Victory in Melbourne 

Getting the three points against Central Coast on Saturday night was almost sufficient payback for our two home defeats against the Mariners.

The match highlighted that our tactics in our previous two encounters were way off the mark. Straight from the kick off you could see that the Victory wouldn’t be sucked into trying to match the physicality of the Mariners. If it wasn’t for some incorrect calls from the linesman we may very well have hit the lead much earlier than we did.

The three goals were brilliant examples of great team goals and surely Thompson’s role in two of the three surely would have caught the eye of Pim Verbeek, who was watching from the stands.

Another who may have caught his eye and the eye of many others would have been Mitchell Langerak. Since getting his opportunity after Glen Moss was “rested”, Langerak has made the position his own. On Saturday night, he pulled off a number of great saves and we could be seeing Moss spending an extended period on the bench with performances like that.

For more of my thoughts on the game and my gentle swipe at Lawrie McKinna’s tweeting, check out my latest 442 blog.

Saturday night’s game will certainly go down as one of the most exciting games we have seen so far in the short history of the A-League. And that’s just on the quality of the goals alone with five of the six scored being absolute crackers.

But the game was also the story of how Melbourne’s makeshift central pairing was unable to deal with the combined presence of van Djik and the slippery fish, Henrique. Matthew Kemp is probably one of the best right backs going around but as a central defender he looks a lot less assured.

Merrick’s other gamble of playing Nick Ward as Kemp’s replacement also didn’t work. And much like Fred’s exploitation of Greg Owens in the 2006/07 Grand Final, Henrique was too much of a handful for Henrique and left Kemp exposed too many times for everyone’s liking. From what we saw on Saturday night, Surat Sukha needs to be given a starting spot and a proper central defender is needed to shore up the currently leaky defence.

One person that seemed to be copping a lot from the crowd, was former Wellington Phoenix custodian, Glenn Moss, with the Victory faithful seeming to blame him for all our goals. This is extremely poor form by large sections of the crowd and in my latest blog 442 post I take them to task.

Carlos Hernandez, what else is there to say apart from - “We have been two years for you to score from a free kick!”