Western Sydney Wanderers celebrate Asian Champions League grand final berth
An early goal against FC Seoul set up a momentous win for the Western Sydney Wanderers in the ACL, Mark Bridge writes.
West
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It’s a massive moment for the club to make the Asian Champions League grand final after beating FC Seoul 2-0 on Wednesday. It still hasn’t fully sunk in yet.
It was a great performance against a very good team and we were confident coming back with the draw from Korea and performance at home, and that’s what we did.
Knocking out the defending champions and then the runners up is definitely confidence boosting, they’re two massive clubs and we’ve done well.
What really stood out for me was our defensive structure, it was brilliant. From the front to the back they found it very hard to break us down.
They only had one option, to go wide and try and get in behind our defenders which they couldn’t. Very good signs for the big games we have coming up in the future.
And getting that early goal I think rattled them a bit, I done think they were expecting it and it caught them off guard. From that moment on they were chasing, and trying things they probably shouldn’t have been.
It was great for us to get that win in front of our home fans. They’re always ready, they love it when we got to Parramatta Stadium, especially when we’re winning.
It’s a great culture at the club at the moment. Thank you to everyone again for the unbelievable turnout to our midweek game.
After the game hearing the FC Seoul coach say that we would go on to win the grand final is a big compliment from him. We’ve always had the belief that we can go all the way, but, in saying that, we have a very tough game ahead of us.
We have to go to Saudi Arabia to play against a great team and its still going to be challenging, but something we’ll focus on after the first two A-League games.
Our Dubai training will definitely come in handy for that. Poppa (Coach Tony Popovic) is known for his meticulous planning and I’m sure that was in the back of his mind when he was planning out the preseason schedule. He’s a very intelligent man and everything he does is for a reason.
In terms of the A-League, to be honest, we haven’t really spoken about it that much. We’ve been focusing souls on the champions league. It’s a weird feeling, doesn’t feel like the season is starting next week. But we’ll be ready for it.
It’s going to be a tough season, everyone is looking very strong. It’s going to be up to us to quickly adapt back to the way we play in the A-League and get a couple of wins on the board before we play the grand final.
We’re really looking forward to the start of the season.
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