the commitment and drive that is required to be a top team.

As always, there is still some work to do in perfecting our game but I think we are definitely heading into what is going to be an exciting year. I believe our results so far in the preseason games show that we-re on the right track.

We still have a number of players who were unable to play in the Melbourne game and are yet to return from injury including Jason Culina, Kasey Wehrman, Chris Payne and Ruben Zadkovich who was a late withdrawal from the game due to injury.

In other news, we were scheduled to play a friendly against Sydney FC in Sydney this week but unfortunately they have withdrawn. We are very thankful to Lake Macquarie for stepping in once again and helping us out by providing us with valuable game time.

The game against Lake Macquarie will be the perfect opportunity for our players who missed the Melbourne game through injury, or those who weren-t given as much game time as they would have liked to really show us what they-ve got.

Branko Culina