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Prized Perth recruit Chris Coyne hopes rival clubs will be running scared this season as the Glory aim to go from perennial underachievers to A-League champions.
The Glory have failed to reach the finals since the inception of the A-League and have finished second last for the past three seasons.
But with the addition of Socceroos Coyne, Mile Sterjovski and Jacob Burns, plus former Blackburn Rovers defender Andy Todd and former Bundesliga striker Branko Jelic, confidence is sky high.
Coyne, who took a significant wage cut to link up with Perth, believed the squad coach Dave Mitchell had assembled was ready-made to challenge for the title.
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise,” Coyne said on Monday.
“I’m not coming here to pick money up, I’m not coming here just to play games, I’m coming here to win.
“Unless you have that sort of ambition in football why bother playing? We need to win games and with the squad we’ve got I believe we can do that.
“I know things haven’t been as pleasing for everyone as they would have liked over the past few years but the players coming into the squad are going to make the other players that were already good players here even better.
“Quality breeds quality and everyone will see it in the games coming up that we’ve got a good squad.”
While some have questioned how Perth could fit so many big names under the league’s strict salary cap, Mitchell insisted it was all fair dinkum.
“It’s not all about money, money, money,” Mitchell said.
“Some of the guys have taken a drastic wage cut to come here.
“They want to be part of the A-League, they want to be part of Perth Glory and they want to be part of a winning side, so it’s all positive.
“He (Coyne) has taken a big wage cut and that’s a credit to him. There were some big offers on the table for him.
“We told him where the club wanted to go and where we wanted to be … and he said he wanted to be a part of that.
“It’s a powerful squad so we want to be challenging the finals and top two if possible.”
Coyne, who played a vital role in Australia’s successful qualification campaign for the 2010 World Cup, was contracted to English club Colchester United for another two years but believed his Socceroos ambitions would have suffered had he remained at the League One outfit.
“If I’d been playing in the Premier League, if I’d been playing where the games are televised week in, week out, then Pim (Verbeek) and his assistants would have seen me playing a lot more,” Coyne said.
“But in League One you might see one game a year, whereas now I’ve got the opportunity to come back and play 27, 30 games.”
Coyne only arrived from England on Sunday and said he was unlikely to feature in Wednesday’s pre-season clash with Premier League side Fulham.
The 30-year-old had a light training run on Monday but said he was only at 60-70 per cent fitness.
AAP jsc/gjw
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