Clinical Argentine Marcos Flores is the icing on the meticulously prepared cake of Adelaide United’s 2010 Asian Champions League campaign.

Flores held centre stage during much of the Reds’ 2-0 victory over Shandong Luneng in China on Wednesday night, producing the kind of defence-splitting passes no-one at Adelaide has been consistently capable of providing since the Brazilian Diego was released to Wellington Phoenix in 2009.

It as one such threaded delivery that opened things up for Lucas Pantelis to provide the cross that resulted in the vital opening goal, and several others kept Shandong’s defence on a wary footing.

Having watched Flores offer a few similarly inspired touches during the team’s opening 1-0 victory over the Pohang Steelers at home, United coach Aurelio Vidmar agreed the 24-year-old had added an element pivotal to Asian success.

“He’s very good, we saw that in the first half – he’s played two or three decent balls into the front third which were quite clinical,” Vidmar said.

“He probably gave a bit too much time on the ball, but he’s that type of player who can see a lot of different pictures and if you’ve got the right players making the right runs, then we’re always going to be dangerous.

“So we’ve been pretty pleased with him, and he’ll get better.”

Flores remains some way short of full match fitness, leaving the tantalising prospect of better to come.

“He’s probably not as match-hardened as he should be, but with a few more games he should be fine,” said Vidmar.

“Probably after another two or three weeks he should be able to finish off 90 minutes.

“He was a little bit closer against Shandong, but it was a really quick tempo, so he was always going to struggle a little bit physically towards the end of the game, but we understand that and he’ll get better.”

There was no better indicator of how carefully United had prepared for the ACL than the Scott Jamieson corner that set-up the second goal.

Aware of Shandong’s tendency to man-mark at corners, the Reds created space at the back post, allowing Matthew Leckie to use his pace and power for a surging run to nod in the flat delivery of Jamieson’s left boot.

“We’ve been working on it for a long time, and we said that we’d had a good look at what (Shandong) did against corners,” Vidmar said.

“We knew they were man-marking quite a bit so we really focused on making sure the execution of the pass was good and also our movement was good and that certainly paid dividends with the second goal.”

Adelaide now sit three points clear atop their ACL group, and next face the Japanese side Sanfrecce Hiroshima at home on March 24.

© AAP 2012

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