World Cup 2018: Socceroos’ confidence building as work on new structure earns solid result against Czech Republic
SOCCEROOS forward Mathew Leckie has highlighted the promise shown in his team’s World Cup warm-up defeat of the Czech Republic on Friday night, after scoring his first international brace.
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SOCCEROOS forward Mathew Leckie has highlighted the promise shown in his team’s World Cup warm-up defeat of the Czech Republic on Friday night, after scoring his first international brace.
Leckie scored his seventh and eighth international goals either side of halftime in a 4-0 win that gave the Socceroos a confidence transfusion ahead of the opening World Cup game with France on June 16.
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After 10 days of intense instruction from new coach Bert van Marwijk at their camp in Turkey, Leckie said the performance against the Czechs in the Austrian town of St Polten showed those efforts are bearing fruit.
“It’s nice when you train hard on a new structure and it works, then you really believe that it can work,” Leckie said.
“If we came today and lost four-nil, there’s doubts there and confidence is down. Before the game started I was really looking forward to winning but I didn’t expect to win by such a margin.
“It’s very positive and we’ve been training (this way) but on the pitch today we’ve done it even better than what we’ve been training it
“What we’re most excited about is how we’ve been training and working on things, it’s worked. The confidence builds.”
The game marked a significant improvement on van Marwijk’s first two games in charge, a miserable defeat to Norway followed by a 0-0 draw against Colombia in March.
“I think our first camp with Bert in Norway, not everything went the way we wanted,” Leckie said. “It was never going to go perfect but we never should have lost 4-1.
“Against Colombia it was better again, and today even better. We kept a clean sheet, and scored a lot of goals.
“I just felt like the flow of the game looked dangerous always. We could have even done it better at times.
“Now it’s going to come down to the next couple of weeks, to work on it even more and just get stronger.”