Stangs Sting Adrenaline for ninth straight home loss

The Melbourne Mustangs survived a late comeback from a plucky Adelaide Adrenaline escape with a 5-3 victory on Saturday in Adelaide.

The win is huge in the context of the Mustangs season, who currently sit in fifth in the AIHL standings, one spot out of a finals berth and were 11 points adrift of the fourth-placed Thunder leading into Saturday’s game against the Adrenaline.

Mustangs coach Michael O’Flaherty was impressed with his team’s ability to execute their game plan on the road in what was a critical game in the context of the season.

“First period was great, we did the things we talked about and helped us get into a good position,” O’Flaherty said.

“It’s a different rink (in Adelaide) but the basic principles of the game are the same, you’ve got to support each other and work as a group.”

“The guys know what’s on the line and they answered the call today.”

It wasn’t all one-way traffic for O’Flaherty’s men though, who appeared to lose control of the game after racing out to a 4-1 lead in the first period.

The Mustangs opened the scoring with under two minutes played after Eric Louis-Seize turned a blocked shot into a sparkling breakaway goal.

However, the Adrenaline responded, with captain Greg Oddy winding back the clock with an incredible coast to coast goal to level the scores early in the first.

The rest of the first period was one-way traffic from there as the Mustangs added three more goals and established a lead that would prove too difficult for the Adrenaline to overcome.

To the home side’s credit, they worked back into the contest with under five minutes to play, TJ Battani stepped up the plate, netting a brace to make the score 4-3 with 3:07 to play.

It wasn’t to be for the home side as the Mustangs added a late empty netter to seal the contest in the final minute.

O’Flaherty credited Adelaide’s resolve but was just glad his team escaped with the critical three-points.

“Every team in this league, you give them an opening and they’ll take it,” O’Flaherty said.

“We’ve just got to keep doing the things that got us into a good position early and do that for a whole game.”

Once again it’s back to the drawing board for the Adrenaline who have now lost their past nine games at home.

Adrenaline head coach Eric Lien expressed his frustrating at his side’s inability to buck the trend of going down early in games and being forced to work back from a poor start.

“It’s pretty cliché, but if you’ve got that thing where you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, it’s the definition of madness,” Lien said.

“Until we start going about playing hockey a little bit differently, we can’t expect these results to change. Collectively, as a group, we need to change our methodology.”

Poor starts have been the bane of the Adrenaline this season and Lien mused over the fact that changing habits amongst the group appears difficult and what is being practiced during the week isn’t translating on to the ice.

“It doesn’t surprise me that we get down early in games and it forces us to struggle back because we just don’t come out ready to play,” he said.

“We seem to constantly be hitting the reset button; we feel good about ourselves (at training during the week) but we forget that actually it is going to take a collective group of 18 guys all buying in and all doing it properly and right now we can’t get 18 guys that are on the same page.”

The Adrenaline will need to come up with a solution fast to arrest the haemorrhaging at home as the Mustangs are back tomorrow at 4PM in game two of the weekend.

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