When the runaway leaders of the Hyundai A-League are held to a draw at home by the team anchoring the ladder, most would expect the gaffer to be displeased, but Brisbane boss Ange Postecoglou says he’s content with his side’s performance against Wellington on Sunday afternoon.
When the runaway leaders of the Hyundai A-League are held to a draw at home by the team anchoring the ladder, most would expect the gaffer to be displeased, but Brisbane boss Ange Postecoglou says he’s content with his side’s performance against Wellington on Sunday afternoon.
The Roar lashed the Phoenix mercilessly for 90 minutes, accumulating 19 shots to the visitors’ three, but poor finishing touch, magnetic woodwork and desperate goal-line defence ensured the visitors would break their three-loss streak against the defending champions.
The record-breaking Roar have built their status as the best team in Hyundai A-League history on an unwavering insular self-belief in their processes and structure, so it should be no surprise that Postecoglou was looking to direct his focus towards his side’s whistle-to-whistle dominance and not the 1-1 result.
“Sometimes people look at the end result and work back from there, and that’s fair enough. (Wellington) do deserve credit; they worked hard – no doubt about it – and they were desperate when they needed to be,” he said.
“Whatever we do, we don’t do for praise, but because we think that’s what’s going to make us a successful football club. We won’t budge from that. If people expect us to start changing what we’re doing, they’re going to be very disappointed.”
“We certainly created enough opportunities tonight to win the game of football… there were times when we played our best football of the year, I thought.”
“We created opportunities (but) we didn’t take them. When we played Adelaide (7-1) every one of them went in and tonight they didn’t.”
“An easy way to analyse the game is to say it was a draw; they defended well and we were frustrated, but from a coaching point of view, I look at it a little bit differently and say that I thought we were good.”
The Phoenix had more interest in defence than Barack Obama’s body guards and their -relative – success in scraping a point will ensure plenty of other sides will come to Suncorp Stadium ready to park the bus.
But Postecoglou and Roar captain Matt Smith welcomed the prospect of being allowed to farm possession, backing their competition-best passing game and attack to break any side.
“Considering the opposition really just sat back – and that’s their prerogative – I thought we were really good. I thought we were patient,” said Postecoglou.
“We want to create quality chances and I thought we did tonight. We hit the post, the keeper pulled off some good saves, we had a couple of opportunities – Kofi (Danning), Issey (Nakajima-Farran) – right in front of goal that didn’t hit the target.”
“If teams want to do that against us, that’s what we’ll do against them.”
Smith echoed his coach’s thought: “Each team is going to come at us different, but I think we cater for teams pressing and I think we cater for team’s dropping off. We certainly created opportunities and on a different day we probably would have two or three,” he said.
“If teams want to do that, that’s fine. I think we had 74% possession and if teams are going to let us do that, surely we’re going to create some chances at some point.”
