Diles, Victory wary of Wanderer banana peel on eve of ALM finals.
Locked into finals and unbeaten against the top two over the last fortnight, Saturday's clash with Western Sydney is one Melbourne Victory boss Arthur Diles, after past slip-ups, won't look past.
Already locked into finals football and after going unbeaten against the league’s best two sides across the past fortnight, Saturday evening’s clash against wooden-spooners elect the Western Sydney Wanderers strikes as just the type of banana peel that Melbourne Victory have become adept at slipping on in recent times. But coach Arthur Diles says he’s aware of this phenomenon, and that his side is constantly growing their mentality to battle it.
Losing just once in their last ten matches, Victory’s 2-2 draw with Newcastle last week, combined with results elsewhere, not only saw the Jets seal a maiden A-League Men premiership but also locked themselves into finals football for the third straight season. Currently sitting sixth, they will enter the final day of the campaign as the only side in the playoff places without home final destiny in their hands, albeit a win over the bottom-placed Wanderers would force both Sydney and Adelaide to take three points in their games against Auckland and Melbourne City to deny them.
Victory’s one defeat across their past ten weeks, however, came a few weeks ago when they slumped to a 1-0 defeat against Wellington, part of a pattern of less-than-ideal performances they’ve dropped this season that also includes a home 1-0 loss to the Wanderers that snapped a four-game winning run, a 1-0 home loss to Central Coast at the start of February and a 1-0 defeat against Brisbane Roar back in round six that made it four defeats in their first six games.
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Win any of those fixtures, and they’re in the box seat for a home final. Win half of them, and they’d be looking at a week off in the first week of the finals and, should the Jets slip up against the Mariners this weekend, a chance to go top.
“That’s mentality,” Diles said of his side’s slip-ups. “That’s something that we’ve always had to keep growing with, and something that, at times, we haven’t dealt with as well as I would have liked.
“But in the end, [Saturday’s game against Western Sydney is] another game for us to grow as a team: mentally, physically and tactically. And that’s the most important thing; that we always turn up to make sure we play the best football that we can. That should correlate with a result at the end of it.
“And if we’ve fallen short with our football, there still should be ways that we can win games, because you don’t always have to be pretty and win. We’ve seen that happen against us a few times, and we need to know that whatever it takes to win a game, we’re ready for it. Whether that’s through beautiful football that we want to play and dominant football, whether that’s through grinding out a match and fighting with the opponent -- you’ve got to do whatever it takes.
“That’s something that, mentally, this group, we’ve got to keep working on. And we’re always addressing it.”
After missing the past two weeks – draws against second-placed Auckland and top-of-the-table Newcastle – with a fractured elbow, Spanish superstar Juan Mata is expected to be available for the trip to face his former side, albeit Diles said that if he plays a role, it will almost certainly come off the bench.
Both Jing Reec and Josh Inserra remain absent, but the coach said that he will otherwise have a full squad to choose from – enthused about building off the back of a run of recent form with just that Nix-shaped blemish on it.
“We’ve had a great couple of months,” he said. “We’ve been in some really good form. We’ve had some very good results, and we’ve built confidence, we’ve built momentum.
“I’m really proud of the young players that we’ve given exposure to this year. And they don’t get enough recognition. The pressure that they’re under at this club, to perform at their level, first and foremost, to win games, because that’s expected, and play in front of a big crowd that they’re exposed to every week -- that shows growth.
“And it’s a testament to them for carrying this team a lot. Because this year, in almost every game, we’ve got anywhere between six and 10, U23s is in our squad. No one talks about that, but we know about that.”
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One of those young players is 21-year-old goalkeeper Jack Warshawsky, who has served as the first-choice goalkeeper since that aforementioned 1-0 loss to the Wanderers back in round 12 and who has been experiencing some of the downs associated with keeping week-in-and-week-out in senior football across the past fortnight – awarded, per FotMob, -0.82 goals prevented against Newcastle and -1.17 prevented against Auckland and conceding from the only two shots on target he faced in the latter fixture.
This has led some vocal contingents of the Victory fanbase to call for the return of Jack Duncan between the sticks – the veteran initially moving out of the lineup due to concussion, only for Diles to stick with Warshawsky after he returned – but the Victory boss was quick to shut down any talk of a change between the posts on Thursday.
“For me, [Warshawsky] hasn’t put a foot wrong,” said Diles. “Yes, there are maybe a couple of goals that you can slightly do better with. But that happens. There’s no blame game there. You’ve also got to remember some saves that he has pulled off in the last couple of games. In the game against Auckland, where we have to deal with almost 28 set pieces between long throws, corners, and free kicks, he’s come out catching and punching and doing ever so well.
“Even last week, he made a couple of top saves that kept us in the game. In the end, maybe he can do better with a long-range shot, but it has a lot of dip on that in the last second. That’s part of the game. He kept us in the game for many periods of that. He’s doing really well.”