Newcastle coach Gary van Egmond will use Adelaide’s stunning AFC Champions League run of last year as motivation for his players ahead of their opening clash against Beijing Guoan on Tuesday.
Van Egmond admits he doesn’t quite know what to expect from his team’s opening match at the Workers Stadium, but has taken plenty of lessons from the way the Reds went about their business in making the final last year.
“Our goal is to play as well as we can and hopefully that will be good enough to qualify for the next stage,” Van Egmond said.
“For us it’s a new experience, we’ve never been in this competition before and we’re looking forward to it.”
“We saw how well Adelaide did and they competed extremely well last year, so we take great heart from that, because we can compete very well with Adelaide and if Adelaide can do well, there’s no reason why we can’t.”
Van Egmond admits it is hard to know what to expect from Beijing after the team which finished third in the Chinese Super League last season made several changes in the off-season.
“We feel that Beijing is going to be a big challenge for us, they have obviously recruited as well as what we have,” he said.
“We feel that obviously Grampus and Ulsan are going to be very, very difficult as well, but we’re concentrating 100 percent on Beijing.”
The match has been given extra spice with the three Griffiths brothers facing off against each other. Joel and Ryan, who play for Beijing, take on Adam, who will spearhead the Jets’ new-look defence.
Van Egmond is backing his Griffiths to get the job done.
“Adam is in very good physical condition, he’s always been in good physical condition but in particular now,” he said.
“He’s the biggest of the three brothers altogether and he’s probably the mentally strongest of them, so he’s looking for bragging rights after this game.”
“He’s very up for this game, he’s wanting to win this game, so he doesn’t get a ribbing from his brothers.”
