There’s nothing unfair about football – Melbourne’s Merrick

Melbourne Victory coach Ernie Merrick was probably the most disconsolate he has been in football after last night’s Grand Final loss to Sydney FC.

The man who had led the Victory to a previously unprecedented two A-League championships was almost in shock as he sat barren-faced in his chair as Sydney’s Sung-Hwan Byun beat goalkeeper Mitchell Langerak to hand the Sky Blues the title after a tense penalty shootout.

In the post match press conference, Merrick was asked if he believes the way his team lost, after seemingly dominating the second half of proceedings, was an unfair way to lose.

“There’s nothing unfair about football,” the Scot said.

“During the game I thought we did well, I thought we created some good chances. Towards the end of normal time I thought we had the chances to score, young Aziz (Behich) on the line, Adrian’s (Leijer) header but overall I thought it was a tremendous effort by the boys but it’s easy to make it excuses about being tired and fatigues and all the rest but we lost the game and it’s not a case of being fair or unfair, Sydney won and congratulations to them.”

The Victory were forced to dig deep when the league’s all-time leading goalscorer Archie Thompson was stretchered off the pitch with a potentially serious knee injury in just the 16th minute and Merrick admitted that his was a major loss in the overall scheme of things.

“Key player to lose but I thought the boys fought back really well and Marvin (Angulo) did well up front,” he added.

“Coming from behind we just struggled to get players in the box and you’ve got to get players in the box to score. We created some good stuff but it wasn’t that killer instinct. You can always tell with us, if we aren’t getting in behind the defence and playing through balls in behind the defence, then we are not playing our normal game.”

A key moment in the match was when defender Rodrigo Vargas bundled the ball in for the Victory but was adjudged offside and immediately Sydney countered to score through Mark Bridge down the other end and Merrick agreed that his players did switch off for a split second.

“No doubt we got caught out. I think it was a genuine offside so I’m not complaining about it, yes of course we switched off but then they switched off and Kevin (Muscat) knocked in a cross for Adrian (Leijer) to score,” he said further.

“It was pretty hard to play our best, first of all losing Archie for a start but I thought we played some good football. We had a problem in midfield which I thought we fixed quite well at half-time. I thought in the second half we played quite well.

“I was disappointed we didn’t win the game in the 90 minutes, we had it in 90 minutes. I was a bit frustrated that every time we had an attack there would be blatant professional fouls. We had to stop and start again and there weren’t many yellow cards being handed out which was disappointing, but what can I say?”

The Victory now have the task of picking themselves up for an Asian Champions League game in Japan on Tuesday night but Merrick was confident his squad was strong enough to get through it.

“They’re a pretty tough bunch, this is just one of many setbacks we’ve had this year and we still got to the Grand Final despite the setbacks we’ve had and this bunch will pick themselves up mentally. Physically is another question. Mentally we can pick ourselves up, physically it’s going to really tough.”