Melbourne Victory midfielder Mark Milligan has called on his team-mates to find some extra mongrel as they look to turn around a run of three straight losses.
Melbourne Victory midfielder Mark Milligan has called on his team-mates to find some extra mongrel as they look to turn around a run of three straight losses.
Speaking on Thursday after a high-intensity training session at AAMI Park, Milligan said the time for reflecting on last Saturday’s 6-2 loss to Central Coast was well and truly over.
Instead it was time for action, and he said there would be no more nice guys on the pitch for Victory this weekend as they take on Newcastle.
“I think sometimes, it (the rapport among the Victory squad) can be, not too friendly, but when times are bad I guess you need a little bit of mongrel as well to get the boys up around you,” Milligan said.
“I think you saw that reaction in training today.
“We’ve spoken about it (the loss), we’ve done all that, but at the end of the day we can speak about it all we want, it doesn’t help.
“We need to get on with it and train and work hard on the things that went wrong and make sure that doesn’t happen again.
“We have had our little period of hurting after the game but there’s no point crying about it all week otherwise it’s just going to hurt us again this weekend.”
Milligan said the focus on lifting an extra cog in training would help the side overcome some mental flatness against the Mariners that was shown up in the post-match reviews.
“We’ve analysed games the same way all season,” Milligan said.
“It gets analysed in the sense of how we play and how we do things and on the weekend there wasn’t a great deal to analyse in that sense.
“We as a team, we didn’t execute things that we wanted to and we got hurt, especially late in the game.
“One of the hardest things in football is when you’re in maybe a little bit of a slump and you’ve lost a couple of games, is to come out of it.
“It’s always smiles and quite easy going you know when you’re winning games but it shows the true character of a team to turn things around.
“So it’s going to be a test.”
Marcos Flores (quad) will miss again on Sunday, but star forward Archie Thompson is expected to be fit after his hamstring injury.
