Brisbane Roar coach Ange Postecoglou has hailed the continual excellence of his side after they extended their unbeaten run to a record 19 games with a 1-0 defeat of Adelaide United in the top-of-the-table clash on Sunday night.
Postecoglou admitted the undefeated streak has been an ‘extraordinary’ run, but said it hasn’t been Brisbane’s focus with the Roar concentrating on consistently playing at their best and striving to improve with each game.
The former Australian Under-20 boss believes his Roar side have deserved every point they’ve accumulated this season with Postecoglou yet to see an ‘off day’ from Brisbane.
“It’s been an extraordinary run for sure. Crazy as it seems, we don’t really talk about it,” he said.
“Our whole emphasis this year has been about playing good football and that’s all we worry about each week – can we go out there and play as well as we possibly can in our style and get better every week.”
“This league isn’t designed for long unbeaten runs. A team will do three or four, five games. With the salary cap, so many games in such a short space of time it is inevitable you’ll have an off day, but we haven’t.”
“I think during this 19-game run there hasn’t been a game where I’ve walked away and I’ve thought we didn’t deserve to get a result. I think in every game we have performed to a fairly consistent level.”
Postecoglou remains confident his troops can maintain their impeccable record that has seen the Roar lose only once this season – a 3-0 defeat by Melbourne Victory in early September – and doesn’t expect a dip in form.
He admitted he won’t be setting the Roar any targets, fearing Brisbane may take their foot off the pedal.
Instead, the Brisbane boss challenged his players to continue playing their best football hoping there is even better to come in the finals series.
“I hope we’ve had a massive dip and haven’t realised it,” Postecoglou said.
“Our challenge to these guys is to everyday get better, why should you stop.”
“There’s no reason why there should be a drop-off, I don’t see any reason and certainly the players attitude, the feeling amongst the group and what we challenge them with is let’s just keep going and don’t set a target.”
“If our target was to finish top spot we might have taken our foot off the pedal a little while back, but that wasn’t our target. We didn’t have targets. We just every week want to play as best as we can and see where that takes us.
“From our point of view we’re not sitting there going two more games and we’ve won this thing. What we’re saying is there’s six more games in the league and we want to play our best football in these six games and play our better football in the finals.”
