Perth Glory Captain Jamie Coyne has made a swift recovery from a calf injury and will return to the squad to play the Central Coast Mariners on New Years Eve in Gosford.
Perth Glory Captain Jamie Coyne has made a swift recovery from a calf injury and will return to the squad to play the Central Coast Mariners on New Years Eve in Gosford.
Coyne will be hoping he can be part of a Glory outfit that will see in the New Year in style and capitalise on their recent good form.
While finals are mathematically still possible for Perth, Coyne said with only four matches remaining the players know there will be know second chances and are determined to continue to fight for a place in the top four.
“It’s going to be very hard and we haven’t won four straight games in a long time, but we are taking each game as it comes and focusing on trying to get a win over Central Coast at the moment. We then have an 11-day week before playing Melbourne, so that will give us a lot of time to get ready for that,” Coyne said.
“My injury has come up good and I’m back a week earlier than expected, so I’m very happy with that. If we were to win the last four that would definitely put us in the top-four and that’s what we are aiming to do.”
The Mariners at Bluetongue Stadium on New Year’s Eve looms as a huge challenge for Perth, but Coyne is backing his team to get the result.
“Central Coast is one of those teams on the cusp of the top-four and we’d like to be on the other side of it. It’s a hard game for us, but one that we have to win as well,” he said.
“If they won, they’d be quite a few points away from us and make things very difficult. Hopefully we can win and have some other results go our way. We are pretty confident going in, the boys have been playing well and we give ourselves a good chance.”
Coyne can look back on two crucial games that have cost Perth the chance to be closer than six points from the top-four. Against the Jets in Round 2 and Mariners in 13, the Glory looked assured of victory until conceding late goals.
“In some cases we definitely deserved more than we got, especially the draws right at the end against Newcastle early on and Central Coast about a month ago,” he said.
“They are two games where we dropped four points in and that’d make a huge difference now. It is hard to look back on our start but all the teams have gone through a bad run now, ours was at the start, and hopefully we can continue our good form.”
Despite Glory playing their third match in ten days Coyne doesn-t expect fatigue to be a factor on Wednesday night and said he’s looking forward to teaming up with former Dutch international Victor Sikora for the first time.
“The coaches have kept training pretty light to make sure we are ready for Wednesday night. They will be just as tired as us, though, and we have the motivation to win and will then have a break for 11 days after that,” he said.
“Sikora is a tricky little player, is very sharp and it will take him a while to settle as we don-t know his game, and he doesn-t know ours. The fact that he speaks English and has come here to win is a real positive, and you can see his determination to work hard off the ball as much as when he has it.”
