What’s With All These Rocks Or Diamonds Wellington Phoenix Results?
It was a surreal feeling. All that positive energy surrounding the Wellington Phoenix and their first game at home all season, with a crowd of 18,000 fans in attendance... and they got pumped 4-0. They started all good. Lots of attacking energy, the crowd absolutely loving it. But then a goal against the run of play completely tore up the script, as swiftly as a dream can turn to nightmare.
Clearly the Central Coast Mariners are a horror match-up for this Phoenix team. They lost 5-0 to them a few weeks back in Gosford and now 4-0 in Wellington. A nine goal aggregate... rather stunning considering that the Phoenix are ahead of the Mariners on the table. CCM are no guarantee to even make the finals. Games in hand will give them a boost but right now the Mariners are on the outside looking in despite their double-beatdown of the Phoenix.
Both those matches have involved the Mariners taking leads into half-time and thus being able to sit back and pick the Nix off in the second half with their dangerous attacking weapons on the break. That’s the issue right there, it’s no secret. Fellas like Beni N’Kololo and Jason ‘Cumdog’ Cummings have caused all sorts of carnage on the counter. The Phoenix have also been without several key players throughout those games (a midfield of Alex Rufer and Clayton Lewis would certainly help against those counters) but the Phoenix have beaten other teams with similar squad troubles while CCM have not played like this against other teams. It’s a strange one. Here are the Mariners last five results:
Drew 2-2 vs to Western United
Won 5-0 vs Wellington Phoenix
Lost 5-0 vs Sydney FC
Drew 2-2 vs Western Sydney Wanderers
Won 4-0 vs Wellington Phoenix
That WSW game saw them reduced to ten men on 48’ and still snatching a 95th minute equaliser. They scored in stoppage time of both Nix wins too, though under very different circumstances.
Actually that’s an important point too: the Nix have been playing all these midweek games to catch up on the covid postponements of earlier days and they’re doing so with a bare bones squad so naturally fatigue is an issue. The Gosford loss was 3-0 after an hour but two goals were penalties (both conceded by Louis Fenton in what will surely be the last match in which Uffie experiments with him on the left... dude played like he had his head in a swirl with no sense of direction). After an hour in Wellington it was only 1-0. Meaning that the final thirty minutes of those two games have accounted for five of those nine goals.
Ufuk Talay has spoken about the team’s injuries robbing them of game-changing depth on the bench, severely limiting his ability to alter the course of a match from within. That’s why he’s taken the extremely rare move of switching up his favoured 4-2-2-2 formation for a back three... though he hasn’t necessarily stuck to it. For example Tim Payne pushed up into the midfield at half-time of the Wellington match. All brought about by limited playing options.
Uffie’s not lying either. Here are the players who were unavailable for that homecoming game:
Alex Rufer, Clayton Lewis, Gary Hooper, Sam Sutton, Josh Laws, Callan Elliot.
(Also Kurtis Mogg and George Ott haven’t been in a matchday squad since the second bout of covid caught up with the team but the club doesn’t specify who’s got covid and who doesn’t, plus if they did have it then they’ve surely recovered by now anyway and as youth players wouldn’t necessarily be making matchday squads – but add them to the list if you want)
There’s this stat that’s been doing the rounds about how Welly Nix games keep going the way of the team that scores the first goal. Nine times the Phoenix have conceded first and nine times they have lost. They haven’t had a 0-0 draw this season meaning that they’ve scored first whenever they haven’t conceded first. And when they score first they don’t lose. Ten wins and three draws. There ya go.
It’s a pretty remarkable stat: score first and win or draw, concede first and lose. Simple as that, apparently. The Nix have lost to nil in seven of those nine defeats, the other two being 2-1 losses – one against Sydney in the fifth game of the campaign in which they went two down and then pulled one back in the 83rd; the other against Brisbane to end their seven-game unbeaten streak in which Gary Hooper equalised on 72’ but then Henry Hore restored the lead for the Roar three mins later.
Point being that not only have the Nix lost every time they’ve conceded first but they’ve only scored one equaliser all season (and still lost that game). Each of the other eight times they’ve conceded first they’ve also conceded second. Six of those times they’ve gone on to lose by at least four goals. Ufuk Talay’s Phoenix had never lost by four goals in his first two seasons in charge but this term they’ve had defeats of: 4-0 (NEW), 4-0 (ADL), 4-0 (NEW), 6-0 (MCY), 5-0 (CCM), 4-0 (CCM).
