Adelaide United Women Head Coach, Ivan Karlović, discussed his side’s 2-1 win over Newcastle Jets Women at Marden Sports Complex on Thursday night.
Amber Brooks and Mallory Weber were on target in the victory as the Reds’ Westfield W-League 2019/20 season ended.
Karlović gave his assessment on how the team fared, in addition to revealing the implementation of another offseason program for the South Australian players to continue their development.
Karlović on ending the campaign with a win and avoiding the wooden spoon…
Obviously, it’s nice to finish off with a win. At the end of the day we don’t want to be finishing at the bottom of the table, and we came out tonight not to be in that position. I feel we probably could’ve been further up the table but there’s areas within our game that we need to improve and even a game like tonight where we totally dominated, we still showcased that we need to get better in front of goal.
Karlović on the team’s performance and playing style…
I thought the performance was excellent. I thought we played some really good football tonight and throughout the whole year we have been brave in the way we have tried to play the game. We haven’t sat back and tried to play teams on the counter, we have looked to try and play a good brand of football, which we have most times.
And when you do that you are sometimes going to get punished with mistakes and cheap turnovers, and we have this year. For us the most important thing is we need to look to convert our opportunities, but I thought was a really good performance and really proud of the girls.
Karlović on plans for the offseason…
We’ll sit down and review the season and look to see the areas we need to improve in. We’ll look to continue to work, I think over the last two or three years we have continuously improved what’s happened in the offseason. I think this year we are going to take it up another step and continue their development because like I said they are a young group.
The issue we have got is that they don’t get enough high-quality games throughout the course of the year so they coming into W-League and it’s a really high tempo. So we need to be able to try and replicate that as much as we possibly can, because we haven’t got the luxury of players that go play professionally overseas, they come back into their W-League side and they are at that level. So we need to make sure that we give our girls the best opportunity to be at that level and we’ll look at that and we have already had discussions and already know the thought process of what we could try and do. So we’ll look to implement and hopefully get the girls up to another level at the start of next W-League season.
