Coach blasts lack of care for finishing
FNQ Heat coach Tim Campbell says his side needs to take training more seriously and stop getting drawn into ill discipline if they are to get their NPL Queensland season back on track.
The Heat fell to their first loss at Barlow Park on Saturday night, squandering a 2-0 lead after just 11 minutes to go down 3-2.
The speed of the young Moreton Bay side, in addition to some classy finishing and lead-up play, caused havoc for the Heat defence in the second half in a game that went endto-end for the full 90 minutes.
Campbell said that once again his side created enough chances to equalise and needed to work harder to make the most of their opportunities in future.
“We do a lot of crossing and finishing practice but they don’t take it as seriously as they should do and I think that’s come back to haunt us a little bit,” he said.
“We had two, three, four really good close-in header opportunities and we just didn’t execute.”
Campbell said he was disappointed the Heat were drawn into Moreton Bay’s game plan to challenge the home side physically and tensions came to a head in the second half with nine yellow cards – seven of them to Heat players.
“I think Moreton Bay got us to play their style of football,” he said.
“They started getting a bit niggly, started getting a bit of physicality in there and tried to stop us playing and they did what they needed to do.
“We joined in on that instead of just doing our thing and keeping our game plan going.
“They got in behind us a couple of times and good finishing, good game plan and you’ve got to give the team and the coach credit.
“He made a couple of little changes and we didn’t adjust.”
Moreton Bay assistant coach Adam Piddick said Jayke Cuschieri’s wonder strike into the top corner from 25m in the 26th minute was the turning point for his side.
“If we didn’t get that we probably would have got into halftime 3-0 down to be fair, so that was probably a big change, not in momentum but it gave us a bit of a grip into the game, something to fight for at halftime,” he said.
“We knew we weren’t going to match them if the ball was in the air, so we kept playing with the ball, kept moving the ball.
“And we changed our shape midway through the second half to try to open them up a bit more, be a bit more attacking and sometimes it works.”