Croydon Kings ended West Torrens Birkalla’s six match undefeated run in Round 20 of the PlayStation 4 National Premier League South Australia with a 1-0 win at Polonia Reserve last Saturday.

John Panagaris scored the solitary goal of the match that would see Croydon move into third spot, two points behind West Torrens, who are sitting second only on goal difference behind new leaders West Adelaide.

Croydon striker Andreas Wiens admits that the win was very much a workmen-like performance.

“I think we all worked pretty hard – we all put in a 100 per cent,” Wiens said.

“It wasn’t as free flowing as last week. In the end, everyone put in and we got a good result."

Given the win and the recent run of results, Wiens believes that Croydon has a real shot at the title.

“I think the top four is still pretty tight,” he said,” there is only two points between us and the top.”

“I think we’ve got six games left or something. We will win more matches; we definitely are a title contender and if we believe it, we can win it all,” Wiens said.

As pointed out by Wiens, the match lacked flow with clear cut chances few and far between.

Croydon’s Shaun McGreevy came close in the 30th minute, when his header was comfortably saved by Torresan after a Visconte free kick.

Birkalla responded with a chance of their own on the brink of halftime, when Akira Miyayama’s deflected shot scraped the left-hand post.

The stalemate would be broken four minutes after the restart, when another Visconte free kick struck the cross three time before it was pushed over the line by Panagaris to hand the hosts the lead.

Another set piece almost handed the visitors the equaliser in the 60th minute, when Miyayama rose the highest to meet a corner that was just saved by Croydon keeper Nick Munro.

West Torrens didn’t threaten Croydon goal for the remainder of the match, which saw the three points remain at Polonia Reserve.

Post-match, West-Torrens keeper Julian Torresan said that he and his team mates were “a little bit unlucky” to lose 1-0.

“I think it was a very stalemate match between the two teams,” Torresan said,” there weren’t many chances from either side.”

“In the end of the day, we’re two very evenly matched teams and we cancelled each other out in a lot of aspects.
“They took their chances better than we did and it was just a bit of a jammy goal.”

However, he does believe that Birkalla will recover from the loss.

“We respect that Croydon are a good team and for them to take points of us – not that we like teams taking points of us – they’re the league benchmark and they have taken points of us and we’ve got to respect that,” Torresan said.

“If we had lost points to any other team we definitely would be upset, but at this point in time it’s a good wakeup call.

“Again, we hadn’t lost a match in seven (six) matches and now we have, so it’s a good wakeup call before we head into the finals.”

Article by Christopher Munker