Last week it was the shambolic defence that got the microscope treatment. This week the Wellington Phoenix went right on ahead and conceded five goals at home to Melbourne City. But it would be boring to go on about the defence again, especially one without Andy Durante, especially when this game could have been so very different had the attackers only taken a few of their bloody chances.

Nothing about the first 20 minutes of that game led you to think that City would run away with it. Not when Roy Krishna got on the end of a cross to the near post only two minutes in. Not when Krishna found himself free on the left and with only Thomas Sorensen to beat ten minutes later. Not when Roly Bonevacia slipped through the defence and flipped a shot over the on-rushing Sorensen in the nineteenth minute. And definitely not, five minutes before that, when Kosta Barbarouses had skipped by Manny Muscat (Manny Muscat!), getting a clip on the ankle, taking a tumble and winning a spot kick for his troubles.

But Krishna’s shot went wide and his one-on-one was saved for a corner, while Roly’s little dinked shot dribbled wide of the goal and, worst of all, Kosta’s penalty was slammed into the crossbar. Within a minute of Roly’s miss, Nick Fitzgerald beat the offside trap down the other end and his square cross took two deflections off defenders on its way sneakily into the net. When Kosta came up with a hat-trick of nutmegs with consecutive touches to finally get the Nix on the board they were already 3-0 down and the comeback was soon doused with gasoline for a 5-1 thrashing. At home, man. What the hell is going on?

A few weeks ago there the Nix had this backlog of games to get through because of the postponed Victory game. There was an earthquake. You might have heard about it (or felt it). Three home games in a week and they won the first two, beating Central Coast 1-0 before smashing Melly Vix 3-0 in what to date is still the only genuinely great result they’ve managed all season (even a 2-2 draw in sweltering heat in Adelaide saw a 2-1 lead blown with ten to play). Then they lost the third game that week 1-0 to Brisbane and that was the first goal they’d conceded at Westpac Stadium in almost three months.

Until this latest match, they’d still only leaked three in seven games in Wellington and that was another focus of last week’s piece. But what was overlooked there is that they’d only scored six goals in that same amount of time, winning three games, drawing one and losing three. Now they’ve lost four at The Pac and have a negative goal difference at the ground. Safe to say that the City result was an anomaly but the fact is they’re not exactly holding fort at home like they need to be if they're serious about the playoffs and up until now the reason has been goals. It's still goals. They’re not scoring them.

Remember the start of the season, Roy Krishna was the only guy who could score and even then it took him four games to get off the mark? Yeah, well he’s getting some more help these days but still not enough of it. These are the club’s top scorers this season, only counting A-League goals of course:

Roy Krishna – 9 (in 1627 mins)
Kosta Barbarouses – 3 (1576 mins)
Gui Finkler – 2 (1214 mins)
Hamish Watson – 2 (651 mins)

And that’s it for those with multiple goals. Shane Smeltz (486 mins), Jacob Tratt (1680 mins), Vince Lia (1649 mins), Mike McGlinchey (536 mins), Alex Rodriguez (1116 mins), Tom Doyle (980 mins) and Roly Bonevacia (1534 mins) have all scored once.

Looking through other teams, it seems that the A-League is a place where you can get away with relying on one bloke to score all the goals, but the teams at the top of the table are the ones who are able to threaten with multiple fellas. Sydney have four guys each with at least four goals, Perth have three with at least eight, City have two with at least seven and the Victory have two blokes in double figures including the top overall scorer. Guess what? Each of those teams are gonna be making the playoffs. As for the Nix, 23 goals in 20 games means they’re drifting further and further out to sea.

Of course, the Phoenix’s star goal scorer doesn’t even play as a striker anymore either, he’s squeezed out onto the left or right where when he skins a defender with that burst of pace he has, there’s now a centre back coming across to cover him. And the dude who pushed him out, Shane Smeltz, played off the bench while Hamish Watson huffed and puffed and watched guys around him bugger up their opportunities. It’s the same thing that Smeltz himself has done, to be fair. Both are used as main-man centre forwards and neither is really getting a shot off. They’re pivot players to set up the midfielders around them.

