Adelaide United coach Aurelio Vidmar admits his players’ once miserly defensive game has slipped because of their heavy workload this season.
The Reds have lost their past four games (including the Asian Champions League finals legs) and in doing so have conceded 11 goals.
It-s a far cry from their earlier efforts in the ACL and Hyundai A-League when clean sheets were a common occurrence for the team from South Australia.
United recently played 15 games in 60 days and Vidmar said their focus on recovery rather than tactics had started to take its toll.
“The big issue for us is we-ve been playing every four or five days and we really haven-t been able to go and have a real decent training session and we haven-t been able to do that for a long time,” he said.
“We play, we recover the next day, and we have a real light session to get ourselves ready for the following game. We-ve done that for such a long time and we-ve sort of dropped the ball in that area, certainly we have as coaches.”
“We-ve had a good hard look at that this week and we need to get back to what we doing very well towards the end of last year and throughout the whole campaign this year and in the next few weeks you-ll see the team back to playing how it should be.”
At the other end of the pitch, Adelaide has scored just two goals during those past four games. Vidmar said the team-s attacking approach could do with some fine-tuning too.
“We need to be a little more efficient. I-m not a stats person myself but if you have a look at the stats from last week-s Central Coast Mariners game, we had more shots on goal and we had more possession,” he said.
“The efficiency rate is not what we are looking for so certainly we need to sharpen up and be a little bit cooler in the minds when we get into the front third and we can work on that.”
With the team-s ACL commitments completed, Vidmar said there would be no excuses for poor performances in the upcoming rounds.
And he said the team was aiming to take at least seven points from the next three games.
“Personally I think the way it stands today there will be no sympathy for our club if we don-t make the finals,” he said.
“I think there-s been a fair bit of sympathy up to now with the ACL but certainly there-ll be none if we don-t complete the mission of getting to the finals.”
