Perth Glory coach Ian Ferguson says the wild weather that saw their Wednesday night clash with Sydney postponed has caused several logistical issues, although he won’t be using any of these as an excuse for a poor performance against Wellington on Saturday.
Perth Glory coach Ian Ferguson says the wild weather that saw their Wednesday night clash with Sydney postponed has caused several logistical issues, although he won’t be using any of these as an excuse for a poor performance against Wellington on Saturday.
Perth experienced its wettest December day since 1963 on Tuesday, forcing several flights from the international and domestic airports to be delayed or cancelled.
One of those flights was meant to take Glory to the Harbour City for their clash at Campbelltown Stadium, but after eight hours spent in the Qantas lounge waiting for take-off, they were eventually informed the flight wasn’t going ahead.
Although their clash with Sydney was cancelled, the players were unable to get their checked-in luggage off the original flight, creating several headaches for the coach, who took his charges through a pumped-up session on Wednesday designed to replicate match intensity.
“There’s a lot of logistics that have still to be sorted out,” said Ferguson.
“Obviously we’ve still not got our gear back. We’re trying to find that.”
“We need to get a flight from here. Hopefully we can get the times for the flights as well. We’re trying find a connection flight to Sydney (for) we still have the Sydney flight (to Wellington), but now we’re looking at Perth to Sydney. That’s the biggest problem.”
“Plus the players’ boots. They had to bring their extra boots in today so there’s a few problems.”
“But as I keep saying, I’m not going to make excuses. We’ve got two days training, we’re preparing the same as we do for any away game to Wellington, going two days before, and we’ll go along those lines.”
As the hours dragged by at Perth’s domestic airport, Glory defender Bas van den Brink jokingly said the players tried recreating some of the famous Nike football commercials in the departure lounge before running their phone batteries into the ground chatting to people on the outside.
Ferguson acknowledged it had been a tough day, but was philosophical about it and determined to not let it affect his player’s preparation for Wellington.
“It was hard for everybody,” he said.
“It’s out of our control and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“It was unfortunate about the bad weather and there are obviously rules and regulations for Qantas.”
“There were people worse off than us. At least we were in a lounge and allowed to walk about.”
“There were people in planes for nine or 10 hours, which must have been tough.”
“We’ve just got to get on with it.”
