Central Coast Mariners 1 (Duke 55)
Western Sydney Wanderers 1 (Juric 87)
Crowd: 17,134 @ Bluetongue Stadium
Firstly...sold out, bollocks, where were the other alleged 2000 ticket buyers...I know people tried to buy tickets Saturday morning and got told there were none...so I guess a stack of people stayed home....BUT...the Wanderers once again wandered up the M1, F4 whatever they call the friggin thing now
Anyway a NEAR sell-out crowd of 17,134 in Gosford saw premiers Western Sydney play CHAMPIONS Central Coast mariners....to be fair they were able to negate the impact of Flores.
In the end I reckon we did well not to lose that game. Wanderers had the upper hand for long periods, pretty much choked off the forward play
Roux, Flores and Pazz were all great, Duke's goal a cracker. A cracking effort for such a newly rebuilt team.
Arnie had cause for concern as Flores went down with an apparent knee injury, hell we all got a bit worried when Giraffe went down near Covic and didnt get right up but apparently it was just cramp. Also Zac has had calf stiffness all week and struggled a bit later in the game before being replaced and East Gosfords own Matt Simon's had his first competitive game in 15 months....and his style hasnt changed a bit
I thought Pasfield made some great saves. He just needs to be a bot more comfortable with the ball at feet. The golden boot is yet to come back and I think we missed Wee-Mac a lot. His first thought seems to be to go forward and we seem to create more with him on the field.
Pasfield 9. Mom. Superb shot stopping. Distribution not as good as Ryan but I'm not sure if Ryan would have kept it to only 1.
Storm boy 8. First time I've seen him play and massively impressed. A much better Footballer than Pedj.
Tesco 7. Solid.
Ando 6. Looked a bit dodgy.
Rose 6.5. Ok
Hutchinson 6.5 workmanlike
Monty 7. Great in patches. Excellent professional foul at the end.
Flores 7.5 quality. Best touch since Perez. Very exciting.
Fitzy 7. Not bad...needs to practice headers.
Sterj 6. Some good balls but no good as a target man.
Duke 6. Brilliant goal and a great work ethic but touch was poor at times. Will be great by the end of the season.
Duke finished off a great phase of play around the 55th minute, which was assisted by a brilliant final pass from Marcos , to give the home side the lead ...until Poppa had a brain storm and subbed on new signing Juric who finished off a great cross from Youssouf Hersi
Western Sydney's Adam D'Apuzzo out-muscled Roux as they tussled on the edge of the penalty area but calls for a Mariners spot-kick were waved away by referee Kris Griffiths-Jones....
speaking of which, how has that goddamn idiot ref still got a job...I'm fairly certain he uses a football rulebook that he drew up in kindy...either that or Tom Waterhouse offered some great odds...Hey Gallop, you best get your stuff together about the god awful reffing..you said you'd fix it...thus far your full of balls
NOW...Mariners chants...I reckon the one thing that needs doing, is putting the CORRECT LYRICS in the Central Coast advocate or something, for the Sunday is Football song...I heard about 3 different versions yesterday...here's one I did...
ANYWHOO...overall a good start to the season. The signs are there that we will be near the pointy end come the end if the season. I'll take a point remembering that we started with a draw last season.
OH and considering there were anywhere between 4 or 6 shot snappers at the Bay 16 end, there were no pictures of the Y.A or our tifo...WHAT THE HELL?
Speaking of The Yellow Army...WE GOT A BRASS SECTION...beat that other active fan support...you got nothing
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