Melbourne Victory interim head coach Grant Brebner liked what he saw from the club’s youngsters in Saturday’s 2-1 loss to Western United.
Back in action for the first time since March, Victory went down at Bankwest Stadium despite Storm Roux’s late header, after goals from Tomislav Uskok and Max Burgess.
Teenagers Birkan Kirdar and Aaron Anderson started for Victory, while Luis Lawrie-Lattanzio, Brandon Lauton, Anthony Lesiotis and Jay Barnett came off the bench.
Speaking after the game, Brebner discussed the encounter and the performances of Victory’s youngsters.
on the game…
“The result obviously wasn’t what we wanted, but we finished on a high with obviously getting the goal and the way we started to play towards the end. Of course, we need to start the game better, we need to be braver in the first half. I think we took the easy option at times just to take an easy pass, be safe, when sometimes we probably needed to put ourselves in positions to hurt them and we took the easy option. We can look at that, we can address it this week again with a view towards Wednesday.”
on implementing style…
“In the first half, no, we wanted to get our midfield a lot higher and break lines but we didn’t seem to do that quite as well as we would’ve liked. We addressed it at half-time, I think you could see a marked difference in terms of where we were receiving the ball and then how we were going to play forward after that, our full-backs joining in, we pressed a lot higher because we were able to get on the ball higher up the pitch so that’s something we can look towards and hopefully get better at on Wednesday night.”
on Lawrie-Lattanzio…
“His performances at youth-team level, he’d been performing really well during the NYL [Foxtel Y-League] campaign for us. He’s a good player. He is a young lad, but he’s a good player. The way we finished tonight has given me a lot of things to think about for this coming Wednesday and Luis, like every player in the squad, if they’re performing well, they’ll play and he’s given himself every opportunity to be in that starting 11.”
on youngsters…
“I was pleased with him [Anderson] tonight. I wasn’t expecting a huge man-of-the-match performance, if we had got that it would’ve been nice, but you’ve got to remember who Aaron Anderson was up against tonight with Besart Berisha and [Alessandro] Diamanti. It was never going to be an easy task for him so I thought he did very well considering, and he’ll get better because of that. We’ve still got So Nishikawa, Ben Carrigan, Lleyton Brooks, who didn’t feature tonight, all three of them will be in contention to stake a place as well. We’ve got an abundance of youngsters up here, we’ve seen a little bit of them tonight, and hopefully we can get a few more of them on the pitch. They need to perform. I don’t want to just put them out there just because they’re young lads, we do need some experience around them as well just to help them settle into the game and complement both really.”
