Postecoglou seething from derby defeat

Melbourne Victory coach Ange Postecoglou was making no excuses after his team’s A-League season-opening loss to Melbourne Heart.

Goals from David Williams and Dylan Macallister either side of a Marco Rojas strike helped Heart to a 2-1 win in in front of a record derby crowd of 42,032 at Etihad Stadium on Friday.

A visibly upset Postecoglou said post-match he could find no positives from his team’s performance.

“I’m not happy about anything. I’m happy about absolutely zero tonight. Absolutely zero,” he told reporters.

“42,000 people turned up and we let them down so I’ve got nothing to be happy about, absolutely zero.

“I take responsibility for that.”

Postecoglou, trying to implement a possession-based game at Victory, said his team should have performed better and insisted they were ready for the clash.

Victory often struggled to deal with the high press put in place by John Aloisi’s Heart, and Postecoglou said his side’s passing out of defence was below par.

“The execution should’ve been there tonight. I don’t think we played out of the back well at all tonight. We were very, very poor,” Postecoglou said.

“We weren’t as positive as we wanted to be playing out from the back and we second guessed ourselves a little bit and there was no reason to.

“Again, this is straight after the game, but from where I was sitting I thought there were options out there for us to find solutions.

“Players were in the right areas they just didn’t play it.”

Postecoglou said the derby loss was a missed opportunity, refusing to make excuses for his team’s display.

“We can sit here and find a thousand reasons. I don’t care. I really don’t. All I know is that we missed a hell of an opportunity tonight,” he said.

“I’m not interested in trying to find reasons or excuses as to why we didn’t perform.

“We were ready to perform, we were prepared to perform, there was absolutely no reason for us to dish up what we did tonight.

“We take that disappointment, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, and we go to the next game.”

Postecoglou, a two-time championship-winning coach with the Brisbane Roar, believes there is enough quality in his squad to execute his game plan.

“We’ve been building towards playing this game for a while and we were certainly ready to do that and we certainly had the players out there to do that,” he said.

“I’ve got no doubt about that. Anything less than that, it’s a cop out as far as I’m concerned.

“We were good enough to play our style of football. We had a team good enough to play our style of football tonight – absolutely no doubt about that.”