Victory W-League team urged to forget last season’s grand final loss when playing the Roar

The Victiry’s Emma Checker competes with Sydney FC’s Jodie Taylor in the semi-final last weekend. Source: Getty Images

Victory fell at the final hurdle last year, suffering a 3-1 loss to Sydney FC at AAMI Park, and so will be hoping to go one step better when they host a Roar side they have never beaten at South Melbourne’s Lakeside Stadium.

And while Edmondson said some of his players who played last year may be driven by that grand final defeat, he said a raft of new faces in the team this season had diminished the atonement factor.

“We’ve been very focused on what we want to achieve this year as this group,” Edmondson said.

“I think it’s always dangerous when you look too far in to the past an dwell on things that have gone before.

“There are some stats been bandied around this week that Melbourne’s never beaten the Roar in the W-League, but I don’t think we’d beaten Sydney until last week (in the semi-final), so if you dwell on those things in the past it doesn’t achieve anything.

“If we hadn’t beaten Sydney before then who cares, we beat them ... when it really mattered.”

Sunday will be Edmondson’s last game in Melbourne before he returns to Britain to take over as head coach at the Bristol Academy, although he said his drive to win hadn’t been strengthened as a result.

Edmondson was the coach of the Adelaide United W-League team last season before making the switch to Victory, but said yesterday the instant success of his new team had not surprised him.

“It may sound a bit arrogant ... but to be honest, the team we put together — and my reason for coming to Melbourne — was to win things,” he said.

“So if we’d started the year thinking we couldn’t do it then I would have been disappointed in myself in terms of what recruitment we’d done and how we’d put the squad together.

“The reality is, yeah, we did think we could be here, but we knew it would be a lot of hard work.”

The Roar defeated Victory 1-0 in Brisbane on February 9, the last round of the regular season, but Edmondson said that success did not necessarily hand Sunday’s opponent an edge.

“The two last games that we lost before the semi-final (were) I think games where we played some of our best football. The results didn’t go our way, but we played good football.

“We dominated big spells of that game against Brisbane, the goal we conceded was a little bit soft.

“There’s lots we can take from that.”