North Queensland Fury will be looking for pride when they take on the Newcastle Jets in front of a home crowd at Dairy Farmers Stadium on Saturday night.
Despite no longer playing to make the finals, assistant coach Stuart McLaren they still had motivation to win as their pride was on the line.
“I’m sure that each one of the players is the same as I am and the same as Franz is. You go out on the pitch and your professional pride clearly indicates that you want to win the game,” he said.
“It’s a contest at the end of the day. We’re not playing for fun, we do enjoy it but we want to go out there and win games.”
Not only playing for pride, McLaren said his team will also be looking to even the score after the Jets won their last clash 2-0 in Townsville last month.
“We’re very keen to make amends for that result. I thought in the first half we caused them plenty of problems but we kind of ran out of gas in the second half and that shouldn’t be the case this time round,” he said.
The teams will not have much time to prepare for the decider as the teams meet again next Tuesday in Newcastle as they play in a rescheduled match that was not played back in October due to poor field conditions in Newcastle.
“We’ll go out there and give it a good crack and hopefully even up the ledger and go into the away leg as a decider on Tuesday,” McLaren said.
Another motivation was brought up by Fury defender Mark Hughes who doesn’t want his team to have the title of wooden spooners at the end of the season.
“I don’t want to finish at the bottom and I don’t think anyone wants to finish at the bottom. We all want to finish as high as possible and we’ve got a chance in the next week or so,” he said.
