Brisbane Roar keep their unbeaten run going (Images: Brisbane Roar FC - Twitter)
The Brisbane Roar’s Melbourne road trip ends fruitfully with the side recording a 1-0 victory over the Melbourne Victory at AAMI Park.
Having shared the spoils with Western United last Friday, the Roar took all three points against a struggling Victory outfit, to ensure they leave the state with their unbeaten run intact having now gone without a loss in their last eight fixtures.
Having only registered one shot on target for the entire game, it was all Brisbane needed to see off Melbourne in a lacklustre affair with Irish veteran Jay O’Shea finding the back of the net inside the final twenty minutes having combined well with Marty Hore and assisted kindly by a wicked deflection to help break the deadlock after a scoreless opening half.
Having struggled to find the back of the net this season with their end product in the final third being a weakness for them, Warren Moon post-game didn’t appear too concerned with the side’s inability to find the net. The Roar coach was largely pleased the side was able to come away with the three points while on the road in back-to-back weeks and admitted while it’s an area to work on it’s nothing too much to worry about long as the side continues to pick up points.
“We haven’t scored many, we haven’t conceded many, and we’re picking up points, and I think that’s the important thing for us,” Moon said post-game.
“We’re not phased by the fact that we’re not scoring at the moment, we picked up a win on the road tonight, an excellent win, that’s four points out of six at AAMI Park against two very good sides so we’ll take that.
“We’ll continue to work hard, try and be more of a threat and score more goals, but right now while we’re not losing games we’ll keep looking to improve and I think we will.
“It’s just a case of right now with the squad we’ve got, we’ll get a few more bodies in the door shortly and hopefully we’ll kick on in the second half of the season.”
Having now gone unbeaten in its last eight games and exceeding expectations Brisbane is currently sitting inside the top six. Moon feels the side has more to give saying while the squad have shown encouraging signs in the opening 10 rounds, it’s not the finished product and there are still areas of improvement.
“This is what we wanted to see from this team, with the type of players we have, we want to be hard to beat, we want to be hard to break down and resilient,” he said.
“That’s a box we’ve ticked so far but we also want to be easy on the eye, we want to play good football too and I think we’re just starting to do that.
“We played some really good stuff tonight. I thought some of our play tonight was first class, but you know again we just got to work on that final third, we’re lacking in the area where it matters.
“It didn’t cost us tonight, we’ve got the three points but we know we need to improve and we’re going to continue to do that.”
With the summer transfer window having recently opened, Moon said he’ll be wanting reinforcements to help aid a finals berth in the second half of the campaign.
Happy with how the current squad is performing, Moon said the incoming players will be looking to complement the current squad and there won’t be any major changes.
“I don’t want to dismiss the core group we’ve got right now who’s performing for us, I think that’s really important,” he said.
“I said this a while back, there’ll be some out the door and there’ll be some in the door, but the key players, the ones that are performing at the moment that is at the core of the squad, we don’t want to dismantle or change that too much, that’s working for us.
“We want to try and make sure whoever we bring in it complements that and adds to that.”
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One player, in particular, the club will be looking to replace is Englishman Charlie Austin who departed back to England for family reasons having signed for the club in the pre-season. Needing coverage in attack, Moon said the club have been working on bringing in a replacement and will be looking to bring in several new players during the window.
“I said last week the club’s been well prepared for this and been working hard to bring the right person in, our plans haven’t changed,” he said.
“The club are still looking to proceed with those signings when they happen, all I can do right now is focus on what we’ve got right here and we’ve been magnificent the last two weeks.”
Set to take on the Perth Glory at Macedonia Park on January 10, Warren Moon touched on the short turnaround for the game. Though admitting he may need to make some changes to the squad given the short period between games, he’s hopeful all those that featured against the Victory will recover in four days’ time.
“We’ve done this before [played games with short turnarounds] so it’s not foreign to us, but I think what helps is we go to Perth on the back of a good win so [the] boys will be in good spirits,” he said.
“[We’re] on the plane tomorrow, we’ll just recover them now and try and get up and obviously get some fit bodies on the park and try and get three points in Perth.
“I think we’ll have to make some changes, I think we’ll have to look at that, but again we just need to see how everyone pulls up.
“If everyone pulls up fine then we’ll look at everything and how we’re going to set up against Perth and we’ll make a decision from there.”
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