Rather than being disappointed with Newcastle’s first loss of the 2009/10 Hyundai A-League season, Jets coach Branko Culina is looking forward to seeing his team’s response against Gold Coast on Sunday.
The Jets began the season impressively with Culina guiding them to a win over Wellington in his first game in charge before a draw with Central Coast ahead of Sunday’s 2-0 loss in Perth to the Glory.
Now that Newcastle has suffered a loss, had a win and played out a draw in the first three games, Culina is keen to see how his team responds to that defeat to Perth and is focusing on that, rather than coming up against his son Jason and his Gold Coast team for the first time.
“I don’t like talking about my son, his football talks for itself. For us it’s not about whether we play Gold Coast and Jason Culina, it’s about how we rebound from a loss. That’s what I will be looking at during the week and there’s no greater task than Gold Coast,” Culina said.
“They have set the benchmark, are the best team in the competition by a country mile and it’s great for Australian football to have a club playing great football. We should all strive to what Gold Coast has been in the first three rounds.”
“It’s going to be a huge task for us, but it’s more important to see how our players bounce back from a loss this week. We are playing at home so it’s going to be a real test of character for us.”
Culina said that despite the loss it wasn’t a bad performance by his team, which didn’t take good enough care of the ball and wasn’t able to create many realistic scoring chances.
“It was even in the first period until they scored the goal. After that we found it a little difficult to really create, but they didn’t create much either aside from the last 10 or 15 minutes,” he said.
“I’m not all that disappointed because we are still a work in progress. We have a number of players who weren’t ready, including Nikolai (Topor-Stanley), but he put his hand up to play because we needed him and then we have a number of other players still to come back. We aren’t overly disappointed, but it would have been nice to get something out of the game.”
“The scoreline doesn’t lie and we lost 2-0. Whether or not I think we deserved to get anything is irrelevant and would take credit away from Perth, and we don’t want to take credit away from the opposition who won and deserved to win. What we need to do is look at the reasons why we didn’t do a little bit better.”
Culina did switch things around a little especially through the middle after half-time and it worked with the Jets gaining some momentum until the Glory managed a second goal on the counterattack.
Culina has seen improvement in his short time in charge and expects things to only keep getting better after a less than ideal preparation for the season.
“Once we made the adjustments at half-time we played better football and kept possession, but there was always the chance of them catching us on the break because we were eager to push forward, and that was the case,” he said.
“Every game has been a test for us so far and we came into the season a little unprepared due to our commitments in the ACL, but we are getting better and stronger. We are learning something about the team all the time and where players are best suited, and we are juggling with some players being unavailable or not quite ready.”
