Melbourne Victory coach Kevin Muscat says his players will travel to Canberra with a “serious ambition” to progess through to the next round of the FFA Cup as they prepare to face NPL side Tuggeranong United tomorrow night.
Their place in the round of 16 was booked after a 2-0 win against Bayswater City and Muscat has admitted the club will respect tomorrow’s opponents just as much as their first round match.
“I said from the start, we respect this competition and tomorrow night won’t be any different,” he said.
“We’ll go across and realise it’s not going to be easy, they’ve put the effort to make it a good show and hopefully we can reciprocate because we’re going to go there with a serious ambition to get through to the next round.
“In the back of our minds we want to get a result [but] we’re concentrating on getting the performance right. Each game that we’ve gone into throughout this pre-season, we’ve taken a step in the right direction and tomorrow night is no different.
“We want to come away from the game thinking that we’ve improved on our last game.”
The Victory boss also touched upon the signing of Macedonian international Daniel Georgievski – who joins Besart Berisha, Carl Valeri and Matthieu Delpierre as one of the Victory new boys – and the importance of adding depth to the Melbourne squad.
“First and foremost it was about getting some serious competition and some real depth in those areas. We’ve got three very good young full-back’s who’ll be called in for various national teams [throughout the season] so getting Daniel [Georgievski] to come back to Australia with the age that he has, I think it’s good for the Hyundai A-League – it shows how far the competition has come,” the Victory boss said.
“Apart form that, when Daniel did arrive, he had a look around and training with the boys, he was pleasantly surprised with the professionalism and the intensity.”
With the season rapidly approaching, Muscat admitted Melbourne were “active” and would be looking to add further quality to his side with another signing but remained tight-lipped on exactly who the Victory were chasing.
“We’re active – we’ve been working diligently away from the training ground to bring bodies in and hopefully we get the opportunity to bring someone in before we go to Tasmania in ten days time,” the Victory boss said.
“Things change, we’ve worked hard on makings sure that any addition to the squad is going to improve the squad and with Daniel [Georgievski] that is the case and hopefully in the next few days or week we’ll be able to shed some light on maybe another body coming in,” he added.
Melbourne Victory will head to the nation’s capital tomorrow to face Tuggeranong United in the Westfield FFA Cup Round of 16. Kick-off is scheduled for 7:30pm at Viking Park, Canberra.