Melbourne Victory seeks to build on its win last time out in the Westfield W-League when it hosts the Newcastle Jets at AAMI Park on Sunday.
Summary
Victory claimed a hard-fought 2-1 win over Perth Glory away from home in Round 7.
Amy Jackson scored a brace for Victory, including a stunning effort from distance in the first half.
Jackson has netted 12 Westfield W-League goals for Victory – the equal third most for the club.
Victory goalkeeper Casey Dumont had kept her team level with a third penalty save of the season, continuing her good form.
The win over Perth was Victory’s second of the season, but it has lost just once in its past five games, picking up eight points.
It meets Newcastle for the first time this campaign and Natasha Dowie, who played her 50th Westfield W-League game for the club against Perth, has enjoyed a good record against the Jets.
Victory’s all-time leading goalscorer has netted in three of her five games against Newcastle since 2016.
The Jets have lost their past two games and sit seventh on the table.
Head coach Jeff Hopkins’ pre-match thoughts
on last week’s win…
“Obviously in terms of points it’s a big boost for us. We’re trying to build a bit of momentum now and obviously with momentum comes confidence and wins build confidence as well so it’s a real big boost to us. The performance was very pleasing as well and some individual performance as well, but in general we spoke about it a couple of weeks ago that now we’re at the stage where we need to win games and three points was very important and there was a real focus on that for us and to come out with a win and three points was obviously really important and it builds confidence in the squad.”
on making changes…
“Changing our formation (to a 3-5-2) came from us needing to win more games, to win more games we need to score more goals, we need to have more forward, attacking options and we felt that playing with an extra player forward would help that, an extra target, an extra player to make runs forward. The formation side of things was built out of that and obviously then we need to see in terms of personnel who fits into the formation and the way we want to play and the way we actually want to play that formation. It’s easy to say we changed formation, everything’s good now, but we need to get the most effective players playing the most effective roles in the team. I think it was only our second game in that formation and we definitely made improvements, not everything’s perfect, there’s still a lot of things that we need to do to keep fine tuning, but that’s why our training has been great to have time to train and train a few things that we’re seeing in games and game by game I think we’ll get better and better.”
on the Jets…
“They’re a good side. The actual league this year and over the last couple of years the depth within the league and the difference between your top teams and teams further down the league is not a great deal. We’re in the process of having a real good look at them. We understand I think they’re a team that’s going to be a little bit similar to Perth, they play well together, they’re quite united as a group and we’re obviously looking to go in and win the game, but they’ve got a number of areas that we’ve got to be very careful of, as well as having a few areas where we think we can be stronger than them and we can actually cause them a few problems. We’ve had a conditioning day today (Wednesday), we’re going to get our heads together tomorrow in terms of how we’re going to go about winning the game and then work Friday, Saturday on our tactical plans and hopefully that’ll come together on Sunday.”
Last time
Westfield W-League 2018/19 Round 2
Melbourne Victory 2-1 Newcastle Jets
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Lakeside Stadium, Melbourne
Victory and the Jets last met early last season.
Melina Ayres scored a long-range screamer before Grace Maher set up Dowie, with Victory claiming three points despite a Cortnee Vine goal as all three came inside 12 minutes.
As it stands
Match details
Melbourne Victory v Newcastle Jets
AAMI Park, Melbourne
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Kick-off: 4.00pm AEDT
