Isuzu UTE A-League R20 Preview: One game left for Reds to avoid equal-club low & home ground curse
https://aleagues.com.au/news/isuzu-ute-aleague-men-round-20-preview-team-news-broadcast-details-how-to-watch/

Really hard week to tip feels like most teams are in bad form.

Some midweek games too for some extra fun

Anyone watching? 

A nasty bordering on brutal game.

Both sides were determined to make sure nobody got away from a challenge clear with the ball - making physical challenges to keep the play locked in.

Wanderers came out from the halftime break with an obvious 'drop on contact' directive from Rudan - likely because Rudan recognised that United were playing an equally physical game. It backfired badly in my eyes because it opened the door to Wanderers being weaker in challenges. When Wanderers went up the goal off a fantastic strike from Milanovic just before the hour it looked to me like they thought they had done enough to turn the game in their favour and their intensity and focus was lost. Western United kept at it with both intensity and desire and that gave them the presence to equalise then win outright.

Western United played a similar half physical, half skilful game to Wanderers - which ended up being perfectly suited to the close contact, no quarter given style of play of Wanderers. Had Wanderers maintained composure and not been drawn into a continuous arm wrestle in that second half they could have kept pressure on United to the point of scoring another goal themselves.

Definitely wasted opportunities from Wanderers, but it was more losing their wits and their edge in the second half that buried them.

An interesting game to watch if you like physical contesting with your beer and stadium burger.

gee i feel for wanderers

they play pretty football, but look mentally very fragile. Two wsw players tried to foul penha after he tore them apart and milanovic starts yelling at penha on the ground

That's ok. With them, it's probably the refs fault from what I'm going to read.

Have to say given how their season has gone, Western haven’t given up and have won 3 of their last 5 games. Credit to them for not giving up and to Aloisi to keep the belief strong in the camp. If they get their off-season recruitment right, they can easily climb the table.

As for WSW, the wheels have well and truly fallen off. Even though their squad is a bit top heavy, they definitely should be higher than 6th place with the players they have.

I saw something that I haven't seen in awhile which is the home team dropping physically during the second half and they got bossed, usually its the away team from travel but WSW didn't have any of that.

Either they trained too hard during the week or they have poor conditioning, either way its very poor especially when playing the team coming last on the table.

Their fans are calling out their coach to be sacked even though their coach signed a 3 year deal recently, they got of alot of work to do to turn their season around and get their fans back onside too.

Milanovic's goal last night was pretty to watch. 

Great give and go and great finish.

Rudan must be on thin ice now.
Probably the best only thing keeping him in the job is that new 3 year contract an the payout the club would have to you make.
Strange decision, that. 

You're not carrying expectation into the game are you NicCarBel?

You put those cards deep in your pockets until the whistle at least ;)!

I wonder with Wanderers if Rudan has built the players up so far and developed such self-belief in them that when things go wrong the players feel far too personally responsible for every little thing they did wrong. Like they have been told "you can be anything you want to be if you put your mind to it" and they have believed that down to the results of individual games.

When they are losing games now there are many players who really look like they have let their manager, fans and team mates down so badly that I suspect it is affecting their next performance.

Too much ownership of results in a game which can sometimes swing on the luck of the bounce, leading to frustration and loss of the very composure that made them so dangerous and effective earlier in the season.

Or maybe I am overthinking it and just seeing so many shattered players who cannot tolerate a loss when they believe they are better than that.

Rudan did not get up off his seat when he substituted Borello and Milanovic - and the camera cut away too soon but it looked like he unwillingly slapped/shook hands with Borello then looked away scornfully when Milanovic followed.

Yeah great goal. I'd say he's the most improved young Australian player this year. Wasn't even on the Olyroos radar last season 

Adelaide GKs kit is fantastic.

A throwback to the 90's!!!

Irakunda with the knuckle ball shot.

Good to see Bruno scoring and keeping national team options open. Duke should be omitted this time but it won't happen.

I think Bristol City keeper had something similar. Carlisle away kit the season aka fruit salad.

