Ahead of the Brisbane Roar’s first away match of the season against Sydney FC, coach Ange Postecoglou has promised that his team will take their offensively-orientated game wherever they go – exactly as they did on the way to the premiership-championship double last season.
Ahead of the Brisbane Roar’s first away match of the season against Sydney FC, coach Ange Postecoglou has promised that his team will take their offensively-orientated game wherever they go – exactly as they did on the way to the premiership-championship double last season.
The increasing trend of “parking the bus” and playing every man behind the ball in away games in the hope of a draw is something that doesn’t sit well with the entertaining Roar outfit and Postecoglou assured it would never be an acceptable strategy for his side.
“The key to our season last year was that we didn’t change our mentality going away from home,” he said.
“I think sometimes you can go into a defensive mindset when you are playing away from home. Our thinking last year was that we’d go to every game trying to win it.”
“There’s no point settling for a draw or trying to minimise risks when you’re playing at an opposition’s ground, so that was our attitude last year and certainly our attitude this year.”
“You can afford to lose a few games away provided you win a lot. When you go for draws away from home or try to minimise risks, inevitably you end up drawing a few but you end up losing a few as well.”
“That’ll be our mentality to go down there to win the game and that’ll be our mentality all year.”
With first-choice Brazilian attacker Henrique requiring a further week of rehabilitation, Postecoglou is near certain to retain the 11 starters and four bench players that started the season with a 1-0 win over Central Coast.
“We were pretty happy with the way things went last week,” said Postecoglou.
“Ricky was close, but he hadn’t had a full week of training and it’s a long season so there’s no point unnecessarily rushing him in.”
Queensland have lost just once in their previous 13 encounters with the Sky Blues, and last year ended a six-year drought at the SFS with a 1-0 win in December.
Recent history suggests last year’s wooden-spooners will have a tough time of matching it with last year’s champions, yet Postecoglou insisted the revamped Sydney outfit would be a genuine challenge.
Marquee signing Brett Emerton didn’t deliver to his full potential for Sydney in their season-opening 0-0 draw with Melbourne Victory, but Postecoglou is predicting the Socceroo to bounce back strongly and lead a confident Sky Blues outfit onto the pitch for their first home game.
“It’s their first home game and there’ll be a bit of hype around it,” said Postecoglou.
“The boys are looking forward to playing not just against (Emerton) but the whole Sydney as well.”
“There’s a decent rivalry between Brisbane and Sydney. We’ve beaten them once down there and from our point of view we want to make sure we continue that recent result.”
“I think they would have got a lot of confidence out of last week. They went down to Melbourne in front of 40,000 people and all the hype surrounding Victory and Harry (Kewell) and all those kind of things.”
“Any coach will tell you if you go into a game like that you’ll be pretty happy if you come out of it with some sort of result.”
