Canterbury Utd set sights on home semifinal
With a place in the national men’s football league playoffs secured, Canterbury United are setting their sights on a home semifinal.
They booked their spot last weekend, joining Auckland City, Team Wellington and Eastern Suburbs, who were all locked in a week earlier, but they don’t want to rest on their laurels.
After Hawke’s Bay United, who they face tomorrow in Napier, they have a week off, before finishing the regular season with matches against playoff rivals Team Wellington, at home, and Suburbs, away, which mean they control their own destiny.
Win all three of their remaining games, and Canterbury will have a home semifinal for the first time since 2012, which would go a long way to helping them make their first final since 2010.
‘‘I think the 11th of March will be an interesting gameday, where Auckland City play Suburbs and we play Wellington, so it’s the top four contenders together with two weeks to go before the playoffs,’’ said coach Willy Gerdsen, who has now taken the team to the playoffs twice in three seasons.
‘‘We’re looking forward to it, we’ll enjoy [being in the playoffs], but we’ll still keep working hard and we’ll see where we are at the end of March.’’
Since losing to City at home on January 21, Canterbury have won four straight, but even though they were all against teams that didn’t make the playoffs, the results didn’t come easy.
They had to come from behind in both of their wins over the Wellington Phoenix reserves (3-2 at home and 5-3 away), they needed a late winner to pip Southern United (2-1 at home), and they had to toil hard to beat Hamilton Wanderers last Sunday (1-0 away).
‘‘It’s an old saying, ‘good teams find a way to win,’ and we are a good team,’’ Gerdsen said.
‘‘We’re not an outstanding team, but we have a lot of character in the squad, a lot of resilience in the squad, and we are able to twist and turn.’’
Canterbury’s return to the playoffs after missing out last season has come despite them losing midfielder Aaron Clapham, their long-standing playmaker, four rounds in, when he withdrew from the squad, citing a need to put his family first.
They have been outstanding defensively – allowing an average of 1.2 goals per game, fewer than everyone bar Auckland City and Team Wellington – and have started to find their scoring boots, with English striker Stephen Hoyle already netting eight, one more than he managed in all of last season, English midfielder Gary Ogilvie five, and new Japanese striker Futa Nakamura five as well.
With Auckland City and Team Wellington starting their OFC Champions League campaigns this weekend, there is only one other ISPS Handa Premiership game – a bottom-of-the-table clash between the Phoenix reserves and Hamilton Wanderers, who are the hosts at Links Avenue in Tauranga today.
Wanderers are six points behind the Phoenix reserves as things stand, and will need to win and close that gap to three if they are to have any chance of avoiding the wooden spoon.