Victory in Melbourne 

So there we have it. Jim Magilton’s first game in charge of Melbourne Victory. We may all have been hoping for a first up win but unfortunately Adelaide United didn’t get the message and the match ended 1-1 in what was must be said was a very cliched match of two halves.

For those expecting dramatic changes in his first game would have been sadly disappointed as the starting line-up was pretty much the same the played the weekend before against Newcastle with the only change being the inclusion of Adrian Leijer for Petar Franjic, which was hardly a suprising move. What was interesting was Magilton’s use of the bench with Jean Carlos Solorzano, Diogo Ferreira and the aforementioned Franjic being his substitutes. For someone who is probably used to having a larger bench it was interesting that for his substitutes he went for a striker, midfielder and a defender along with the mandatory goalkeeper. It was a fairly conservative choice and I’m sure we will see a different bench once he gets used to having only a four man bench.

As I alluded to in my opening it was a game of two halves as the Victory shot out of blocks at the start of their game as has been their want of late and save for the efforts of Eugene Galekovic, the woodwork and some poor finishing the home team could well have been more than a goal up come the half time whistle. Kewell continued his recent renaissance out of the left and it was his early match trickery that not only set up the first goal but also created a plethora of other chances that unfortunately weren’t converted. He combined well on in the left hand-side with Fabio, who had his best game for the club although apart from a few blemishes has been pretty consistent throughout the season. It wasn’t all just Kewell in that early match dominance with Hernandez, Thompson and Allsopp all looking dangerous.

However as been the case through most of the season the team couldn’t put a whole match together as Adelaide fought their way back into the match and dominated much of the second half, save for a few chances for the Victory. Whilst the first half was full of free-flowing football the second half was in stark contrast as we resorted to long hopeful balls to the forwards as the connection between defence to midfield and beyond seemed to disappear. After a pleasing first half it was a little disappointing to see the team resort to type in the second half as the opposition stepped up their game and for most of the time looked bereft of ideas.

There is obviously plenty of work for Magilton to do in the coming weeks but his first up effort obviously displeased Australia’s self-proclaimed football oracle No. 1 Barcelona fan, Craig Foster who had probably been saving this piece up all week. This prompted a misguided twitter response from Robbie Slater, who is personal friend of Magilton which in turn prompted this well-written response by Mike Tuckerman on The Roar which pretty much summed up the thoughts of most level-headed football supporters who have a dose of reality unlike the aforementioned Foster and Slater.

It might be drawing a bit of a long straw but tonight marks a new era in the life and times of Melbourne Victory with Northern Ireland’s Jim Magilton taking charge of his first match of the club against Adelaide United. Appointed as an interim manager in the lead up to last week’s match against Newcastle it will certainly a baptism of fire against one of our fiercest rivals in a must win match.

Magilton’s appointment marked the end of the dysfunctional managerial tenure of Mehmet Durakovic that saw the team only win three matches out of fourteen matches. One has to feel a little sorry for Durakovic, who has been a great servant to Australian football, with much blame for his appointment has to put at the feet of Anthony Di Pietro and his fellow board members. They took the easy option after a supposed “worldwide” search for someone to replace Ernie Merrick by appointing the inexperienced Durakovic to a position that in all honesty was too big for this stage of his coaching career. Not helping matters for Durakovic was having Kevin Muscat by his side, who whether it being intentional or not appeared to be undermining the man in charge. Hopefully for Durakovic’s sake he can pick himself up and we’ll see him in a coaching role somewhere else in the A-League.

Magilton has only been appointed as interim manager to the end of the season, with the remaining twelve matches of the regular season being a test as to whether the Northern Irishman is a good fit for the club and vice versa. Coming off their poor decision to appoint Durakovic this move to only appoint his replacement for the remainder of the season at this stage is a good one and we will look forward to see how it pans out and whether our poor season can be turned around. It certainly has fans talking and excited again nonetheless.

To label the A-League off season interminable is somewhat of an understatement but never fear we are only days away from the action kicking off. In light of that I finally got around to writing a season preview for The Elastico, the first part part of which you can read here. All I can say is that I’m glad I left Newcastle for the second part.

The title pretty much says it all and I’m not just talking about the performance against Adelaide. It also applies to their performance against the Wellington Phoenix on the preceding Wednesday as well. Never have I seen the Victory play such ordinary football in consecutive matches.

And the common denominator in both matches was Melbourne’s inability to get control in the all important midfield battle. This meant the defensive was always under constant pressure and the strikers weren’t getting enough of the ball. The Victory always plays well when they get can serious amount of midfield possession but both Adelaide and Wellington didn’t allow this to happen and when they did get possession it was often coughed up too quickly. Chief amongst the culprits was Billy Celeski, who hasn’t looked the player that he was before his knee construction. Whilst he hasn’t suffered the recurring injuries of both Thompson and Kemp, his form has definitely suffered and it would wise for Merrick to give him a couple of weeks break.

That all being said the Victory have certainly missed the presence of both Kruse and Thompson in attack with the combination of Danny Allsopp and Ricardinho yet to hit its straps as one would expect and maybe we as fans are expecting too much. Let’s hope they can both find some form against Sydney this weekend because another loss could spell disaster with teams like Melbourne Heart, Wellington Phoenix and Newcastle Jets all breathing down our neck for a finals position. What was looking like a comfortable finals finish a couple of matches ago has all of a sudden looked a tad precarious. What is of concern is those losses weren’t valiant losses, they were terrible, ugly losses and that more importantly needs to be rectified.

