For 87 minutes at a near-capacity Allianz Stadium on Saturday night, the first Sydney derby of the nascent A-League season seemed to be heading towards a disappointing stalemate after a tight, often niggly affair that had largely failed to live up to the pre-match hype.
Enter Milos Ninkovic. The Serb produced a rare moment of individual brilliance to settle the contest at the death and give Sydney FC early season local bragging rights, and all three points, in a 1-0 victory over Western Sydney Wanderers.
Ninkovic, Sydney’s off-season signing from Evian, left it late but managed to do what no other player on the pitch had been capable of. The midfielder’s touch to take down Brandon O’Neill’s ball through was sublime. His finish past Andrew Redmayne was no the less impressive. Cue pandemonium in the stands as Sydney FC celebrated a second victory of the season and their new position at the top of the fledgling A-League standings.
The strike will gloss over a poor match that was never on a par with the more entertaining previous editions of the derby, many of which were fresh in the memory after a hype-filled build-up.
Played out in front of an expectedly boisterous 40,539 crowd – the always intense atmosphere fuelled further by reports of the theft of a Sydney FC tifo from a warehouse overnight – the game failed to capture the imagination. Chances at either end were few and far between and moments of the kind of quality Ninkovic produced late on sorely lacking.
Certainly the opening period was one to forget, characterised by several wild lunges that have become typical of a Sydney derby, a couple of bookings, continuous lighting of flares and not much else of interest.
Smoke emanated from the away end on a regular basis through the first half, obscuring the view of some Wanderers fans but failing to mask the game’s shortcomings.
Ninkovic went close with a fierce side-footed drive early on for Sydney FC and Rhyan Grant should have done better when he bore down on goal just after the half-hour mark, a moment which left Graham Arnold mirroring the feelings of many inside the stadium with his head in his hands.
For Wanderers, Dario Vidosic, an early replacement for the hamstrung Romeo Castelen, had a header from a corner cleared off the line and Jaushua Sotirio had a neat back-header disallowed for off-side as the half drew towards a close. Otherwise there was little to write home about.
The game screamed out for a player capable of keeping his cool in the final third, someone with the ability to unpick defences in tense affairs like this with a killer pass, touch or a set-piece. Until Ninkovic delivered, no one had given evidence of it on the pitch.
The game desperately needed a spark, and soon after the restart, Scott Neville – one of those already booked – nearly inadvertently provided one, crashing into a challenge on Ninkovic which warranted a second yellow but didn’t prompt one. He was swiftly brought off, having appeared to injure himself in the challenge, and it remained a fair numerical contest.
Vedran Janjetovic was brought into action to repel a Vidosic shot and the keeper was soon again under the microscope, backpeddling to keep the ball from creeping in under the bar having misjudged a high ball into the box. Indeed, at that point, an error appeared to be the likeliest source of a goal, given the lack of a cool head in the final third. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and Ninkovic’s class provided the abiding memory of an otherwise forgettable derby.
A frustrated Tony Popovic bemoaned the disallowed goal on the stroke of half-time.
“It’s a goal,” he said. “If it’s line ball and we’re supposed to be giving the attacking team the advantage, that’s a goal. If it’s clearly off, it’s clearly off. That wasn’t clearly off.
“You know on another day that flag stays down. Clearly that stays down on another day. Different linesman stays down. So for me that should be a goal, and it changes everything.”
