Brisbane Roar coach Ange Postecoglou says his team can look forward to the second half of the season with confidence and optimism after recording a drought-breaking victory over Adelaide United at Hindmarsh Stadium on Friday.
A poor performance against the Reds could’ve seen them anchored to the bottom of the A-League ladder with the players left to mull upon a disastrous five-week period.
Instead, a convincing 2-0 result over United has them yearning for consecutive wins and a move back into the top six.
Postecoglou says the win ensures the midseason break will be approached with a positive attitude.
“We need a break, players like Reinaldo and David Dodd and even Tiatto were struggling to finish the 90 minutes,” Postecoglou said.
“The squad has been through a really tough time and it will just give us a chance to refresh all the boys. We’ve got three or four that are just on the cusp of returning which will help us enormously Henrique, Massimo (Murdocca), Liam Reddy, a lot of competition for places.”
“We need everyone up and running and I think the week’s break will do us the world of good. To be honest it would’ve been worse if we lost with a week’s break because sitting on a loss we would’ve been bottom of the table.”
“Now we can work really hard in the next two weeks.”
Postecoglou said the team was hopeful a stint at Suncorp Stadium would create some winning momentum.
“Hopefully for us that’s the end of our bad trot and we can get some wins together, we’ve got a couple of home games coming up, Melbourne Victory and Wellington, a good chance to really get amongst it,” he said.
“Once we get our strongest team and everyone pushing each other we’ll be hard to beat against anyone.”
Round-14 hero Griffin McMaster – who stopped a Lloyd Owusu penalty kick and made several saves in the first half – says the team were relieved the run of poor results was over.
“It was important to get the monkey off the back so to speak. Everyone worked hard and everyone was desperate, that’s what we talked about in training,” McMaster said.
“It’s just one of those nights where things go your way and fortunately it went our way and I think the penalty save really deflated Adelaide, it took the wind out of their sail.”
“It was obviously my fourth game and I hadn’t kept a clean sheet after my third game so it was very important we got the clean sheet tonight.”
“We’ve got to do it every week, it’s not easy but consistency is now the key. It’s still early days, we’ve still got a long way to go, the next game is in a fortnight and we are looking forward to playing Melbourne.”
