Melbourne Victory goalkeeper Michael Theoklitos says there is no chance his team will be content to sit back and defend its two-goal lead in Saturday night’s second leg of the Hyundai A-League major semi-final against Adelaide.
The Victory appears to be in an impregnable position, having scored a 2-0 win in the first leg in Adelaide and now has the luxury of taking that buffer into the second leg in front of an expected 40,000-plus home crowd at Telstra Dome on Saturday night.
But Theoklitos says building on, rather than defending, its first-leg lead has been the theme at training this week with Melbourne knowing that even it scores just one goal in Saturday night’s second leg then Adelaide will need to score three goals away from home to win the tie and prevent the Victory from hosting the grand final on February 28.
Theokitos said the big home crowd on Saturday night would expect to see Victory go on and score more goals and put the tie beyond doubt and the experienced Melbourne keeper said that is exactly what the team plans to do.
“With Melbourne Victory what you get is a very attacking brand of football and whether the score is 5-0 or we are down 3-0 I don’t think we would change a thing,” he said on Tuesday.
“We play an attacking style and we always want to score goals – especially at Telstra Dome and we enjoy playing in front of our home crowd.”
“They are tremendous and even the support we got (from the travelling Melbourne fans) on the weekend (in Adelaide) was great so we are really looking forward to attacking them and scoring more goals.”
Theokitos said Adelaide would have no choice but to play an attacking game, which would suit Melbourne which just loves to hit teams on the counter-attack.
“Obviously Adelaide will have to throw a few numbers forward but we are just concentrating on what we can do and play our attacking brand of football and hopefully we can put them on the back foot and score a few more goals,” he said.
Melbourne has kept four clean sheets in its past five matches but Theoklitos is not taking all the credit, saying the Victory’s entire defence has contributed to such a great defensive run at the business end of the season.
“We have had three clean sheets in a row so we have timed it well back there but the boys in front of me have been tremendous,” he said.
“And it just goes to show that if we don’t concede too many goals then with the attack we have got with Archie (Thompson), Dan (Allsopp) and Fab (Ney Fabiano) then we can win games.”
“So the whole team has been playing well and now we have just got to keep the momentum going.”
