Sydney FC coach Viteszlav Lavicka said his side needed to improve everything about their game after his side’s 1-0 loss to North Queensland on Saturday night.
Lavicka was left to rue a listless performance by Sydney, its second loss in as many weeks after a 2-1 defeat to Gold Coast the previous round.
Asked which areas he wants to improve on, the Czech-born coach pin-pointed a couple of areas but was looking at improvement across the board ahead of next week’s home match against Newcastle.
“We need to improve everything after this game. I repeat, we played a bad game. In attack we were without creativity. And we weren’t hungry to win,” he said.
Lavicka added that he felt the turning point in the game was Paul Henderson’s penalty save from John Aloisi’s first-half spot kick.
Sydney was made to pay for that with a sublime second-half goal by Robbie Fowler to help hand North Queensland its first ever win in the Hyundai A-League.
But the Sydney coach didn’t take anything away from his opponent who he congratulated for their organisation.
“I have to say that the opponent played very well. Very compact, especially in defence. I think the key point was the penalty, but still we didn’t create some good opportunities to score during the first half and second half,” he said.
“But when I compare our performance with Round 1 away against them, we played a bad performance tonight and the opponent played very well.”
Sydney FC captain Steve Corica echoed his coach’s comments saying the Fury had pressurised the Sky Blues across the park.
“They didn’t give us much time on the ball and in the end I think that showed in the game. We kept giving the ball away and we didn’t create anything,” he said.
Sydney defeated Fury 3-2 in the opening round of the season. After taking a 2-0 lead, Fury got back in that game before a late penalty sunk them at home in Townsville.
Since then, the Fury’s results have slowly improved as their squad has gelled and they were considered unlucky not to defeat both Brisbane Roar and Adelaide United in recent weeks.
“They’ve got better, a lot better since we last played them,” added Corica.
