Adelaide coach Aurelio Vidmar says he is unlikely to make any changes to his side ahead of Saturday’s Hyundai A-League Grand Final and pledged to park a ‘double-decker’ bus in front of the Melbourne goal in order to prevent the favourites from scoring.
Vidmar said immediately after the Preliminary Final win over Queensland that he planned to defend deep against Victory in a bid to turn around a five-match losing streak against Melbourne.
And on the eve of the match, he has refused to back down from those comments, jokingly suggesting he wanted the biggest bus possible to thwart Melbourne’s dangerous strike pair of Archie Thompson and Danny Allsopp.
“It’s a double decker by the way,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about their two boys up front, they just know where the goals are. We know it’s going to be very tough, we need to play tough and smart football and we need everyone to do that.”
“It’s 50-50, it’s 90 minutes of football, certainly we need to improve on the performance we had against them in the major semi-finals, and I don’t think we can play that bad again.”
Vidmar said he had already decided on his starting XI and there was unlikely to be many changes from the team which defeated Queensland last week.
“That team did quite well, considering everyone’s under a little bit of pressure to get a result. The team did very well. There’s no need to change it,” he said.
“I’ve decided it, that will be kept between myself and the team and that will be announced just before the game.”
Adelaide has pin-pointed the space Melbourne was allowed in the midfield as a major factor in the two semi-final losses. Vidmar addressed that by putting Jonas Salley in as a second holding midfielder against the Roar, and it worked very well. He is likely to go with the same ploy this week.
“That’s certainly an area where they were very strong and they were very poor in those two games. That’s an area we need to make sure we get it right,” he said.
Adelaide has already lost a final this season, going down to Japanese giants Gamba Osaka in the decider of the Asian Champions League. Vidmar said that while a loss on Saturday would not condemn the season as a failure, the club will be judged on the trophies they win, not the finals they made.
“It’s been a tough season for us. We’ve had a lot of football, we’ve played a lot of big games. One’s that take mental and physical strain out of us,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about silverware. They’ll say it’s not successful unless you win some silverware and tomorrow night’s an opportunity to pick up a trophy.”
However, Vidmar praised the steps the club had taken in the past 12 months after missing the finals last year.
“It’s delivered a lot, you have to remember where we came from last year, we didn’t make the finals, we finished sixth, we had a lot of young kids. From where we have come to achieve what we have this year has been a massive turnaround,” he said.
