Reds attack can improve

Adelaide United has admitted its attacking game remains a work in progress with just two games left in the season.

Adelaide United has admitted its attacking game remains a work in progress with just two games left in the season.

The Reds have had a disappointing year scoring just 20 goals in 25 games with not one player featuring in the competition’s top 20 goal scorers.

Leadership duo Travis Dodd and Lucas Pantelis have been the most effective playing up front with four goals each this season.

Many believe attacking flair is instinctual rather than learned but United coach Aurelio Vidmar hasn’t given up on improving his team’s scoring power.

“It can be taught. There’s a few technical issues and even just reviewing the DVD with the players during the course of this week they actually see it, they probably don’t see it during the course of the game but when you freeze the action and then they realise ‘Yeah, I should have done that’,” Vidmar said.

“They are aware of it, we even did some more work on it during the course of this week, just reliving those same situations that they had in the game to try and make them better. Once again it’s just a work in progress for us.”

The Reds have brought Marcos Flores into the fold this week but he alone will not be able to lift the team’s fortunes.

Instead Vidmar is hoping a strong work ethic will help his players break through for a victory against the Brisbane Roar on Saturday night.

“It (the players’ attitude) has been fantastic, the last couple of weeks the commitment and training … it’s been like that for most of the year but it’s been such a fine line between winning and losing … their commitment and resolve has been tremendous so we are very pleased with that,” he said.

While Adelaide is only playing for pride in its remaining two games, Vidmar said it was unlikely the team had lost its mental edge.

“We’ve still got to go into the last couple of games as solid as we possibly can. Although we’ve had a poor season it’s not about just getting rid of the season and concentrating on the Asian Champions League,” he said.

“We still need to go out there and perform and we wanted to put in a committed performance out there so that’s all we are planning to do.”

“It’s important to get a win because when you start winning it breeds a lot of confidence and although over the last few weeks we’ve probably done enough for a result, it just hasn’t been good enough in terms of getting over the line and getting that win.”