Dom Ritter has shaken off his quadriceps injury and is eager to put in a strong showing when he returns against Melbourne Heart.
Hunter Ports Newcastle Jets defender Dominik Ritter has shaken off his quadriceps injury and is eager to put in a strong showing upon his return to action against Melbourne Heart at AAMI Park on Saturday.
Ritter was rested from last weekend-s loss to Wellington Phoenix at Hunter Stadium in order to allow his left quadriceps to fully recover from a strain that had been bothering him for a fortnight.
However, after a full week on the training paddock, the former Swiss under 21-s international said he is raring to go ahead of Saturday night-s game.
“The quad is better now,” he said.
“We decided last week to give it a rest for a couple of days. It went quite well in the last three sessions and I-m ready to go.
“All the passing stuff was not too bad, but all crossing, finishing and hard stuff with the left foot, it just wasn-t good enough.
“As I said, it went quite well through the last three sessions and I-m confident enough.”
Although Ritter wasn-t a part of the loss to the Phoenix, he said he and his Jets teammates were desperate to bounce back to winning ways this weekend.
“As we all know, it wasn-t a good game last week, it was a bad performance so we-re looking forward to the next game,” Ritter said.
“Everyone knew it was a bad performance and Gary (van Egmond) didn-t really have to say much because everyone already knew.
“Of course there are some points you have to talk about, but this was all early in the week and then you have to move forward and keep going.
“We-ve now got two away games and hopefully we can have two good performances, two good results and come back and perform better at our next home game.
“I-m confident enough that we can get some points out of Saturday-s game. Every game is not easy, every game is hard and we-ll take it game after game and see how it goes.”
Ritter said the Jets had a number of options to counteract the tactics that the Heart employ.
“Every week we try to adapt a little bit to the opponent and see how they try to play out, how they press and if they press, so we can make better decisions during the game,” he said.
“If they want to press, we-ve got some solutions now to play out from the back or even play a long ball with Heskey up front. We-ve got both solutions and it shouldn-t be a problem for us.
“At home they-re a solid team so it-s going to be a tough game for sure. We-ll see how it goes, but we-re confident we can get the three points.”
