Melbourne coach Ernie Merrick has described Saturday’s 3-1 win over Adelaide as his team’s best 90-minute performance of the year and a shining example of the depth the club has at its disposal.
Melbourne’s new-look side featured two players who had never started a game for the club before in Sutee Suksomkit and Mate Dugandzic and both played major roles as the Victory recorded an eighth straight success over the Reds.
Merrick described the win as the best of the club’s six successes this season and said that the players wanted to make amends for their previous appearance at Etihad Stadium, which resulted in a 3-0 defeat by Sydney.
“It was a just a very impressive performance. I think there was very crisp inter-passing the first half, the second half we scored two goals. I think the main thing out of tonight is that the boys really wanted to atone for the loss against Sydney. We not only played good football, we wanted to score goals and win the game,” he said.
“I’d say it was our best 90 minutes. I think we could have scored a couple more with the one on ones at the end. I thought Eugene Galekovic pulled off a couple of brilliant saves,” he said.
Dugandzic, who scored the first two goals of the match in the 17th and 56th minutes, impressed his coach not for his ability to find the net, but his commitment in defence.
“He was very conscientious in defending as well as attacking. Scott Jamieson couldn’t get past him. We were surprised with his engines, we thought we’d have to substitute him, but he just kept going and going,” he said.
Dugandzic, who turned 20 last Thursday, said he was delighted to have made such an impression so early in his Hyundai A-League career.
“It-s great to do that in front of family and friends here in Melbourne. It-s really satisfying,” he said.
Merrick also lavished praise on Suksomkit, who was making his first appearance of a nine-match guest stint.
“Sutee, he surprised us with how fit he was. His technical ability on the ball was first class. He’s got a sweet left foot and under pressure, when people dive in, he always beats them. Coping with that in his first game, a big crowd and high expectations, I thought he was fantastic,” he said.
The coach described the squad he has at his disposal this season as the best in the five years of the competition, saying he could rely on the depth more this year then before.
“At Melbourne Victory for sure. Gary (Cole), Aaron (Healey) and myself agree that it-s beginning to pay off. Even season three we would have said that players were struggling. But now we have proven through being persistent that we-ve got a really good squad.”
“But we can-t sit back and rely on that. We have to keep on turning on that sort of performance week in, week out,” he said.
Adelaide coach Aurelio Vidmar said that there were some positives to take out of the defeat, but that the club needed to get to the bottom of why it is unable to perform for the full 90 minutes.
“There was a positive tonight, we scored. That’s the first time in five outings against Melbourne that we had scored,” he said. “The first half was pretty weak. One team was out there trying to win and the other was just playing. We changed that around in the second half but it was far too late.”
“You’ve got to be motivated every week to play. I don’t know why we can do it in the second half and not in the first half, you just can-t wait to the 50th minute to start playing.”
