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09Dec23
Newcastle Hand Wellington First Defeat Of Season
by Jeremy Ruane
Newcastle Jets stunned Isuzu Ute A-League leaders Wellington Phoenix 3-0 in front of 4395 fans at Sky Stadium on December 9, inflicting a first defeat of the season upon the table-toppers, who rarely looked like a top-of-the-table team in this windblown encounter.
Yes, the wind with which Wellington is so often associated was in town with a vengeance for this encounter, and Newcastle took full advantage of having it at their backs to open the scoring just four minutes into play.
Former Wellington fullback Lucas Mauragis sent the impressively performed Clayton Taylor racing down the left, and he held off the challenge of Tim Payne before slipping a pass inside to Apostolos Stamatelopoulos, whose shot on the turn from six yards found the net via the inside of the far post.
The home team's fans were dumbstruck by this early and unanticipated development, but were soon urging their team on as Wellington set about the task of levelling the scores. Costa Barbarouses' eighth minute cross was blocked by Mark Natta, but the All Whites striker had more success with his second attempt, the ball arcing to the far post where Nick Pennington was arriving on cue to direct a close-range shot goalwards.
Newcastle goalkeeper Ryan Scott produced a fine reflex save to keep his team in front, then hurtled out of his penalty area to head clear seconds later as Barbarouses looked to get on the end of a Lukas Kelly-Heald ball downfield, launched from inside his own half.
In the twelfth minute, Bozhidar Kraev set off on a buccaneering run from inside his own half past four opponents before playing the ball into the stride of Barbarouses. He took on and beat a rival before seeing his shot blocked by the legs of Scott.
With numerous players and staff members in both teams having played for their opponents in this match, there was more than a little exceedingly willing activity taking place throughout proceedings, something which referee Jonathon Barreiro could have clamped down a lot better than was the case - only three players were booked in the match, two of them for persistent infringement. More were merited.
In the 25th minute, after pushing and shoving aplenty, some football broke out in the form of a Pennington corner. It wasn't cleared, allowing Alex Rufer to let fly with a shot on the turn. Thomas Aquilina blocked it, an effort which typified Newcastle's performance - they thwarted Wellington at every turn, the home team not helping their own cause by producing a display of passing accuracy and quality most kindly described as mixed.
After former Wellington star Reno Piscopo lashed a thirty-yarder on the run a foot over the bar in the 32nd minute, Scott again came to Newcastle's rescue in the minutes which followed, racing out of his area to clear his lines again soon after getting his angles right to prevent Oskar Zawada from hitting the target with an angled drive, after the striker's run had been picked out by Pennington's perceptive pass from halfway.
In the shadows of the half-time whistle, Newcastle doubled their lead. Persistent pressure culminated in All Whites fullback Dane Ingham delivering a cross from the right which Finn Surman failed to clear. The ball struck the unsuspecting Alex Paulsen and fell kindly to Taylor, who wasted little time in despatching the sphere into an empty net - 2-0.
The second half was just twenty-five seconds old when Taylor was unceremoniously felled in the area by the combined efforts of Surman and Scott Wootton. Referee Barreiro had no hesitation in pointing to the penalty spot, from where
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Stamatelopoulos slammed the ball home over the diving figure of Paulsen - 3-0 Newcastle, and surely no way back for Wellington.
So it proved, although to their credit, the home team never stopped trying to reduce the deficit. Scott punched a beautifully flighted near post cross from Payne off Zawada's head in the 54th minute, and repeated the dose three minutes later, this time from an angled cross from Rufer, with Zawada left nursing a bloodied nose in the aftermath.
In between times, Newcastle's goalkeeper kept out a Pennington drive, while in the 61st minute, a wayward Pennington cross was cleared to substitute Sam Sutton, whose volley was headed inside by Kraev for Surman. He directed a header past the post - Wellington's best chance to this point.
Still they pressed, the effervescent Barbarouses slipping Kraev through the inside right channel in the 65th minute. The Bulgarian skipped past a defender before luring Scott out of goal, then slipped the ball past him, fully expecting a fellow black-clad Wellingtonian to be on hand for a tap-in to an unguarded net. The cries of anticipation swiftly turned to cries of dismay - David Ball and Ben Old were too far behind play to take advantage of a gilt-edged opening.
The moment when Wellington knew that this was not their day materialised two minutes later. Payne's powerful run into Newcastle's half of the field saw the defender cut infield before finding Kraev looming large on his right.
The attacker took the ball on before picking out Payne with his pull-back, the fullback firing a ferocious low first-time drive which careered past Scott, only to cannon to safety off the base of the left-hand post.
Breaching Newcastle's rearguard was proving extremely challenging for Wellington, with Kraev unable to engineer space from which to shoot in the 73rd minute. Old sent the ball soaring over the bar seconds later, while Scott was right behind a thirty yard free-kick from Kraev ten minutes later as the home team resorted to desperate measures in a bid to get on the board.
Newcastle rebuffed them at every turn, however, although Payne's teasing 86th minute cross-shot went close to giving the natives something to cheer, the back-pedalling figure of Scott tipping the dipping ball onto and over the bar before he himself crashed into the far post.
The goalkeeper emerged unscathed from that incident, proving the fact with a fine full-length diving save in stoppage time to prevent Kraev from finding the net with a twenty yard drive, Wellington's last attempt to score in a contest in which Newcastle looked to net a fourth goal in stoppage time.
Mauragis worked a one-two with Daniel Wilmering before being superbly denied by Paulsen, who had largely been a spectator since conceding the penalty two minutes into the half. The goalkeeper then looked on with relief as Callum Timmins fired a low drive narrowly past the far post from the corner arising from his save, and while the Novocastrians were disappointed not to net a fourth goal, their 3-0 victory was a more than satisfactory one.
Wellington: Paulsen; Payne, Surman, Wootton, Kelly-Heald (Sutton, 55); Al-Taay (Old, 55), Rufer (booked, 45), Pennington (Van Hattum, 74); Barbarouses (booked, 90), Zawada (Ball, 63), Kraev
Newcastle: Scott; Ingham, Cancar (booked, 29), Natta, Mauragis; Piscopo (Timmins, 77), O'Neill, Grozos; Aquilina (Buhagiar, 84), Stamatelopoulos (Goodwin, 77), Taylor (Wilmering, 84)
Referee: Jonathan Barreiro
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