



More than just luck for Victory

There's good luck, bad luck, dumb luck - and luck you work for.

People describe the A-League's most successful coach, Ange Postecoglou, as a lucky manager.

So often in matches his side seems to get the decisive rub of the green or a late goal that snatches a draw from defeat or victory from a seemingly impossible position.

It's been happening for years, most spectacularly with his former club, Brisbane Roar, which he guided to two A-League premierships in a row, making the Queensland club the first to achieve back-to-back titles. He also took the Roar on a record undefeated run of 36 matches, with it sometimes riding its luck and hitting back with crucial goals when it looked to be out of contention.

It happened last Friday, in the elimination final, where his current club, Melbourne Victory, looked dead and buried in the dying stages of a disappointing game. Victory was 1-0 down at home and Perth Glory was given a penalty in the 88th minute. But Shane Smeltz missed, Victory went down the other end and attacked, was awarded a very fortuitous spot kick of its own, Glory defender Steve Pantelidis was sent off, and Mark Milligan smashed in the equaliser. The rest is history, as Victory went on to win in extra time against a depleted Perth to line up for Sunday's semi-final against Central Coast.

Even back in the late 1990s, in the days of the National Soccer League, Postecoglou's South Melbourne side was winning late. It beat Carlton 2-1 in the 1998 grand final courtesy of an 87th-minute winner from legendary striker Con Boutsianis, and defeated Sydney United 3-2 the following year, Johnny Anastasiadis scoring the decisive third goal in the 87th minute.

But don't tell Postecoglou that he's lucky. While some coaches are fatalists and are happy to acknowledge that the gods have sometimes tipped things their way, the Melbourne Victory boss is very much in the other camp.

Napoleon asked ''Is he lucky?'' of candidates who were put forward to him for elevation to the rank of general.

Postecoglou would have said, ''Has he prepared fully, has he left nothing to chance, will his men fight to the last second to stay in the battle?''

Napoleon's record was pretty spectacular - he did, after all, take most of the developed world to extra time in a campaign of revolutionary warfare, only to lose in the last seconds - but ended up in exile.

So far Postecoglou has not missed a beat in his A-League career. Rather than end up in exile, he would surely win a popularity poll if fans were asked who should replace Holger Osieck if he was dispensed with as the Socceroos try to rebuild their stuttering World Cup campaign.

In fact, he gets rather prickly if anyone even suggests his teams' feats owe anything to luck. Hard work, super fitness, commitment, never giving up, a high level of technical ability and even greater self belief are the keys to his methodology.

All those factors are crucial. His Brisbane side played pretty, made possession its mantra and worked and prised openings against even the stiffest defence, which sometimes gave up on its side's own chance of victory to concentrate on stopping the Roar.

But it was a very fit team which could run games out right to the end, and that is where the ''luck'' so often kicks in.

As games get stretched in the last 10 minutes and players tire and teams lose their shape, the fittest, most technically able side tends to get an edge. Brisbane often scored late winners or levellers as its superior quality showed in the dying moments.

The Roar also held its nerve and believed in its system.

That tends to create situations where you make things happen, however improbable - even though those fatalists among us would find it hard to look at the finale of the 2010-11 grand final, when Brisbane scored twice in the last three minutes of extra time to level the score with Central Coast and then win on penalties - and not believe that the gods must have loaded up on the Roar that day.

Still, these things can't continually happen for no reason, as Postecoglou says.

The entire press room at Etihad Stadium last Friday night believed Victory's win over Glory was a bit of a fluke.

But the coach does make one valid point when he argues that his side didn't buckle under pressure. Smeltz, Perth's penalty taker,who is the A-League's all-time top goalscorer, missed his spot kick when he had the chance to win the game, while Milligan remained calm and slotted his penalty under enormous pressure to give his side a chance to stay in the game.

With all that in mind, Graham Arnold, the Mariners boss, will surely know that his side will need to put Victory away in normal time or at the very worst in extra time on Sunday: given Postecoglou's propensity for getting out of sticky situations, the Gosford club would not want its fate determined in the lottery of a penalty shootout when, of course, luck will have nothing to do with it.

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