It’s not often I get on my soapbox, but with all the kerfuffle surrounding Friday night’s clash against Adelaide United and more specifically “that” tackle by Surat Sukha. Whilst I could have used my usual blog for Australian FourFourTwo to cover this issue I felt that it had it already been done to death and thus saw no need to go over old ground. But a tweet today from SBS analyst, Craig Foster really got under my skin. Foster who has recently started using his twitter account, wrote:

Match review panel v sukha - red card offence. Give automatic 1 match ban. No place for late/high tackle in game

My response for which I received no reply at this stage:

@Craig_Foster Why no comment on Paul Reid’s equally poor tackle on Billy Celeski? Bias because #Leckie is next big thing!

And that is my main beef with this issue. Whilst I will admit that Sukha’s tackle was late and clumsy and may have been worth a red card at worst and at least a yellow card the outrage that it has generated seems a little over the top. We all know Matthew Leckie is a great talent and his absence from the A-League will be sorely missed but has the reaction been a little superfluous because many consider Leckie to be Australian football’s next big things.

As a number fans have pointed out (and not just Melbourne Victory fans) Paul Reid’s cynical challenge on Billy Celeski during the second half for which he received a yellow card has received no attention whatsoever. Nor has a clumsy attempt by the aforementioned Leckie to put his studs into Robbie Kruse’s knee before his own incident. Why have these incidents received no attention? The answer is quite simply the players involved aren’t the current darlings of the Australian football media.

If we are going to highlight dangerous tackles in key moments of games, let’s not focus on what incident because it suits our purposes but let’s bring them all to light no matter who is involved. Because at the end of the day no one wants to see anyone player get hurt whether they be from their own team or from the opposition.

As I alluded to in my previous post, the real test of where the Victory is at a third of the way through the season was going to be the two clashes against Brisbane Roar and Adelaide United. Whilst we didn’t come away with three points against Brisbane, mainly down to the heroics of our former ‘keeper and a slice of luck, there were plenty of positives to come out of Saturday night’s clash in the Queensland capital. These positives were the subject of my latest blog for Australian FourFourTwo, which you can find here.

Now as we look forward to Friday night’s match against Adelaide and our attempt to make it ten wins in a row against the team from South Australia. They are yet to lose a game this season and a tenth win against them would be truly satisfying way to end their unbeaten streak. Let’s hope so.

One of the keys to Sydney FC’s relative success over the Melbourne Victory in their 2009/10 double winning season was their ability to shackle the rampaging Carlos Hernandez like no other team could. In light of that it was rather pleasing to see the Costa Rican provide an assist and also get on the scoresheet  in Saturday’s romp over the still winless champions. Not that Hernandez has been playing that badly up to then anyway.

The confidence boosting win over Sydney FC is difficult to judge mainly because Sydney FC are really that bad. The defence that was so measly in their last campaign was completely porous on Saturday and if it wasn’t for some poor finishing (I’m look at you Ricardinho and Rodrigo Vargas) we could very well have had a repeat of that 5-0 thrashing in Season 1, which coincidentally occurred five years to the day on Saturday.
The real test of where the Victory is really at will come in the next matches against Brisbane and Adelaide. Whilst they may have beaten the Roar 3-0 a number of weeks back, the team from Queensland is playing some of the best football in the competition at the moment. Despite our impressive record at Suncorp Stadium it will be a difficult challenge.

As for Adelaide, I can’t really say that much about them as the only match of theirs I have witnessed was their 0-0 bore draw with Gold Coast United. That aside, their results so far speak for themselves and it will be interesting to see if our winning streak against them can continue.

Whilst one Costa Rican may have grabbed all the headlines on Saturday, it’s the lack of game time for another that forms the subject of my latest effort for Australian FourFourTwo, which you can read here.

In my latest blog for 442 I cheekily put at the end that I wished that we could play Adelaide United every week. The main reason being that we can’t seem to lose against them at the moment but one must also note that we have put on probably two of our best performances so far this season when we have played them. The highlight being the performances of Mate Dugandzic and guest player Sutee Suksomkit.

Next week sees the Victory take on Perth Glory, a team against we which struggle, particularly out west. They are coming two losses and will be looking to bounce back. Here’s hoping we can continue our excellent recent form, but who knows in this topsy-turvy league.

On a slightly different note I was also asked recently who would be in my all-time Melbourne Victory starting XI and here it is:

Theoklitos
Kemp - Vargas - Muscat - Leijer
Celeski
Kitzbichler - Hernandez - Fred
Thompson - Allsopp

Let me know what you think?

It looks like Ernie Merrick’s love affair with Costa Rica has continued with the signing of Marvin Angulo from Club Sport Herediano as an injury replacement for Billy Celeski. On the surface, it doesn’t appear a like for like replacement as Marvin Angulo looks to be more of a attacking midfielder. He will be interesting to see how he copes with the physicality of the A-League as he listed as being 172cm and only weighing 58kgs. Here’s hoping that he is a Carlos Hernandez kind of success and not the Jose Luis Lopez kind.

Speaking of love affairs, Melbourne seems to love playing Adelaide with the Victory racking up their seventh straight win against our arch enemy. That feeling of love for Adelaide was the topic of choice for my latest piece for Australian FourFourTwo, which you can read here.

Take note Etihad Stadium management. A good playing surface equals Melbourne playing attractive football and getting good results and thus bigger crowds. The Hindmarsh Stadium surface last night was brilliant and it allowed the Victory to play to their strengths. And it’s not like Adelaide has any more water to work with than Melbourne. Next home game, no excuses.