BRISBANE Roar’s players need to stick together over the coming months if they want to keep their season alive amidst off-field troubles.

Unpaid wages, poor training conditions, uncertainty within the club’s offices – it’s a disgraceful environment for a professional group to be working within, but, for now, this is their reality and they have to make the most of it.

I know, because the situation reminds me of what my Central Mariners cohort went through a few years ago. We were so galvanised by the club’s off-field troubles, we bonded, became the tightest of groups and went on and claimed the club’s one and only grand final win.

But it’s a lot easier said than done, trust me.

I read this week that sacked Brisbane Roar managing director Mark Kingsman paid wages out of his own pocketbefore the Bakrie Group gave him his marching orders.

It’s a difficult situation for the club, fans and everyone involved – all the way to office staff. You hear rumours that they’re so understaffed, so it becomes a patchwork of people trying to get work done, which makes it even more difficult.

Simply, Brisbane, particularly with their core of senior players, need to divorce themselves from that – it’s the only way to get through training and to keep trying to get results for the fans by controlling the one thing you can, and that’s performances on the park.

But, there are major challenges.

At the Mariners, it was similar.

Roar react to GM sacking

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What happens when your teammate doesn’t have the money to pay his mortgage or rent, or when a younger teammate comes to the senior boys stressing out, looking for advice because the landlord is now knocking on their door, threatening to throw them out, over missed payments because the club hasn’t been paying them?

In any field, if you’re not happy, it drags into workplace.

Especially in sport, if you’re having a bad time off the park, you could have a couple of bad training sessions and then, all of a sudden, you can get into a form slump.

The Mariners is proof it can be overcome: under Graham Arnold, we had an ‘us against the world’ mentality. We disassociated ourselves from the stuff off the park.

That was Arnie’s advice, saying – ‘you guys can do the job on the park and everything will fall into place, let us worry about stuff off the park’.

And that, he did.

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He was giving money to the younger guys to pay rent.

I even heard rumours he was giving groundsmen petrol money for the lawnmower so we could have the best possible surface to train. He would do anything to make the guys not worry off the pitch and concentrate on the pitch.

Luckily for us, Arnie put his hand in his pocket, and the PFA eventually came to the table.

I also sympathise with the Roar players on their training conditions; I was up there a few weeks ago, it’s pretty ordinary. Like when I arrived on the Central Coast, the promise of a new pitch is still a little while away.

In my first year at Gosford, we had a training base. Previously, the boys would get a text in the morning telling them where they were training – and it could be from Central Coast to Knox Grammar in Sydney. That came to a head when Arnold had a clause in his deal where he could leave if the facilities weren’t ready by a certain date.

But – adversity can sure lead to success, still.

The year we won the Premiership we never trained on a full pitch – we only had a three-quarters sized field, and only trained on the main stadium once in a blue moon.

To be fair, it is pretty remarkable what you can do with the right mindset and right bunch of guys, so the challenge for the Roar boys is to try take a leaf out of that.

Looking back on it now with the boys, we can laugh. It says a lot about the group that we all stay in touch, and that we got through it together. I had spent two years in Romania previously so I used to joke – ‘It’s all good boys, I’ve done this before, in a foreign place and here we’re all together in a nice lifestyle’. You learn you can’t control everything as much as you would like, and looking back we say they were really great times because we bonded.

We can now sit and laugh at that. But it was stressful at the time.

In a professional environment, what happened to us, and what’s happening at Brisbane, should not happen. It is disgraceful. But, the challenge for all of John Aloisi’s staff and players is to remain the professional ones. There’s no point sitting around and crying. Usually through adversity people come out stronger.

Watch Daniel McBreen on Just For Kicks each Thursday night on Fox Sports 501 with Tara Rushton, Archie Thompson and Robbie Slater.

Daniel McBreen column: Brisbane Roar problems remind me of Central Coast Mariners days | Fox Sports