Life in the top flight of Victorian football has shown promising signs early for Dom Barba and the Bulleen Lions.
Having been narrowly defeated by champions Bentleigh Greens in the first round, the Lions came home to the Veneto club and claimed a victory over Oakleigh Cannons.
A Sami Nour goal was the difference in a mature team performance, with the side not being overawed by the Cannon’s advances in search of an equaliser, holding firm for the 1-0 win.
Barba says his squad took positives and learned from the Bentleigh defeat, and applied it to the contest against Oakleigh.
“We were lucky at times but we picked them [Oakleigh] off the way we needed to and it worked a treat,” Barba said.
“So now we’ve got to keep the momentum going and build that confidence, and we go into this with an opportunity to cement another result.”
“We believe last week perhaps we should have got something out of that game, we took that and basically eliminated honourable losses out of our language, and we look at every game and believe we are good enough and out best can compete with every team.”
The contest marked the hosts’ first win at David Barro Stadium for the year, with Barba reiterating that home results will largely determine the club’s fortunes in 2016, but a key focus has also been on strengthening the side’s performances away from home and the artificial turf.
“It’s really important that we actually make us our fortress, if we don’t lose our games here [it can help achieve] a mid-table finish or a little bit higher,” he said.
“At the end of the day, teams will come here and find it difficult, but we don’t find it difficult, what we are improving on is our away form when we’re playing on grass.
“Last year we played on some cow paddocks, but this year the grounds are equally as level as this ground so we can play some decent football and it helps the style we play.”
Despite an often-entertaining pre-season, which yielded high scoring encounters, Barba’s Lions have adopted a more pragmatic approach in the season-proper to date.
Shoring up the defence helped the side ensure promotion in 2015, and it has kept the Lions concede only once so far in 2016, with the backline making life difficult for some of the competition’s most clinical forwards.
“My whole philosophy is defend first, attack second,” Barba said.
“If you can’t defend, you can’t win games. I believe our defensive improvement has helped us win the league last year and made it hard to break us down.”
Barba says a similar philosophy will be adopted in the club’s next fixture against Melbourne Victory, though he is confident in his side’s ability to assess the circumstances of a contest and be able to attack or defend when required against any kind of opposition.
“There’s a lot of preparation that goes into it. Melbourne Victory are a very talented group of individual young men and they play very good football,” he said.
“You give them an opportunity to beat you and they will. So it will come down to those finer moments and those one percenters.
“Having said that, I back my boys to play any styles of football, whether it’s beautiful football or football designed to stop the opposition.
“They’ve [Victory] come up with us, we’ve come up with them.
“We know what NPL/VPL football is all about, Victory and City organisations tend to play in almost a bubble and don’t necessarily come out in the real world and play against players who are just prepared to stop you.
“For us it’s very important we are really effective in the way we play, as opposed to beautiful.”
Images: Smile for Peter Photography