JTM's blog

It ain’t much but Adelaide United must use last week’s clean sheet in Canberra as the foundation for a successful second half of the season.

Strangely as the season moves into its second half, United and Brisbane play each other for the first time, since last season’s Prelim final.

 And the omens suggest it is a good time to be playing them.

Adelaide has a good record against the Roar, losing only twice in 13 meetings.

But, speaking of omens, those two defeats have both been at Hindmarsh and the last one was on Nov 2, 2007.

That of course effectively makes this match two years to the day since Adelaide lost to the Roar, but with four defeats form their past five outings, it would be easy to think Brisbane’s confidence is getting a hammering.

Reinaldo, the scorer of that goal back in Nov 07,  returns from injury, (another omen?) but the loss of the exciting Tommy Oar allied to the continued absence of Miller, Henrique and Zullo shears much of their creativity .

Adelaide loses one of its recent creative outlets in Matthew Leckie, but much will be expected from his replacement (not in a like for like sense) Fabian Barbiero.

Can he conjour an effort like we witnessed in the Prelim final?

If he did and it helped United to three points, then I’m sure fans would forgive him the stupid red card against Sydney.

And although Aurelio Vidmar insists it’s not panic stations, this is a game United MUST win and win well.

With nine points separating the top seven teams, the competition remains tight but Sydney and Melbourne are starting to break away at the top.

 Crucially Wellington’s win against Newcastle and their mauling of the Gold Coast has seen the ’Nix’s goal difference rocket to eight better than Adelaide’s, and so push the Reds to 7^th.

And should Brisbane snatch a win and Newcastle do likewise against the Fury, then the Reds will only be off the bottom on goal difference.

 Conversely, and perhaps more plausibly, a Reds win and victories for Wellington, Melbourne and Sydney over Perth, the Mariners and Gold Coast respectively means United will be 5^th come Sunday night.

Just as Vidmar has done for weeks now, Adam Hughes today spoke about how the goals fly-in during training, but come match time the tension rises as everyone realises it’s a week longer since the last win.

It might only be three week since that last win but for a team struggling for consistency you get the sense it feels a lot longer.

You also get the sense that scoring the first goal might be all United needs to rekindle its season.

As Vidmar said today, “it’s not desperate times but United is desperate for a win.”

But then again, so is Brisbane.

Who wants it more?

Tags: a-league, adelaide united, Brisbane, Brisbane Roar, football, john thompson-mills, jtm, Roar, soccer

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under a-league, sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.