With questions over players to answer, Western United’s title-winning head coach can build from a position of strength writes Tom Smithies.
Just at the point when John Aloisi’s first press conference as a title-winning coach was being invaded by his players, armed with beer to spray over their leader, all traces of the A-League Men Grand Final were being wiped from the face of AAMI Park in Melbourne.
As the goals came down and the pitch markings were power-washed away, ahead of a different code taking possession today, you can imagine Aloisi seeing the triumph of this season as something to be enjoyed but just as transitory before the planning for next term starts with a clean slate.
No doubt Western United will party for the next few days, and the celebrations will be utterly deserved. They were the best team in the finals, and deservedly manoeuvred Melbourne City aside in Saturday’s Grand Final.
But even before the hangovers have abated – or possibly before they have even started – there will be a taking stock of the lessons of this season, as a vehicle for thinking about next year.
For Western, there are issues to address on and off the field. If, as seems certain, we have seen the last of Alessandro Diamanti, Aloisi has to decide how that money will be invested next season. Does his team need a new playmaker, and how will their style evolve as a result? How does he build on this achievement, and ensure it’s not just a remarkable one-off?
Similarly the club as a whole have existential questions to answer, and the success on Saturday should bring them into even sharper relief rather than allow Western to put them off. While the A-Leagues were satisfied with a Grand Final crowd of just over 22,000 after a horribly disjointed season, Western’s attendance issues have to be tackled next year. Key to that is the development of an identity and the laying of roots in one area, rather than living a nomadic life moving from stadium to stadium.
We all know, or rather we’ve all been told, that the new stadium is coming, but the answers to all those questions can’t simply wait until the builders hand over the front door key on a finished home ground.
Just outside the door of Aloisi’s press conference, meanwhile, Melbourne City’s players drifted along the corridor and out into the night air of a hugely disappointing evening. The defending champions didn’t quite give up without a whimper, but their tactics were wrong and the whole match felt like an orchestra slightly but fatally off-key.
Patrick Kisnorbo was asked afterwards about pre-match comments from his striker Jamie Maclaren, to do with creating a dynasty of success; a dynasty isn’t built in one or two or even three years, Kisnorbo observed, but over an extended period.
If the City coach needed any motivation to go around again this defeat surely supplies it. At the start of this campaign, Kisnorbo effectively banned talk of last year and the double-winning success the club had enjoyed, for fear that his players would not set new standards to attain. It worked in terms of the Premiers Plate, but their record against the top four sides in the league was a bizarre anomaly. Saturday’s defeat meant they finished the season with just one win against all of Melbourne Victory, Adelaide United and Western United.
The suspicion is that the team need more creativity in the sense of fresh angles and avenues of attack. Kisnorbo will be all too well aware of the way Manchester City can attack via just about every one of their players in any number of combinations; contrast that with City’s paucity of options in the first half the Grand Final.
Of course for both clubs these are reviews to be done from positions of strength. Other clubs have more root and branch reform to instigate, such as a new playing style, and personnel to implement it, at Sydney FC and Western Sydney Wanderers. This is one of the fascinations of the off-season, to keep us entertained until the actual football kicks off again.
