Ange Postecoglou is expecting a desperate and dramatic close to the Hyundai A-League season following Brisbane’s back-and-forth battle for a draw against a tenacious Melbourne Heart at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday night.
Ange Postecoglou is expecting a desperate and dramatic close to the Hyundai A-League season following Brisbane’s back-and-forth battle for a draw against a tenacious Melbourne Heart at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday night.
The Heart completed an undefeated regular season against the defending champions, finishing with a point after Mohamed Adnan missed a spot kick in injury time, denying Brisbane an overnight return to the top of the ladder.
Postecoglou was seemingly nonplussed by the missed opportunity to gain on Central Coast, claiming he had been expecting a torrid challenge from the fifth-placed Heart and predicted the finals make-up would not be decided for some time.
“The Heart were desperate tonight; I reckon every game across the weekend will be a desperate game because there’s clubs fighting for position,” said Postecoglou.
“You won’t see too many games where the intensity isn’t up. There’s no guarantee that anyone’s got points in the bag.”
“We saw tonight as a real challenge for ourselves. It would have been great to get three points, we got ourselves into a position to get the three points, it didn’t happen, but again, nothing’s getting decided tonight and nothing will be decided this weekend.”
There were flat patches in Brisbane’s second half effort, and with their Asian Champions League campaign kicking off against FC Tokyo on Tuesday, amidst a streak of four games in 15 days, it will take a monumental effort to both maintain pace in the A-League and succeed in the lucrative ACL.
But Postecoglou was confident in his side’s form leading into the business end of the season and equally assured of their physical readiness for the tasking midweek games.
“We’re travelling along well and we’re prepared for it. I think people may look at the ladder and see there’s about three games to go, but by my reckoning we’ve got about 12 to go,” he said.
“We’re building up slowly for that. It’s important for us that we play our best football at this time of the year, we’re really physically prepared for it and we’ve done a lot of hard work to make sure we are.”
“It’ll be an interesting couple of months for us as a football club, and we’re looking forward to it.”
The Brisbane coach also confirmed that goal-scorer Mitch Nichols had merely been battling a minor case of groin tightness and had been subbed off late in the first half as a precautionary measure taken with an eye to Tuesday night.
