United's men eager to make strong first impression in Tarneit touchdown
John Aloisi has coached Western United in Geelong. He’s coached them in Tasmania. He’s coached them at two different stadiums in Ballarat. Now, finally, Tarneit.
John Aloisi has coached Western United’s A-League Men side in Geelong. He’s coached them in Tasmania. He’s coached them at two different stadiums in Ballarat. But now, he’s finally going to lead them into a game in their actual proposed heartland of Tarneit, and he knows the importance of making a good first impression.
After years of a nomadic existence drifting from one stadium to the next, unwanted and increasingly unloved at the venues they stopped at, United’s men will play their first-ever game at their training base at Ironbark Fields on Saturday afternoon, hosting a Macarthur FC outfit engaged in a dogfight for positioning in the top six.
Of course, United’s hopes for finals football long since extinguished. A horror start to the season in which they won just two of their opening 16 games made sure of that. Instead, their coach sees the season’s final month as an opportunity to lay a foundation for what’s to come; grabbing as many wins as possible, building a sense of momentum and, if possible, avoiding being forced into a playoff for the right to enter the next iteration of the Australia Cup.
And beginning to establish a proper presence in the west of Melbourne, ostensibly their reason for being to begin with, is a significant part of this. Their training base doesn’t represent the completed stadium, an elephant in the room that will cast a shadow over everything until it’s complete and for a while after that given how long it’s taken, but at least they’re actually where they’re supposed to be now.
They’re not just the other, other team at AAMI Park. Now they can start actually laying down tangible roots and attempting to reflect the community they seek to represent. And they want to get things off in a positive manner, with three points.
“We'll keep on growing with the community but we want to show them that we represent this part of Melbourne and try to put on a performance that shows that,” said Aloisi.
“Sometimes you'll play really great football and that's what we want to do; we want to play attacking football and try and make sure it's exciting for the neutral or, mainly, our supporters coming to watch the game. But also [make sure] that the players will work hard for each other and that they've got that togetherness as the people out here have got. So that's what we're going to try and do and show that.
“If we can lay that down very early, that will not only hold us for this season but for the seasons coming in good stead. Because next season we're going to be [at Ironbark] for the majority of the season. So we'll make sure that we make the most of it now. I know that finals are out of the question but we want to finish as high as possible, we want to finish with as many wins as possible and they'll set us up nicely for next season.”
Of course, getting off to a winning start in your new home is easier said than done. Aloisi only needs to pop his head into the office of A-League Women counterpart Kat Smith to ask about that.
United’s women had the honour of playing the first competitive fixture at Ironbark Fields when they hosted the Newcastle Jets in March but, unfortunately for the scriptwriters, they subsequently fell to a 3-1 defeat at the hands of the Novocastrians. Ending the season in third, they’ll get their chance at revenge when they host an elimination final rematch next week.
Aloisi is hoping a longer lead-in at the facility, going on a not-short tangent about the challenges of adapting to differnt types of grass, for his unit will help them avoid a similar fate.
“The last couple of weeks being in the facilities has been great for us,” he said. “Knowing that this is our home and that we're going to play our first game [here]. We’ve got three games in a row. We want to try and make it into a place that's like a fortress. To do that, you have to start by trying to put pressure on the opposition, winning games and then making sure that it's hard for the teams to come here.
“We've been speaking about that a bit. We've been lucky enough to train on the actual main pitch a few times in the past two weeks so the boys should know what the pitch is like, how the ball rolls, and also just the surroundings. We want to make it an advantage for us as much as possible.”
On a broader level, not only would a victory for United give them that positive start, it would also serve to, potentially, move them off the foot of the A-League Men table; two points back of eleventh-placed Newcastle and three of tenth-placed Perth but, should they beat the Bulls and Perth fail to beat Adelaide on Sunday.
Of course, they could have accomplished this last week had they been able to travel to South Australia and continue what had been a fine run of form. Instead, the Nestory Irankunda-inspired Reds beat them 4-1 to hand them a first loss since February.
“I thought that we were just off physically,” said Aloisi. “Really off physically. I think that was the main thing.
“There are a number of factors with that, I'm not going to go into it because then it will look like they were looking for excuses. We have no excuses. We've made sure that we've worked certain parts of the game still because we got caught on the counter way too often.
“We know against Macarthur that they've got dangerous players on the counter and we have to make sure that we still play our football. In the first 20 minutes of the game against Adelaide, we were the better team by far. We created enough chances to be at least two goals up but it just seemed like physically we were off and they were able to hurt us when they did go on the counter.
“Then at the beginning of the second half they virtually put the game to bed and then we weren't able to react because we just didn't have that energy that we normally have had in the last 10 weeks.”