St Albans earned the respect of the Australian soccer community last week with a gutsy FFA Cup performance against A-League side Perth Glory.
Despite being on the wrong side of a 4-1 scoreline, the Saints were in the match for all but the last 15 minutes.
But Glory scored twice in that period to seal their passage to the competition’s final eight.
St Albans senior committee member Joseph Hovanjec said the entire club was proud of the way the players performed.
“From the score, people might say it looked like a formality, but I’d beg to differ,” he said.
“The difference between the sides was the one per centers that a professional team would expect to come up with against us.
“We’re not taking anything away from Perth Glory . . . we’re just finishing our [NPL] season and they’re just starting theirs [in A-League].
“What we showed was that with a lot of grit and guts we can match those players.”
It took Perth 38 minutes at Knights Stadium to find a way through the St Albans defence, via a free kick by Nebojsa Marinkovic.
St Albans refused to lie down, though, and the score remained 1-0 until Perth’s Jamie MacLaren beat Saints keeper Stuart Webster in the 62nd minute.
Again, the Saints responded in the best possible fashion and found themselves with a chance to get on the scoreboard just minutes later when awarded a penalty. Captain=coach Ryan McGuffie stepped up to the mark to score, sending the home fans into raptures.
“At 2-1 we felt there was something there to be taken,” Hovanjec said.
“We matched it with them, but in the last five or 10 minutes you could see the full-time outfit had more legs to be able to get them over the line.
“They put another two goals past us and that was the difference.”
Last week’s win allows Perth to progress to the competition’s quarter-final, where it will host Melbourne Victory.
St Albans’ season, which also included a Dockerty Cup semi-final and a top five finish in the NPL1, has come to an end.
“A lot of things happened for the first time this year,” Hovanjec said.
“It was the inaugural season for the NPL; it was an inaugural season for the FFA Cup and it was probably the longest run we’ve had in the Dockerty Cup.
“The exposure there with social media and with the interest in the FFA Cup from the media, it was great to see a club from the western suburbs of Melbourne on the national stage – it was fantastic.”
In the other quarter-finals, Bentleigh Greens are at home to Adelaide City, Palm Beach Sharks host Central Coast Mariners, and Sydney FC is home to Adelaide United.
