Wellington Phoenix head coach Mark Rudan believes there is still room for improvement after a resounding win over Newcastle Jets in the Round 23 Hyundai A-League round at Westpac Stadium.
David Williams was in fine form after his hat trick, recording only the third hat trick in Wellington Phoenix history.
On Performance
“Yes, satisfied with the performance. Obviously I think there were areas where we could have been better. Like I said I thought the front three, in terms of their starting positions, weren’t the best. We worked a lot on if they played with a back three, which they did tonight, or if they went to a back four like they did against the (Central Coast) Mariners. So we knew over the last two weeks or last two games that they played two different formations against (Melbourne) Victory and the Mariners so I wasn’t really happy with that because I thought they were able to pick out passes and break our first line quite easily. That’s fixable and we have to work on that but again because I tweaked the formation somewhat. I guess I expected that at times not all the time. But overall particularly the second half when we decided to play a bit more on the counter-attack, knowing that we had that one goal lead and had to come at us and take some risks. There were certain positions that I wanted players to occupy when we weren’t in possession, particularly when were defending on the edge of the 18 and we picked them out left, right and centre. I mean, you do your homework, you look at the amount of bodies they get forward and you find spaces in areas and I thought we were really good with our first pass, that was always important on the counter. We just ripped them to shreds, absolutely ripping them to shreds in the second half and you look at 20 shots, 8 to 1 I think it was on on target. We could have had a lot more tonight but I can’t be too greedy.”
Watch the full press conference here.
