Adelaide United coach Aurelio Vidmar will ignore player feedback and persist with a lone striker when the Reds tackle North Queensland Fury at Dairy Farmers Stadium on Sunday.
United has scored just six goals in seven games this season and its main attacking weapon Lloyd Owusu has admitted he feels isolated in the side’s 4-2-3-1 formation.
He’d prefer to play alongside Cristiano who has come off the bench in a number of games this year.
While Owusu is ‘frustrated’, Vidmar said he wouldn’t be tinkering too much with the team’s approach in Round 8.
“We need to play whatever formation is right, so they need to understand that, everyone has got an ideal way of playing and what formation they would like,” Vidmar said.
“Unfortunately I’m the boss so we’ll have to play the way that I see fit and the way the coaching staff agrees on where we can get a decent result.”
Vidmar said some of the team’s midfielders needed to get more involved to ensure Owusu wasn’t on his own.
“Really when we play that system, it’s not one up front, so once the ball is on one side, if it’s on the right hand side Cassio comes in and becomes the second striker anyway,” he said.
“And then we’ve got Lucas (Pantelis) and Hughesy (Adam Hughes) who should be involved as well and it’s about them pushing themselves a little bit further forward.”
“At this point of time they are just a little bit too far away from that support and that’s probably why at times, it does look a little bit isolated.”
Vidmar said it was inevitable the Reds’ approach would be criticised when the team was struggling for success.
“The massive difference is winning and losing, when you are winning no one worries about the system, no one worries about anything and soon as you start losing with that same system it becomes a big issue,” he said.
“The system is not the issue. We still feel the players that we’ve got in there can fit that system.”
Defender Iain Fyfe said the Round 8 clash at Dairy Farmers Stadium was not the time or the place to add another striker to the mix.
“We are going up to North Queensland – in this specific game it is going to be very hard to play with two up front in an away game with that heat as well,” Fyfe said.
“It might be something the coaching staff go for but at the end of the day we’ve got big Lloyd up front and if we start with Cristiano on the bench he come on and do a job for us.”
