Roar and Victory to meet under a torpid cloud

With six championships and five premierships between them, two A-League giants, wading through a thick, foggy campaign, will attempt to rouse themselves against one another this Sunday.

These teams also have just two wins each this season, the underwhelming reward for an underwhelming limp through the opening ten matches.

Both managers are under considerable pressure, and have tiredly batted away rumours of dismissal or departure like a lazing basset hound might a clique of summer flies.

The deepening sense of torpor, however, only attracts more buzzing hearsay, and as the season has rolled on past the one-third mark, the need for at least one of these teams to snap out of their malaise is growing.

Bad starts happen every season, but the season’s start has come and gone now, and we’re entering the gut of 2017-18.

John Aloisi and the Roar, it must be said, are battling an injury crisis at the moment. The recruitment – specifically the ages of the recruits – has been questioned this season.

It is cheap and easy to point to Massimo Maccarone’s 38 silvery years when the Roar labour and heave, but age and experience have always gone hand-in-hand with success in the A-League.

Last season Sydney and the Victory had two of the oldest squads in the competition, and were clearly the two best teams that year. 

So when Fahid Ben Khalfallah said it’s “bull****” to link the age of the Roar squad to its current injured state, he is largely right to do so. Eric Bautheac is the latest Roar asset to crumple, and he joins other key pieces Luke DeVere, Brett Holman and Michael Theo in the infirmary.

[latest_videos_strip category=”football” name=”Football”]

“If you take out of Sydney the best six or seven players in every game, they’re not the same team.” Ben Khalfallah said, again correctly.

The Roar – perhaps slightly more than all the other teams in the league – are not being flattered cast as they are under the broad shadow of Sydney FC; for a club as successful as Brisbane have been, who not too long ago had an iron grip on the competition in the same way Sydney has now, the comparisons they are subjected to are especially harsh.

No one expects Central Coast or Wellington to make deep runs through the finals every season, but they do expect Brisbane to. 

And that’s how it should be, of course. Big teams must be held to a high mark, and it’s not unreasonable to judge them if they flounder beneath it. The Roar, though, are floundering at the moment with their limbs in traction.

Melbourne, on the other hand, are not as hamstrung by injury, and have – on paper – one of the league’s strongest teams, with established foreign and domestic stars dotting the starting line-up. A team as talented and experienced as Kevin Muscat’s should not be sitting outside the top six, with a negative goal difference, and twice as many losses as they have wins.

The Victory have suffered through a dearth of attacking invention this season – it seemed, over the first handful of rounds, that Muscat’s entire attacking scheme revolved around giving the ball to Leroy George, prodding him, and saying “go on, do something…”

Muscat’s ability to refresh a stagnant attack over the course of a match also seems limited, with like-for-like substitutions and a reluctance to alter the system a problematic hallmark. 

Naturally, these issues at the pointy end are only exacerbated by a startling shakiness at the back. The Victory haven’t been blown out this season – save for the thrashing doled out by Newcastle – but they only have one clean sheet over the first ten games.

They seem guaranteed to stumble into conceding a goal in nearly every game, solitary moments of weakness that have too often been harshly decisive – three of their four losses have been by a single goal. 

It seems letting Alan Baro stroll freely into the Mariners team over the off-season has taken a further layer of varnish off a cracked and peeling defence that has degenerated since the departure of Matthieu Delpierre.

Daniel Georgievski’s departure, and James Donachie’s injury has also not helped things, but a defensive arrangement that includes Rhys Williams, Mark Milligan, Carl Valeri and Leigh Broxham shouldn’t be conceding so routinely. 

The Victory have an Asian Champions League campaign to negotiate this season, which will strain the situation further. James Troisi, whose re-signing this off-season was supposed to be a sign of last season’s success continuing on into this season, has been flighty and ineffective so far.

James Troisi has struggled this season. (AAP Image / Joe Sabljak)

Besart Berisha and the returning Kosta Barbarouses have also shimmered in and out of matches, only occasionally looking like the potent players we’ve become accustomed to seeing. 

The team looks stale, and is offering up something well below the sum of its parts. The blame for this – at least a hefty portion of it – must be directed at Muscat.

Muscat teams over the last few seasons have been known for their intensity, their ravenousness, their slavering desire to – if not dominate – leave a stark impression on an A-League season. This season’s iteration has not impressed, to be sure.

Melbourne’s lowest home turnout this season sits at a touch over 16,500. They are still the best-supported team in the league, and it will take more than one ho-hum season to affect the appetite of their membership.

Brisbane’s lowest home crowd, though, was 5192, which is the second-worst low mark out of any team this season. Only three teams pull in fewer people than the Roar on average and, although Aloisi seems secure at the club, a longer, more barren run of results will hurt them.

The Roar have feasted for so long, and will find it harder to survive a famine. 

There is a sense that, once the injury cloud has cleared, both of these teams have the talent and ability to snap suddenly into life, and race up the table. Their current malaise may well be a faded memory once finals arrive.

A win for either team on Sunday might be the spark they need.