Melbourne Heart coach John Aloisi says his side failed to cope with the heat in their 2-0 loss to Perth Glory on Sunday at NIB Stadium.
Melbourne Heart coach John Aloisi says his side failed to cope with the heat in their 2-0 loss to Perth Glory on Sunday at NIB Stadium.
With temperatures over 30 degrees, Melbourne were outplayed by Perth for most of the match and appeared to fatigue in the second half.
Aloisi said his side were never in the game.
“For the first half we were probably not getting outplayed so much, but we didn’t keep hold of the ball as well as we would have liked and in the second half Perth outplayed us and we struggled with the conditions, we really struggled,” he said.
“We were flat, fatigued, then the game becomes stretched and they start to outplay you in midfield and it was a struggle for us.
“I know you can’t make up excuses, but it’s been quite cool in Melbourne and coming over here and playing at 2 o’clock in the afternoon it really affected us.”
The game became fiery late in the first half when Michael Thwaite and Jacob Burns delivered hard tackles on the Heart’s Dylan Macallister and Matt Thompson respectively.
A first-half clash also saw the Heart lose star player Fred to a poked eye.
“It’s never nice to lose a player like Fred,” Aloisi said.
“He couldn’t see out of his eye, he was struggling, so he had to come off at half-time.
“That affects the team because you don’t want to lose one of your best players, but still we’ve got other players out there that can do a job and we didn’t do it.”
“We know that Perth are a side that play physical, they (are) also a good footballing side.”
It was Melbourne’s first defeat of the season after they won the Melbourne derby in round 1 and drew 1-1 with Wellington Phoenix last weekend.
Aloisi said the impressive start to the season made Sunday’s performance more disappointing.
“We started off the first two games well, creating a lot of chances. Today we didn’t create much, one off a set piece, I think (David) Vrankovic had, that was about it,” he said.
“That’s the disappointing bit because last week we were down to 10 men and still able to create chances.
“Against Victory we probably created six or seven clear-cut, last week the same, then today we just weren’t in it.
“We didn’t create anything, we didn’t really look like threatening Perth and we deserved to lose and that’s probably why it was so disappointing because the first two games we played well.”
