Another Season, Another Elimination Finals Defeat For The Wellington Phoenix Lads
Ah bollocks. The wait for another Wellington Phoenix finals win will have to continue on into another year and another manager as Ufuk Talay’s tenure ended with a 2-0 defeat away to Adelaide United. It wasn’t an unexpected outcome but of course it was still a disappointing one. It always is when a season ends in defeat. This was a campaign that began with so much optimism about what this squad could achieve yet in the end it simply was not meant to be.
Despite some rancid form down the stretch, including a 5-1 defeat at this very same stadium against this very same opposition not so long ago, the Welly Nix did give themselves a decent chance in this match. That gritty 1-0 win over Macarthur the week prior may not have been pretty but it gave them a blueprint to try and work from, which we definitely saw strongly from the get-go on Friday night.
That blueprint involved allowing Adelaide to have possession and making sure to stay structured at the back. In this specific case, it meant no high press. It meant second striker David Ball defending underneath rather than alongside Oskar Zawada up top. It meant rotating hard when the ball was in motion in an attempt to squeeze Adelaide out wide where they could double up on their wingers and then try and hit them on the counter attack.
Adelaide are a tricky team to get a handle on because of how fluid they are, with players drifting to create overloads and all that. But for close to twenty minutes it looked alright. ADL had all the ball but the Nix were doing well to limit them and moments were arising up the other end. Kosta Barbarouses had a couple nice touches. Zawada looked sharp coming fresh off his Player of the Year success at the club awards – where Ufuk Talay was also presented with a pounamu necklace which he wore for the game, looking resplendent on the touchline. Zawada pinged a shot on target inside the opening minute of play and wasn’t far away from getting a head on Kosta’s cross. The plan seemed to be working.
Unfortunately it then came unstuck in a very predictable way because that whole Callan Elliot vs Craig Goodwin battle did not go well. It was an obvious mismatch leading into the game and it was one that Adelaide were happy to exploit. Elliot avoided a handball shout while dealing with a deep cross from the right and that was a bad sign of things to come. A similar cross came his way in the 19th min and his flicked header went straight to Goodwin who’d dropped off anticipating something exactly like that. CG then chopped infield as Elliot couldn’t get close enough to him. Then the Aussie international thumped a beauty of a finish past Oli Sail to open the scoring. Trailing inside of twenty minutes. Exactly what the game-plan did not allow for.
It might’ve been 1-1 at the break had Rufer done better with a scrappy chance from a stoppage time corner but he popped it off the post. It was a reactionary shot and Roof isn’t really the one you want those falling to... but in finals footy it often takes the unusual suspect to step up and be the hero. However we know what this Nix team is like when it comes to finishing. There was case study #14297 of the season.
Still, for as long as they avoided conceding a second they remained in the hunt. One defensive mistake, one stroke of fortune could change everything. Interesting to see Barbarouses and Ball swap positions after the goal with Ball moving to the left wing. Debatable whether that affected much, other than putting more speed further forward in search of those counter attacking moments. It didn’t last anyway because Kosta had to leave the game at the break with a hamstring complaint, Bozhidar Kraev on in his place and moving to the left with Ball going back up top-ish.
That change might have happened regardless. Might not even be true that there was an injury involved, might just be one of those things you tell the broadcasters to protect a senior player. But we’ll stick to the official story. To be honest, Barbarouses was looking decent out there, especially prior to the goal conceded. For a while it felt like we were getting Playoff Kosta, the bloke who has won championships with three different clubs. But nope, that dream soon fizzed out.
There is a frustrating history of opposition goalies having blinders against the Welly Nix in finals games. Not sure Joe Gauci quite reached the levels of Jamie Young last year but he was pretty bloody good. This is the point where it always gets mentioned that he lived on Waiheke Island for a while as a kid... though he’s already been capped by Australia at age 22 so don’t get any ideas. Gauci was flawless in this game. They weren’t all difficult saves but he did absolutely everything asked of him. Much of that meant stepping out and punching clearances from corner kicks and it was an infuriating trend that the Nix kept failing to put any bodies in his path to keep him from doing that. Corners looked like a useful outlet when Rufer was putting that one off the post but Gauci kinda single-handedly took care of that threat in the second half.
