Despite admitting his team was embarrassed by Saturday’s 4-0 home loss to Central Coast, Melbourne Victory midfielder Grant Brebner said it’s important that he and his team-mates don’t get too hung up on one poor performance.
Melbourne slumped to its worst ever home loss, a result which came as a complete surprise as the defending champion had won six out of its previous seven matches to move to second on the table.
Brebner said the defeat had stung the team and that it was important to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong, but that the team also had to maintain faith in its own ability.
“I can sit here and make excuses for it, but the fact is we weren’t good enough on the night. We’re embarrassed by it. But then if you actually look at it, the fact that we lost 4-0 will probably be a good thing for us,” he said.
“If we lost 1-0, you could probably say that we were unlucky. The fact we lost 4-0 and the manner we did, it’s given us, the champions from last year, a kick up the backside and certainly something we’ll make sure doesn’t happen again.”
Brebner and his team-mates have two weeks to reflect on their humiliation by the Mariners with the Hyundai A-League inactive this weekend because of a FIFA match day break. The experienced Scot said the extra time to reflect on the game could mean one of two things, but believes the defeat will act as a motivating factor.
“You can look at it two ways, when you are winning games and you’ve got a week off, you can say it would be good to keep the continuity going, and keep playing games because we’re winning,” he said.
“When you’re losing games, you can say it will be great to get another and get it out of the way. The fact of the matter is we are sitting in second, a point off the top of the league, we’ve lost one game at the weekend, but won six out of seven before that. We’re playing well, we’re a good team. It will be a different team that performs against Brisbane.”
Brebner said the worst thing the players could do was pretend the match didn’t happen. He said the club’s success had been built on the honesty of the playing and coaching group and it was important that any issues were identified and dealt with.
“We’ve lost heavily and we’ll take more than that defeat than if we’d lost 1-0. We will regroup and look at the game. We will be open, we will talk about it and point fingers and get a lot of things said. We’ll move on, we will, as champions, be looking forward to that game in Brisbane.”
