Melbourne Victory Head Coach Jeff Hopkins believes his side can get much better despite Sunday’s 5-1 win over Adelaide United.
Lia Privitelli’s brace and goals from Kayla Morrison, Claudia Bunge and Catherine Zimmerman saw Victory make a flying start to the Liberty A-League season.
An injury to captain Morrison soured the defending champions’ win at AAMI Park.
Speaking at a post-match media conference, Hopkins provided an injury update and said his team could play much better.
on the game…
“It was great. We’ve just spoken about it now. Great to win the game and by the margin we did, excellent, it’s a kind of dream start for us, but probably none of us are under any illusions that it was a really good performance. We were quite clinical in front of goal which was great, we capitalised on a few mistakes which was good, but in general our general play and just the intensity we played with and without the ball wasn’t really good enough for us. The players understand that, I understand that as well, we’ve had a good chat about it, the good thing is this is a really honest group, they all understand that and we’ll just recover out of the game and work on getting better next week.”
on Morrison’s knee injury…
“It’s always a worry. We don’t know yet. Let’s be as positive as we possibly can. I know what it’s like as a player, to have a knee injury you think the worst possible scenario. We don’t know what’s the matter with it so we just need to let the doc have a look at it, most probably get it scanned as soon as we can tomorrow and then we’ll have a better idea, a more informed judgment of what’s gone on there.”
on whether he’s fearing the worst…
“I’ve not really spoken to the doc or anything but obviously you can see in her head maybe there are fears that it might be serious. We’ll see what happens tomorrow, we’ll have more information tomorrow and whatever it is we’ll deal with it and we’ll get her through it.”
on Melina Ayres, who missed Round 1…
“We’re not going to push her. She came in and trained this morning and she trained really well, she had a pretty tough session but she’s still at 80-85 per cent so we’ll see over the next few days how she is but we’re hopeful. She’s a pretty tough competitor and she works really hard and she’s a real professional so if there’s a possibility that she’ll play she will play because she’ll do everything she can to get back.”
