BY THE PALM TREES
This weekend the Central Coast Mariners return to our Gosford home after what has been a rollercoaster ride, start the season. From the lows of a horrendous first half performance in Perth, the coach made a right but hard decision to change things, and the team battled back bravely to carve out a share the points. This led to a level of optimism among fans that was probably not warranted and made last weekend’s four nil thumping at the hands of Sydney FC more difficult to swallow than it should have been.
Clearly results like that one in Sydney are not acceptable. Not to me, not to most fans and I dare say not to coach Paul Okon. At the same time however, getting the team prepared enough to successfully execute his plan and system is obviously going to take time, possibly more time than some of our fans will tolerate and who can blame them after two forgettable seasons.
In the meantime, Paul Okon’s post match comments about our side being the better team that day were wide of the mark and even though I expect he really meant his team played to his instructions and possessed the ball (aka controlled) the game, as the first time A-League coach gains experience with weekly media commitments he will probably adjust his style to avoid such assertions. Having said that – I loved his straight faced but hilariously frank assessment of the softness of the Bobo penalty decision – “he’s a big boy. It takes more than the wind to bring him down…” He clearly is a real character and those types of comments will have fans warming to his style pretty quickly.
Positive aspects of our early season performances include the coach’s willingness to change things when needed, the amount of character shown by the team to come back from an impossible position in round one, and the presence of visible game plans. Not so positive is the number of individual errors, which are often creating chances for our opposition, or the nervous feel about some of our possession play.
This is when the coach really earns the big money! Paolo will be looking to persist with his game plan despite last weekend’s result and drive his philosophy through the squad as quickly as he can.
It looks like the plan will be to patiently maintain possession as the platform for minimizing the opposition’s opportunities, and to create our attacking play by getting our fast wide men and forwards in behind the opposition. To maintain possession, there will be times where unless we pass the ball backwards, we won’t be able to retain it, especially against the best oppositions. The problem is, when the players are put under pressure or not confident in the system of attack, they will default to trying to maintain possession. This will sometimes mean passing the ball back to safety. While fans will moan and groan about this at times, if we want to play possession football, unless we are dominating our opposition in attack, it will be necessary. In the Sydney game some of our attacking set pieces were sent backward to keep possession and this is issue seems exacerbated by the fact that we seem to be struggling to find a quality free kick slash corner taker. With all due respect to Monty, whose contributions are often the model for the rest of the team, his corner kicks have shown to be average at best.
Brisbane is coming off a similar thumping to our own and like us is still looking for their first win of the season. Going down by four in Newcastle will not sit well with them so they will be charged up for this weekend. This is an important fixture for the Mariners as they will not return to Central Coast Stadium until 24 November.
We will hardly find a better early season opportunity to register our first three points and this will be on Paul Okon’s mind as he prepares. I think we can do it and I’m hoping for a vocal home crowd.
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