Melbourne Victory head coach Kevin Muscat was pleased with what he felt was a deserved 2-0 win over Adelaide United on Saturday.
Victory extended its winning run in the Hyundai A-League to five games thanks to second-half goals from Kosta Barbarouses and Ola Toivonen at Marvel Stadium.
Speaking at his post-match news conference, Muscat was asked about his side’s display, Georg Niedermeier’s early injury and Toivonen’s performance.
on the performance…
“Obviously pleased. It was a different game for us, obviously it was a different style that we came up against. I thought we had to be really patient and we were. We dominated a lot of territory. At half-time, the focus was to move the ball a little bit quicker and raise the tempo. I thought the game was slowed down at every opportunity in the first half. When we can control things, we want it to be played at a high speed, at a high tempo and that started from Leigh (Broxham), Lawrence (Thomas) and Thomas (Deng) because they had a lot of possession and in the end, I thought we were good value, very good value, for the three points.”
on the impact of Niedermeier’s injury…
“We’ve been like that a little bit, haven’t we? Players coming in, players dropping out for certain reasons. Georg comes back in and after moments, after minutes, we’ve had to reshuffle and it was a credit to Terry (Antonis) and Leigh, who had to restructure and play different positions and they picked that up very, very quickly. James Troisi comes on after having a virus for a little while and not really training too much and he had to dig deep for the team so all in all it was a pleasing result.”
on Toivonen’s performance…
“It’s a good goal. Ola would be the first to say it, the pass from Terry for his goal was outstanding. Ola gets the opportunity to perform the way he does because of the people around him, because of his team-mates, and that’s how it should be and that’s what we’ll continue to work on. But his finish was exceptional, he caused problems all evening for them. I thought Terry was outstanding, even the ball he plays in for Ola’s header, Kosta scores, in and around the box. You reference back to the patience. Because of the way the game panned out and the way Adelaide set up, we were going to have to be patient. Sometimes the definition of patience can be slow things down, but that certainly wasn’t the case. We wanted to speed things up, but pick and choose the right time to punish the opposition.”
