Adelaide United bounce back from horror loss

Adelaide United has produced a much improved display to earn a 1-1 draw against Melbourne Heart at Hindmarsh Stadium.

In their first outing since last week’s 7-1 demolition by Brisbane, United were unlucky not to snatch a late winner against a 10-man Heart.

After Melbourne defender Brendan Hamill opened the scoring in the 49th minute, United fought their way back into the match with Spase Dilevski leveling the scores in the 78th minute.

Adelaide’s Head Coach Rini Coolen was pleased with the team’s performance but felt his team should have taken all three points in the A-League fixture.

“I’m disappointed because I thought we deserved a little bit more than a draw today. It was a great effort from the boys and I think you saw from the start of the game that the boys were still looking for some confidence, but during the game it got better and better,” Coolen said.

Adelaide Captain Jon McKain said it was tough to recover from last week’s game but felt the team could take heart from their performance against Melbourne.

“Personally it was very difficult for me to bounce back after copping a lot of criticism during the week, putting my hand up and taking a lot of blame for what happened,” McKain said.

“We kept the ball quite well in the first half, I thought we finished the game quite well, even against ten men we battled hard and we really fought to the end.

“We’ve set ourselves up for a bit of a platform, it was a better performance and obviously we need to move on from here,” he said.

Coolen said there were encouraging signs for the team and hopes the Reds can build on the performance in the coming weeks.

“At the end of the day we wanted the win and we deserved the win but we didn’t get more than one point. But for me it’s important that I can do something with this game because there were a lot of positive things to come out of it and that was different from the last couple of weeks.”