Melbourne Victory coach Mehmet Durakovic rued his side’s defending but praised their effort after an entertaining 2-0 loss away to league leaders Central Coast.
Melbourne Victory coach Mehmet Durakovic rued his side’s defending but praised their effort after an entertaining 2-0 loss away to league leaders Central Coast.
Victory’s season sank to a new low with their third successive defeat as Matt Simon scored after just 18 seconds and then again in the dying minutes on his final appearance before moving to the K-League.
The visitors threatened Matt Ryan’s goal on a few occasions, although they had their own goalkeeper Ante Covic and some luck with the woodwork to thank for keeping the score down in an open, end-to-end affair.
Durakovic admitted the early goal, one of the fastest in the league’s history, sent his gameplan out the window.
“What do you do? We planned for this game but to get off to such a disastrous start we were really behind the eight ball,” he said.
“Having said that I thought the players really dug in deep and worked their socks off. A couple of mistakes and a couple of goals and it’s cost us the game tonight.”
Victory are out of the bottom two only on goal difference and Durakovic said the team’s fortunes must turn around right away.
“It’s not acceptable. We’ve got to go back to Melbourne and work on our team shape and creating more chances and putting the ball in the back of the net,” he said.
“We are creating chances but we’re not scoring goals. We’re just making a lot of mistakes and it’s costing us and the pack’s getting away from us.”
“We’ve got two home games in the next couple of weeks and we’ve got to be picking up maximum points.”
Young centre back Petar Franjic again stood in for captain Adrian Leijer, who failed a pre-match fitness test, and he was at fault for the opening goal with Durakovic admitting he couldn’t hide his disappointment at the basic errors.
“Petar Franjic, who I’ve had four or five years in the youth team, is a fantastic youngster coming on but he’s just making some mistakes,” he said.
“Petar will learn from those mistakes but it’s costing us games and we’re not picking up points.”
Nonetheless, Durakovic hailed the ‘determination and effort’ of his side as they tried to fight their way back into the match, and ruled out any major change to team tactics despite their lack of form.
Asked if he would consider a different approach, he said: “Not really, we’ll play our game. Hopefully we’ll get our captain Adrian Leijer back in the next week so that will be a bit of a bonus to our defence.”
“I’ve got full faith in the players that come in. Apart from the mistakes we are creating chances, we just need to score.”
Victory’s next chances to do just that come with home games against Newcastle and Adelaide in the coming week.