It hasn’t quite been the same inevitability in the inverse when they score first but it’s still been pretty good. Thirteen times they’ve scored first: seven of those times they’ve conceded an equaliser, six times they’ve either gone on to score the second (x4) or held on to win 1-0 (x2). But of the seven equalisers they’ve allowed, which is actually eight if you include the two times that Newcastle Jets pegged them back in a 3-2 win March, they’ve struck back to still win four of them – with the other three ending as 1-1 draws.
The smooth duality of those stats is nuts... but the reasoning behind them is clear as day. We saw it blatantly against the Mariners at Sky Stadium where the Nix looked comfortably on top of things until they went and leaked one against the run of play and then that goal changed the whole course of the match. CCM could sit deeper in their defensive structures knowing that the Nix’s attackers have been struggling for consistency. A deeper line takes away Jaushua Sotirio’s best weapon: his pace in behind. It also crowds out guys like Reno Piscopo and David Ball who are much more effective playing in space and at speed. Gael Sandoval was already playing further away from goal to cover for the lack of available midfielders.
The Wellington Phoenix are a team that plays best in transition. They like counter attacks, they like early balls in behind the defence. When those roads are open to them they look great. When those roads are closed they struggle. They don’t really have another trustworthy dimension to their attack (certainly not now with a makeshift midfield, anyway) so the success/failure of Plan A kinda defines everything for them. It says all you need to know about the drastic inconsistencies in their results that the club’s most reliable forward has been Jaushua Sotirio whose production has always been notoriously chaotic and who is more reliant on those transitional attacking moments than anyone else.
As Uffie says, this is a product of shallow squad depth. When the team took just four points from their first six matches, they were only working with two import players - and Gary Hooper missed a couple of those with injury anyway. Hooper is the number one bloke that could change things, to make this team more effective when things aren’t going their way, to give them the best chance of breaking down set defensive lines. But Hooper has only started six games all season and four of those were the first four games of the season. He barely even feels like a Phoenix player any more having already announced that he won’t re-sign (though a return to fitness, even if just off the bench, for the finals would be massive).
When Gael Sandoval and Scott Wootton arrived things immediately flipped with a seven-game unbeaten streak that got them right back into the hunt. A brief spell of Full Strength Squad To Choose From status and they were fantastic. But then the injuries started happening. Some international call-ups too. There was that 4-0 loss to Newcastle (the second one) in which eight first-team players unavailable. Around that time both Alex Rufer and Clayton Lewis suffered injuries. Josh Laws hasn’t played since that Newcastle loss. Neither has Hooper. Piscopo and Sotirio missed time. A second wave of covid hit the group. It’s a fog that still has not lifted (look back at that list of unavailables for the Welly game). Nor is it going to before the season is out, at least not completely.
Another reason for the rollercoaster ride: Six academy players have made debuts this term plus three more have made benches. That’s not even including guys like Sam Sutton, Ben Old, or Ben Waine who have emerged as important players from that same pipeline. Lots of youth and inexperience means lots of wildness. Guys overreacting to match situations. Some deer in the headlights stuff. A lack of patience. Normal young player things that players learn and improve from but with so many of them out there the team is extra susceptible to that affecting their overall performances. It is what it is. Forced upon them by necessity, beneficial in the long run.
And that’s without even mentioning the whole ‘stranded in Oz’ aspect of this season (.... and the one before that... and the last quarter of the previous one too).
Yet here we are, four games remaining, and the Wellington Phoenix are sitting fifth on the ladder with every chance of earning a home finals match. When it’s bad it’s terrible but when it’s good it’s really good and there doesn’t seem to be much spillage between those two states because of those six 4+ goals defeats... they’ve won the immediate next game on three occasions and will be aiming to make it four on the weekend at Eden Park in Auckland.
The Nix’s goal difference was shot weeks ago. At this stage, a 1-0 loss and a 4-0 loss are basically no worse than each other so long as the team is able to respond in the next game which they generally tend to do. It’s rocks or diamonds with them at the moment but considering all the challenges put before them it’s pretty remarkable that they are where they are with everything still to play for going into the last few weeks of the term. Fingers crossed they score first in a couple more of these remaining fixtures.
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