Rainbow Racist Round 

So the Adelaide Victory game had a minimum of 7 added minutes for the second half. In that 7 minutes Fagani gives Izzo a yellow taking too long over a goal kick, but then proceeds to blow full time on exactly 7 added minutes. If the referee has acknowledged wasted time in added time (by showing the yellow), surely he should be adding extra for that.

Taylor scores for the Jets

Huge match on Tuesday night city vs Wanderers 

Taggart gets one back. Just lots of names scoring of late justifying their picks in national teams.

How the Jets didn’t win that game is beyond me, they had so many chances especially from their top scorer in AP who should have had a hattrick tonight. 

For context their average backline age is 22 years old so they have quite a young team overall but they learning the hard way to get results.
It’s still a good learning curve for next season which they should benefit for next season if they can keep the main core around of course. 

Stanton is a good manager. If they can get the ownership sorted and support Stanton the young guys will learn from this season. 

I agree they got potentially a good future with those young players and a good upcoming manager.
Getting their ownership sorted out is very important if they want to make the most of it. 

Sydney are just that much better at attacking raids than us.

Cacares and Lolley are controlled, dangerous and aware every time they come forward. It always feels like they are going to get a shot on goal when they come forward. The rest of the team are able to offer decent support - with Mak composed in his finishing half the time at least.

On the flipside, we could handle the close attention and pressure when we played through Sydney's 10 capable men - but we were rarely incisive or quick enough to take advantage of all the opportunities we were creating. So many fast breaks of ours end up getting passed round th ebackline before we move forward again.

Going the goal down put some urgency into our play - about the only time I really saw it - and colour me so surprised - but the fast play with vision and composure saw us equalise almost immediately. And then we went back to our slow, easily countered buildups...

Keeping 5 players behind the highest Sydney player at times, and passing slowly back and forth was too much a feature of our play - proven when we turned something on and carved through our opposition very effectively. We lack the professional structure of Sydney's attack - which is really quite impressive. 'Luckily' our defence is relatively sound except when it isn't and the greater attacking skill was blocked enough to only leak the one goal.

The red card deserved to be red every day. The insistence from Birdwood-Reich that he got the ball would be quite funny - if it wasn't so reminiscent of Adrian Zahra and 'I got the ball' from yesteryear. Sickening watching Mileusnic's ankle bend under that contact. For all that it counts for nothing - I was going to make a comment before the game about Birdwood-Reich no doubt going to do a hatchet job on one of our players. If you don't say it at the time you can't claim it after - I accept that - but to me he has a tendency to go in hard and reckless as often as not.

Based on Sydney's dominance last game, and the absence of Burke-Gilroy through injury on Lolley's side of the field, a draw shows we are not the basket case we have been at times, and also proves that we are capable of much more. The struggle to break down the bus, and lack of killer instinct and urgency, shows a lack of confidence - maybe in ourselves or maybe in our defence - that only time and quality play will cure us of.

A pretty good performance for us today. Our position in the table is actually pretty much exactly where our level of confidence and play is at the moment (table doesn't lie). We could click next game or we could take the rest of the season to rebuild what we lost between Round 1 and now. I'm going with clicking next game.

Sydney could go either way. They have the quality, cohesion and structure to do better. They just aren't.

Irrakunda is absolutely shyte. Yes I know he has talent. Maybe I’m an old fuddydud. But I know shyte when I see it. Hopefully Bayern helps but I have zero confidence. This kid will fade or we’ll keep talking about him like arzani. Or ameni or even the luongo. Can’t wait till he buggers off. I just watched united replay so maybe I’m annoyed. 

Are you having a laugh?! Did u see the goal he scored last night from outside the box?! Kid has awesome potential. Why would Bayern M sign him otherwise? Just to waste money?!

what's the point of these posts? He is 18 and playing better than most of our 22 year olds. You mention no specifics about his game that need to improve (of course there are plenty! He is young!) and randomly abuse your only goal scorer. Also adelaides results are much better when he starts than when he doesn't as he draws multiple defenders which creates space for other players

It is also uninformed on osaussies, luongo is in line to be promoted to the epl and arzani did his acl first game. Armini is the only player of that group that didn't fulfil his potential. Player trajectories are pretty unpredictable