In fact one of those punches led to the killer second goal. 65th minute and his punch found Nestory Irankunda who’d only just been introduced. Irankunda was too fast for Lucas Mauragis on the turn but Mauragis still could’ve stopped him with a cheeky professional foul. He tried to... but a hack at his legs and a tug on his shoulder didn’t get the job done and Irankunda was able to feed Goodwin on the run. Goodwin got to the area and chopped back then Callan Elliot randomly dangled out not just a leg but the entire lower half of his body. All CG had to do was keep moving in a forward direction and draw the foul. That he did, then he nailed the penalty himself right down the middle for 2-0.
The fullback play of the Welly Nix has supplied plenty of funk this season but against the best teams the relative inexperience of Elliot, Mauragis, and also Sam Sutton who missed this game with injury, has had a tendency to get ripped apart. Elliot’s mistake led to the first goal then he conceded the penalty for the second not realising he had support from Mauragis over his shoulder. Now, that might not have mattered. Goodwin might’ve chopped past Mauragis too and then scored anyway. But damn, bro.
Mauragis gets some blame here as well because if you’re going to foul a guy in transition then you foul him. No tapping him on the shoulder, you grab a handful of jersey and you don’t let go. Notable that both Yan Sasse and Bozhidar Kraev both got yellow cards afterwards for doing exactly that: professional fouls to stop the counter attack as early as possible. It was that dreaded fullback inexperience in the worst way for both goals. Having said that, the whole team needs a grilling for that second goal given how easily it was sparked from their own attacking corner kick.
There wasn’t going to be a two-goal comeback in the last twenty minutes. Not from this Phoenix team, whose last roll of the dice was to chuck on Oskar van Hattum with his zero career goals and assists. Zawada did have one last headed opportunity soon after the second which he got underneath and looped over the bar. Had that gone in then maybe something coulda happened. It didn’t.
Wellington Phoenix were held scoreless for only the second time all season (both coming in the last three games) while Adelaide United advance at their expense. It’s season over for the Nix. It’s the end of the line for Ufuk Talay at the club. It was also the final appearance for a decent number of the playing staff. There will still be a solid core of players who remain for the Giancarlo Italiano Era but it feels like the door has just shut on something which we never quite got to know the best of.
Thankfully Oskar Zawada is one of those under contract for next season because, seriously, if you’d plucked him out of the Phoenix team and dropped him into that Adelaide line-up instead of George Blackwood and Hiroshi Ibusuki then this game probably would’ve ended up in double figures. There are two things that will probably keep this Adelaide team from winning the title and that’s the lack of a finishing striker like Zawada and also their openness at the back when they turn over possession. But we’ll see how that goes against Melbourne City in the semis. Craig Goodwin dominated this game, he might dominate those two legs as well. Hard not to proclaim him as the A-League’s best domestic player when you’ve witnessed a performance like that.
Tim Payne was excellent so there’s that. Great performance from him in a knockout atmosphere away from home when there was definitely a case that Josh Laws (unused sub duty) might’ve started ahead of him. Had to go with the aerial prowess against this cross-heavy team though and T.Payne did what needed doing. With Sail leaving, Payne’s a good shout for permanent vice-captaincy status.
As to why they lost, that’s an easy one: the Nix weren’t good enough. They got beaten by a better team and not just ‘on the day’ either. The Phoenix actually gave themselves a better chance than their recent record suggested they would thanks to a sharp tactical plan but conceding when they did via an individual error soon wrecked it. Then whenever they mustered up a half-chance of their own to potentially tie things back up, change the momentum, and put the pressure back on the home side... they did what they’ve been doing all season and missed it. At least this time the 2.54 vs 0.88 xG yarns were very much against them. No howlers gone astray. This was simply one of those games where there was a clearly superior team and that clearly superior team won. Can’t complain.
Trying to figure out why there was such a gap between preseason expectations and where we are now might have to be its own article. One thing you can’t say about this finals effort was that it lacked... well, effort. The hombres turned up to play. They put in a shift. Played to the coach’s plan. All them cliched things. That was something to be proud of no matter how it ended up... and since that still wasn’t enough it’s going to have to be a task for offseason recruitment to take care of.
Every season ends with a heap of questions and this one had more than most. But in terms of what happened against Adelaide United in the elimination final there are very few. Because what we saw was a continuation of what this team has been doing the entire campaign. Nothing changed. Same strengths and same weaknesses. It means that they haven’t scored a goal in any of their previous three finals appearances and have not won a finals game since 2012. A few months ago it felt like this was the season that they’d finally break through, all they needed was that one timely form streak and away we go. But that form streak never came. They stumbled into the finals on the back of earlier results then lost an unfavourable match-up. Ah well. So it goes. Onto the next.
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