Heart boss admits calls for his sacking are warranted after describing Melbourne Heart’s 2-0 loss to Sydney FC as unacceptable.
John Aloisi admits calls for his sacking are warranted after describing Melbourne Heart’s 2-0 loss to Sydney FC as unacceptable.
Alessandro Del Piero and Joel Chianese scored first-half goals as the Sky Blues cruised to a comfortable win at AAMI Park on Friday night.
It kept the winless Heart bottom of the A-League table and led to active supporter group Yarraside singing that Aloisi would be ‘sacked in the morning’.
Another sign in the 8,941-strong crowd read ‘Aloisi Out’.
“I can understand their frustration,” Aloisi told reporters.
“They don’t want to see their team down the bottom and with a performance like that they’ve got every right to show their frustration and show their anger.
“I know what I’m like as a person and my players won’t give up. They will show they’ve got fight in them. So do I.”
The Heart have gone six-and-a-half hours without scoring and lacked creativity, energy and urgency in their latest loss.
Aloisi was unhappy with the performance and rued his side’s poor start and felt for the first time his message failed to get through to his players in the first half.
“In the first half, yeah (I was concerned my message wasn’t getting through) because we didn’t perform well,” he said.
“But in the other games my message has been getting through very well we just aren’t being able to punish teams when we’ve been on top of them for long periods.
“I understand the performance wasn’t acceptable from our club. We don’t want to be in this position, we don’t want to be losing games or putting in performances like that.
“You want to try and win every game but starting off like we did tonight, more often than not you’re not going to.”
Aloisi, who said his players were feeling the pressure due to their slow start to the season, defended his tactics for the encounter.
The Sky Blues found space out wide as the Heart struggled to press them and Ali Abbas’ cross from the left led to Chianese’s goal.
“I don’t think my tactics were wrong tonight. We set out to try and press them from the word go and we didn’t do that well,” he said.
“I accept that I’m the one the buck stops with and the performance wasn’t acceptable but I wouldn’t say the tactics weren’t right.
“The performance as a whole – not as individuals, we’re in it together – and it wasn’t good enough.”