This is a focussed plan of attack, which is more than they had under Ernie at the start of the season. Ernie was all about getting that midfield clicking but he didn’t have the players. When the Nix weren’t fully feeling it, which was often, they reverted to being a team that worked the ball wide then hoofed it into the middle to nobody. It doesn’t help that almost literally nobody in this squad can cross a football either.

Under Greenie & Buck there’s more of an idea but there’s no more success. They still cross the ball in and they still see cross after cross cleared to safety. 35 successful crosses this season is rather terrible and it also won’t shock to know that a 15.6% success rate (so 35 crosses won by a teammate out of 546) is the worst in the A-League, narrowly more trash than Adelaide’s mark of 15.9% (and again: they’re last, imitating them is not a good thing). Every other team is somewhere around a 1 in 5 ratio, a few a little better than that.

These stats are coming from the A-League website and there’s more where that comes from too. With 96 shots on target in 20 games, the Nix look pretty decent as far as chances go. The crossing thing is dumb but when they put a bit of football together they can definitely create a thing or two. Only Sydney and Brisbane have managed more shots on target… and yet the Nix are tied for second-last in goals scored? 96 shots on target and only 23 goals.

What’s surprising is that while the over-reliance on hopeful crosses is not a new thing, the two players who’ve attempted the most are the two new attacking signings. 117 for Professor Fink, second in the A-League, and 87 from Kosta, ninth in the A-League. Between them they have four assists – the sight of Kosta slicing a cross way off target has become a familiar one, frustratingly. As for the set piece mastery of The Fink that we were preparing for… the less said the better. Of his 117 crosses, two have been successful. Two of them. Two have been won by a teammate. Out of 117!

Kosta’s number is four successful ones. Finkler’s crossing accuracy is ranked at 10.5% so that gives another insight into what’s going wrong here: his delivery has been pretty bloody awful but then he’s also not getting any help from the lads on the end of the deliveries. Two successes out of 12 accurate balls out of 117 attempts. May as well start shooting from half-way at this rate.

But Finkler’s also created 37 chances. Until he got dropped to the bench recently that was up among the most in the whole competition so if those aren’t coming from crosses then they’re coming from through balls and one-twos and passing to dudes in space and all of that. That’s how the Nix need to commit to playing and they need to be getting Krishna involved and they need to be getting Roly involved and Kosta and Finkler, despite being expensive recruits, probably need to be sitting on the bench yet while Finkler’s dropped out it looks like Kosta is going nowhere. Maybe that penalty miss will do it for Greenie & Buck finally – it’s not something that’s fun to say but Barbarouses has been objectively bad this season and a goal at 3-0 down doesn’t change that. (Contrarian opinion: Manny shoulda made the first tackle… and we shoulda been running at The Mus all game, it's not often he's looked slower than he did that day).

Which leads us into frustrated fact number three hundred (or whatever we’re up to now), which is that with the exception of Shane Smeltz, none of these players are good finishers. Bonevacia is not a good finisher. He’s brilliant at most other things but he doesn’t score enough goals. Roy Krishna does score a lot and he’s got some beauties in his highlight reel but he also isn’t the most clinical striker out there. Same for Watto, same for Kosta, same for all of these buggers except for Smeltz who has taken four shots in 486 minutes playing almost exclusively at striker. Six starts and one game of the bench and his lone goal came from a penalty. Get the ball in behind the defence a few times rather than lobbing in a blind cross and maybe he’ll be more effective, you know?

So say what you will about the defence (and we have) but only Sydney have kept more clean sheets. Fourth most goals conceded but 11 of them came in two capitulating defeats – other than that they’ve been rather decent. It’s at the other end that the season’s biggest problems have manifested.