Striker sure he’s a winner
Dario Vidosic says his wife, Marie, can attest to his competitive spirit.
The Wellington Phoenix attacker was part of the team beaten 3-2 by the Melbourne Victory last Sunday.
That result led his coach, Darije Kalezic to say ‘‘we don’t have a team with winners, 11, 15 winners on the field, because if you have winners this can never happen’’.
Such damning public statements from a coaches are rare, in this part of the football world anyway, and must have hit hard for the players. If it didn’t, then perhaps Kalezic was right about them not being winners.
Vidosic said he was a winner, and offered a novel explanation as to why.
‘‘As a professional, you don’t get ot this level without having a winning mentality. We’re hungry for success. Every professional athlete wants to win. That’s what we work hard for, that’s why we’re out here in this heat,’’ he said after training in 27 degrees Celsius weather on Thursday.
‘‘We’re all winners and if you need anything you can ask my wife about that. Not even in Monopoly, even when I give her a win I still get angry and break the board. If you ask her, she’ll tell you I don’t like losing.’’
A week of what Kalezic described as ‘‘open and honest’’ meetings has taken place since the Victory loss, a game which they led 2-0 at halftime.
Vidosic said they had thought they been beneficial, but that would only really be known come fulltime at Saturday’s match against the Brisbane Roar on the Gold Coast.
‘‘The biggest thing with that [meetings] will be on the weekend and the performance we put in. If we play well, then everyone will say it worked. If we don’t do well, then it’s always that sort of token, from a weekend to weekend perspective.
Video analysis sessions had also helped highlight what went wrong last weekend.
Simply put, they stopped doing what had worked well for them in the first 45 minutes.
‘‘At 2-0, we should just consider it as a 0-0 and continue playing our
"Not even in Monopoly, even when I give her [my wife] a win I still get angry and break the board." Dario Vidosic on his competitive spirit
style, because once we veer away from that that’s where we get in trouble and I think that’s the same thing that happened against Brisbane,’’ Vidosic said, referring to a 3-3 draw at home to the Roar earlier in the season when they led 3-0 after 20 minutes.
‘‘We dropped off too deep, tried to defend and that’s not really things we’ve worked on.
‘‘We need to be smarter and just continue to play our style and we know teams will open up more being down 2-0 or even 1-0 chasing the game, so we need to be smarter with what we do and put teams away.’’
Whether or not that helps them pick up their second win of the season on Saturday remains to be seen, although their task has been made easier by the depletion of Brisbane’s squad, who are without six experienced players, including their three first-choice centre backs.