Six rounds are complete in the A-League (apart from the postponed match between the Mariners and Phoenix anyway) and the Western Sydney Wanderers sit two points clear at the top.
There was much talk about how they would handle the second-year blues, and they’ve answered that in emphatic fashion by getting off to a great start to the year.
They are still unbeaten in six matches.
There is still a very long way to go in the season, and I’m not for a moment saying that the rest of the season will simply continue and be a Wanderers party as they romp to successive premierships and then this time cap it off with a grand final win to claim the toilet seat.
That is not the point of this article.
There are a number of teams in the A-League this season playing very good football, but the Wanderers have so far shown one thing that has really set them apart and what has put them, at this point, at the top of the league.
That is the ability to win games playing far from their best.
I have been a Liverpool FC fan for a long time. I have seen many seasons where they’ve had a very good team and managed to consistently beat all the top teams, only to then drop too many points in matches they should win to be able to truly compete at the top of the league.
So for many of those seasons, on their day their top 11 was a match for anyone, but over the course of a season their consistency and squad depth didn’t match it with the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal.
The Wanderers have shown, in the short six games that have been played so far, that they’ve found the ability to win despite missing key players, despite not playing at their best, despite having half their team changed from last week, and despite being outplayed for large portions of matches.
Tony Popovic has shown a remarkable amount of faith in all his players across his squad, and probably more than any other manager looks at his squad as very much a single squad, rather than the top team and the backups.
He has set up a system where he expects that if players are missing and he has to plug in some other players in their place that they are able to get the job done.
In doing this he is setting up his team, as best as possible, to be able to succeed through long periods despite whatever injury concerns or other player unavailabilities may strike through the season.
The other big thing they’ve shown is the ability to win ugly.
On their day they can play some glorious football and dominate a game.
However over the last few weeks they have had some matches where they’ve been pushed really hard by teams playing very well for long periods of time, yet they continue to fight and scramble and be extremely hard to break down, and somehow find a way to win.
That is the hallmark of a champion side.
So often when you see big winning streaks from teams, you assume a team that just dominated all the time.
But what you tend to find is that through any winning streak, there are always some matches where the side were far from their best but managed to hold out and somehow find a way to win, even if they seemed to be outplayed for much of the match.
So anything can happen from here in this season.
I’m not trying to suggest, six matches into the season, that the Wanderers will romp home from here.
But Tony Popovic’s team have shown they have a real champion quality about them that is going to make them very hard to beat for this season’s title.
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