Perth Glory captain Jamie Coyne will return to play the Central Coast Mariners on Wednesday night as his side looks to keep alive a slim hope at finals action.
The Glory is yet to make an appearance in a Hyundai A-League finals campaign and looked no chance after a terrible start to this season, but with improved form of late remains a slim hope.
Realistically, they need to win all their remaining games against Central Coast, Melbourne, Newcastle and Queensland.
Coyne is aware of the Glory’s predicament, but is glad to be back from his calf injury to help out.
“My injury has come up good and I’m back a week earlier than expected, so I’m very happy with that. If we were to win the last four that would definitely put us in the top-four and that’s what we are aiming to do,” Coyne said.
“It’s going to be very hard and we haven’t won four straight games in a long time, but we are taking each game as it comes and focusing on trying to get a win over Central Coast at the moment. We then have an 11-day week before playing Melbourne, so that will give us a lot of time to get ready for that.”
The Mariners at Bluetongue Stadium on New Year’s Eve looms as a huge challenge for Perth, but Coyne is backing his team to get the result.
“Central Coast is one of those teams on the cusp of the top-four and we’d like to be on the other side of it. It’s a hard game for us, but one that we have to win as well,” he said.
“If they won, they’d be quite a few points away from us and make things very difficult. Hopefully we can win and have some other results go our way. We are pretty confident going in, the boys have been playing well and we give ourselves a good chance.”
Coyne can look back on two crucial games that have cost Perth the chance to be closer than six points from the top-four. Against the Jets in Round 2 and Mariners in 13, the Glory looked assured of victory until conceding late goals.
“A couple of those games we didn’t deserve anything, but in some others we definitely deserved more than we got, especially the draws right at the end against Newcastle early on and Central Coast about a month ago,” he said.
“They are two games where we dropped four points in and that’d make a huge difference now. It is hard to look back on our start but all the teams have gone through a bad run now, ours was at the start, and hopefully we can continue our good form.”
Coyne doesn’t expect fatigue to be a factor on Wednesday either, and he’s looking forward to teaming up with former Dutch international Victor Sikora for the first time.
“The coaches have kept it pretty light to make sure we are ready for Wednesday night. They will be just as tired as us, though, and we have the motivation to win and will then have a break for 11 days after that,” he said.
“Sikora is a tricky little player, is very sharp and it will take him a while to settle as we don’t know his game, and he doesn’t know ours. The fact that he speaks English and has come here to win is a real positive, and you can see his determination to work hard off the ball as much as when he has it.”
