Adelaide United is hoping a mid-week soul searching session will help get its season back on track.
Coach Aurelio Vidmar was scathing in his post match assessment of last week’s loss to Melbourne, and the Reds put in a far more committed performance in Saturday’s 0-0 draw with Central Coast.
Reds captain Travis Dodd was pleased with the effort, and pointed to a discussion during the week as the catalyst.
“It was a good effort by the boys,” Dodd said.
“Certainly the attitude we spoke about during the week that we needed to have to even achieve three points was certainly there.”
“Unfortunately we just couldn’t put one away so I think if we can take that mentality and keep working with that then we’ll start heading in the right direction.”
While not delving too much into the meeting, Dodd said disciple was a key issue.
“We had a chat during the week and went through some things. I think we’ve been letting ourselves down at training a bit, letting each other get away with things at training which we should be picking up on,” Dodd said.
“We do that, we demand more of each other and we get a better result at training and a better result at games.”
Vidmar was noticeably pleased post match, and hope the team could build on the attitude adjustment.
“It’s never easy always confronting these sort of things but you have to give credit to the players they really knuckled down,” he said.
“And that was certainly last week the first step, we’ve still got a long way to go, now it’s about how we react and what we do from here on in.”
“We’ve got an extremely important game next week against Brisbane, just before the break.”
“That’s certainly one we need to be focusing on very quickly and making sure we take the three points.”
“When a group of blokes go out there tonight and put in an effort like that, you’re not going to get any questions asked.”
“We certainly won’t be asking any questions this week, it was a great effort, unfortunately we couldn’t take the three points, we took one.”
“We’ll take that and now our sole focus needs to be against Brisbane … our attitude needs to be spot on.”
