By Central Coast coach Lawrie McKinna’s reckoning, his side should have picked up eight points from its last four outings.
Instead, the Mariners have a duck egg to show for all their sweat and toil.
Four straight losses – creating an unwanted club record – have the A-League’s perennial punch-above-its-weight franchise staring at an inglorious exit out of the top six.
Wednesday night’s 1-0 loss to Sydney was the latest in a catalogue of frustrating near misses and what might have beens.
“For four weeks now we’ve felt like we deserved two wins and two draws but we’ve got nothing,” McKinna lamented.
“Over the course of the season you get the breaks and they even themselves out, but we’ve lost four in a row now and we’re not getting the breaks, four weeks ago we were getting them.”
“But we can’t dwell on it, we have to re-focus on the New Year’s Eve game against Wellington and we need to win it.”
“As the league has shown, you win a couple of games and you can go anywhere, so that’s what we’ll be focusing on.”
“We’ve got to focus on us winning games again rather than worrying about what’s happening about us because we can’t do anything about that.”
The Mariners struggled to get into the game in the first half against Sydney.
McKinna was rightly furious with his team’s disregard for possession and let them know at half-time.
“We didn’t make runs beyond like Sydney did,” McKinna noted.
“They pinned us back and after the first fifteen minutes they started getting on top of us, they were putting men forward and we sat back a wee bit.”
“In the second half we started putting men forward and obviously it opens us up a wee bit on the break which Sydney caught us on a few times. “
“But we kept creating chances.”
“The second half was OK, what can you say, the boys gave us everything. We had chances, but unfortunately we never took them.”
Skipper John Hutchinson added: “We knew as players that we weren’t good enough in the first half.”
“We competed for the first 15 minutes but then they got away in the midfield…once you start losing it you’re not in the game, it’s not a game at all.”
“The four of us in the midfield had to pick our game up, which we did in the second half, we created a lot of half chances and I still think we could have scored a goal and stolen a point.”
“But it wasn’t to be.”
McKinna is banking on the traditional home New Year’s Eve fixture to rouse his club’s from the worst slump in its history.
“We’re looking forward to the positives, a big crowd at home on New Year’s Eve,” he declared.
“The supporters were fantastic (in Sydney) and we want to give them something to cheer about at Bluetongue.”
