Wanderers can 'take a lot out of' latest Asian Champions League hammering
Twenty goals conceded from five games is pretty ugly viewing from any angle but defender Jonathan Aspropotamitis says it has only made Western Sydney more determined to scrape pride from their final Asian Champions League outing against star-studded Shanghai SIPG.
That is all the Wanderers will be playing for in Campbelltown next month, after Wednesday night’s 6-1 hammering by J-League leaders Urawa Red Diamonds mathematically ruled them out of an unlikely knockout-stage berth.
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It was the their worst defeat in any competition, a torture compounded by last Friday’s cruel penalty-shootout ejection from the A-League finals. Three years after the club’s historic Champions League triumph the slaughter doubled as a harsh lesson on what Asia’s best look like now.
“It’s a big loss but we’ll take a lot out of that and grow as a team,” Aspropotamitis said. “Now we can measure ourselves against the best in Asia and know where we stand. They’re quality opposition, we knew that going into the game. We just had to come out and try to nullify their quality, and unfortunately we couldn’t do it tonight.
“We’re going to really come out and play and look to win against Shanghai. We’ve got a lot of pride to play for and in two weeks’ time we’ll play with passion and ambition.”
The Wanderers’ 2017 Champions League campaign now reads one win, four losses, seven goals scored and 20 conceded. Unlike February’s 4-0 second-half capitulation to Urawa Reds, this second meeting had Tony Popovic’s side 3-0 down before the break.
Jumpei Kusukami’s 66th-minute goal jolted them into life but any chance of a fightback was snuffed out when Rafael Silva buried a late brace and set up Shinzo Koroki in injury-time.
It came as Popovic changed up his regular formation by playing Aspropotamitis, Robbie Cornthwaite and Brendan Hamill in a three-man back line flanked by wing-backs Scott Neville and Jack Clisby, a move presumably made to cater for their opponent’s tendency to shift five men up front when in possession.
Aspropotamitis insisted the experiment had nothing to do with the result, another continental learning curve the talented 20-year-old says has been invaluable to his development.
“There’s no excuses from our part – as professionals we have to be able to adapt to any formation,” he said. “We tried something new and it didn’t quite come off ... but there was that real belief and we never lost that. We said at half-time that we wanted to turn the game around, and that’s what happened. When we went 3-1 I really thought we could have gone to 3-2 and 3-3.”