As Western United's young side begin to come of age, so to do expectations

Western United's young ALM side has begun to make plenty of noise amidst their recent run of form. But as the wins racked up by this exuberant unit begin to add up so, too, will expectations upon them

There have been many firsts experienced by the young members of Western United’s squad across the past month. Starting debuts, maiden senior goals, first-ever 96th-minute bicycle kick winners and so on. But given the run of form the side has begun to put together, coach John Aloisi may soon find himself tasked with guiding them through another new experience: the expectation, and burden, that comes with regularly taking the field as favourites.

Picking themselves off the canvas and netting twice in injury time to turn what was shaping as a 3-2 loss to Melbourne Victory into a 4-3 win last Saturday, a poor start to the season that saw one of their opening seven fixtures is looking increasingly distant in United’s rear-view mirror. At the midway point of the season, the side from Melbourne’s West are now winners of five of their last six games with that lone defeat coming against top-of-the-table Melbourne City and, though currently occupying the sixth slot on the table, are sitting just three points back of second-placed Adelaide United on the A-League Men table. Yes, they’ve also played more games than two-thirds of the league, helping that points tally, but their improvement, especially given they flirted with a wooden spoon last season, has caught many by surprise.

When weighting for minutes played, they have engineered this turnaround, per FbRef, while fielding a side that is the third youngest in the league, an average age of 24.7 only senior to the team’s rolled out by Central Coast (24.6) and the Newcastle Jets (24.3), neither of whom look like they will play finals football this season. The Jets, as it turns out, are heading to Ironbark Fields on Friday afternoon and given their run of form and the visitors sputtering opening half of the season – the side from the Hunter sitting third-bottom of the A-League Men with just three wins from their eleven fixtures – the expectation will be that United takes all three points.

“The main thing is that we keep playing our football,” Aloisi said on Thursday. “Probably against Victory, we were underdogs. Against Perth, we were probably favourites. But we just keep on trying to play our football and that won't change whoever we play against.

“I got asked before the Victory game that -- [because] they might be tired from midweek, from the travel, from the number of games -- if we will we sit off. We don't know how to sit off. Our team can only play one way and that's pressing and trying to play as quickly as possible going forward and trying to create as many chances as possible.

“That will be the same focus against Newcastle. I know they haven't won a lot of games, but they can play some good football and they can cause you trouble if you're not playing at your best. So the focus is to play at our best.”

But there is a weight that comes with expectations, a level of pressure that comes not just with knowing that the onus is on you to win the coming contest but also, perhaps to an even greater degree, not to lose it. Certainly, you’d rather be in a situation wherein your talent is at the level where it attracts this level rather than not. But, at the same time, there’s a reason that even the most dominant of athletes will attempt to reject reality and replace it with one in which their the underdog and someone, anyone, is working against them.

For the most part, outside of games against a historically bad Brisbane and a Perth outfit that for a time looked like they would join them in an inglorious annal of history, United’s young side hasn’t had to deal with this heading into their games this season. Making the transition from the youth ranks to the senior ones is a complicated enough task already, you almost need to learn to be a footballer again and thanks to the tough run of results that marked their initial exposure to senior football last year and their early-season travails, this been compounded by great expectations.

But if they’re able to maintain their current form heading into the later stages of the season, combined with eight of their last 13 fixtures coming in Tarneit, that weight of expectations they’ll feel on Friday is something they’ll soon have to become accustomed to. They’re not there yet, there’s no guarantee they ever will be. but that’s the goal. But Aloisi isn’t too concerned about what this could mean just yet.

“I'm sure that they'll get used to it,” said the coach. “If it's the case that we keep on winning.

“We haven't spoken about it, or, I don't feel that they've thought about it too much. When you're playing with confidence and you're winning football games, you just focus on actually playing and it doesn't matter that you’re favourites.

“We won't think about [where] Newcastle are on the table. We actually don't even talk about where teams are on the table. We just talk about our game and what we have to do. Yes, we show their strengths and some things that we can exploit, but that's about it. So we just have to mainly focus on what we're doing.”

After flagging that staring strikers Noah Botić and Hiroshi Ibusuki had run themselves near ragged in pursuit of the win following the Victory triumph, Aloisi said the attacking pair would be full participants against the Jets and that, outside of long-term injuries, he would have a full squad to choose from for the clash.

“ "It's funny how players can recover when they win. They recovered really well. I thought that the two weeks that we had were heavy with the games and the travel. But the whole group has recovered really well. They look sharp this week and they're ready to go.