Melbourne Victory looks to bounce back when it travels to Adelaide United in the Westfield W-League on Friday.
Summary
The league leader suffered its first loss of the season with a thrilling 4-3 defeat to Brisbane Roar in Round 7.
Victory fought hard in tough conditions at Lions Stadium, but was left disappointed with its performance on Sunday.
It faces a short turnaround as it gets a chance to respond at Marden Sports Complex on Friday.
Christine Nairn and Emily Gielnik scored their second goals of the season against Brisbane.
Victory captain Natasha Dowie, meanwhile, made it six goals in as many games this campaign.
Despite its defeat against the Roar, Victory remains three points clear at the top of the table at the halfway mark of the season.
It faces an Adelaide side which is fifth after only one loss in its six games.
Head coach Jeff Hopkins’ pre-match thoughts
on the short turnaround…
“I think we’ll be going in with a full squad to pick from. We had a pretty positive session (on Tuesday night) and the girls understand the standards dropped a little bit in the last game and we’ve got to put it right. There was no backing away from the performance wasn’t good enough. They all owned it and it was pleasing and it was kind of led by them which is excellent as well.”
lessons from Round 1…
“There were a few things that we took a bit of time to get used to, a few things that they did defensively which we looked at straight away after that game and we put right. They don’t play the same as everyone else, they play with a 4-4-2, so it’s not something we come up against every week. Knowing we’d be playing them again Round 8, we did have a good look at them. We’re just going to focus on going over those one or two things. We don’t have time to do much else either. The main thing that we focused on, and that came from the players, were things that have been getting us to where we’ve got to that we didn’t really do on the weekend so we’ve got to get back to doing the things that we’re good at and doing them well.”
on defensive performance…
“Obviously there were a couple of own goals within those four (against Brisbane). For me, looking at the game, one of the things we’ve worked on all season is looking at transition moments to defence and really minimising those and by playing long we did turn over possession too often and too easily, leaving us in deep positions and leaving their back line and some of their deeper midfielders with time and space to play. We’ve done well so far to make sure we put pressure on our opponents and putting pressure on our opponents quite high up the field. By giving the ball away, we most probably made it a little bit too easy for them to play from the back and from a deeper midfield area. When you do that, you’re going to give opponents chances. We didn’t give them a massive amount of chances, they took the chances we gave them and a couple of unfortunate own goals as well. Sometimes things like that happen, we’ve just got to deal with them, take it on the chin and move on. The good thing is we’ve had a good look at ourselves, we’ve been pretty honest and we move on to the next game now and put that behind us.”
Last time
Westfield W-League 2018/19 Round 1
Melbourne Victory 0-0 Adelaide United
Sunday, October 28, 2018
AAMI Park, Melbourne
Victory and Adelaide played out a goalless draw in their opening games of the season.
While Victory enjoyed the majority of the chances, the Reds also had their opportunities to claim three points.
As it stands
Match details
Adelaide United v Melbourne Victory
Marden Sports Complex, Adelaide
Friday, December 21, 2018
Kick-off: 7.30pm AEDT
