Sydney FC will know that winning the Australia Cup, defeating Brisbane Roar 3-1 in the final on Saturday evening, does not make a season. They only need to look across town and heed the fate that befell Macarthur FC after they defeated Sydney United last year to know that; the Bulls lost their coach Dwight Yorke midseason, subsequently had the Manchester United legend label them a "pub team," and crashed to a wooden spoon.
Having experienced the ups, downs, and various temperatures that his seat can reach across the previous campaign, Sky Blues head coach Steve Corica will enter the final year of his contract that there is no amount of Cup success will save him if his side's form in the A-League Men proves disastrous.
Fortunately for Corica, though, the Bulls appear a bit of an outlier when it comes to league form and the Australia Cup. Of the eight previous sides to triumph in Australia's premier Cup competition, only Macarthur and Adelaide United in 2019-20 have failed to reach the playoffs -- and the latter had to deal with the fallout of Gertjan Verbeek quitting the club and returning to the Netherlands once the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
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Indeed, Corica only needs to look at Graham Arnold's last year in charge of the Sky Blues in 2017-18 for an example of what can be accomplished by a side buoyed by the momentum of an Australia Cup triumph: Sydney going on to finish top of the A-League Men table before falling to Melbourne Victory in the semifinals.
And if you squint, one can see some of the echoes from that evening just under six years ago in the Harboursiders' triumph on Saturday. For one, the name on the marquee was the same for both, albeit the Sydney Football Stadium has had a complete knock-down rebuild in the intervening years. On both occasions, a Brazilian striker proved the difference, with Bobô popping up in the 111th minute to win the Cup in 2017 and Fábio Gomes, newly arrived on loan from Atlético Mineiro, coming through with two second-half goals to dash the hopes of the Roar. And Sydney certainly was twice made to work for their win, forced into extra-time by Adelaide back then, and made to come from behind to take out the win against the Roar on Saturday.
For Sydney FC, there is cause for a level of nostalgic optimism because when they are at their very best, winning games in this manner is what the Sky Blues have excelled at. Especially under Arnold, there was a sense of almost dispassionate inevitability about their teams. It didn't matter who the opponent was to be, where the game was going to be held or even if they were going to play well. There was a sense of belief about them that made them as dominant and influential as they were hated.
Now eventually, the actual football underpinning this all reached a used-by date and stagnation kicked in. Corica's tenure was left hanging by a thread as his side missed finals football in 2021-22 and, under significant and merited pressure to keep his job, he was forced to attempt to adjust and bring in a host of new players in 2022-23. But the aura was gone. Sydney FC was no longer the ruthless winning machine that swept all before them with a cold, calculating lethality. That force now resided at Melbourne City, where Erick Mombaerts established a foundation for a run of sustained success that, if not for their chronic inability to win Grand Finals, would almost have surpassed the Arnold Dynasty in recent years.
Again, just as one Australia Cup does not automatically correlate with a successful A-League Men season, one come-from-behind win in a Cup final does not mean that the Terminators of Macquarie Park are back. But if Corica is to rediscover that edge this season and effectively win the right to make his fate with his expiring contract, wins such as Saturday evening are the kind that will lay the emotional foundation.
Across the opening 45 minutes at the Sydney Football Stadium, the Harboursiders were second-best. The scoreline may have only read 1-0 thanks to Thomas Waddingham's early effort but the Queenslanders were running rampant: consistently finding space and overloads, often down the right flank, and exploiting pockets of space that were opening beneath Sydney's midfield duo of Luke Brattan and Corey Hollman. Handily dealing with any attempts to get up in their faces and press them as they played out from the back, the counter-pressing from Ross Alosi's Roar when they lost the ball saw Sydney hemmed in and frustrated for vast swathes of the game. Their rare forays forward, such as Anthony Caceres' breakaway or Patrick Wood's effort into the side-netting just before half-time, were cleared or contested. Scott Neville was immense in Brisbane's backline.
Indeed, though they may have lost the battle and are now licking the wounds of a Cup final defeat, the Roar will enter the 2023-24 A-League Men season with a sense of hope themselves.
Waddingham, 18, who has now scored in four-straight Cup games, is almost forcing his coach to give scope to contribute when the season begins, and there are fewer things more valuable (or lucrative) than having a young No. 9 capable of scoring goals on your books. Yet again (sorry to harp on about it), there are no guarantees that a deep Australia Cup run or strong preseason portends success (or that the inverse augurs failure) but early signs are that Aloisi's long apprenticeship and stint as an assistant to Kevin Muscat in Japan has him well-placed to find some semblance of success in his first year as a senior men's coach, even he is in charge of a squad that likely lacks the top-level individual quality to take it to the competition's best.
The second stanza of Saturday's contest gave an insight into that last bit. With circumstances conspiring against them -- captain Tom Aldred hampered by a first-half shoulder injury and Sydney defender Jake Girdwood-Reich very fortunate to not see red for a shoulder charge on Henry Hore -- the Roar couldn't maintain the rage in the second 45 minutes. The individual quality of players like Mark Viduka medalist Joe Lolley, Robert Mak, and second-half substitutes Max Burgess and the aforementioned Fábio all swung the game Sydney's way. Where pockets of space were once being exploited by the visitors, it was now the hosts that were getting in behind their opponents regularly, particularly Lolley on the right. Thanks to both the preseason nature of the game and the relatively new expectations of Aloisi's system, fatigue was robbing the Roar of the intensity that had accompanied their first half.
Thus, when Hore's instinctual reaction to prevent a broken nose led to a penalty for handball and Sydney's Brazilian striker, only on the park for a matter of moments, stepped up to tie the game up the tide was decidedly turning. When Lolley teed up Mak five minutes later for the lead -- the combination between the Englishman and Slovakia international likely the litmus test for how far Sydney will go this season -- the result felt inevitable, even if it did take until the 91st minute for Fábio to deliver the coup de grâce. Roar had the gumption, but Sydney had the class.
Now, both sides will take a fortnight before commencing their A-League Men campaigns, Roar travelling to face Macarthur on Saturday afternoon and Sydney hosting old foes Melbourne Victory later that evening in the prime-time slot.
For the Roar, the Cup run will have given reason to hope that, perhaps, their decade in the trophy-less wilderness will come to an end under the new regime in town, that the journey they have only just started on means that the club will be able to rely on something other than nostalgia to justify its celebrated status. For Sydney, the pursuit of further silverware awaits; a host of highly credentialed talent reinforcing a team that, on paper, should be expected to be at the pointy end when the season reaches its crescendo. Corica is faced with the challenge of putting them in a position to succeed.
In the past, the club has excelled at meeting those expectations. An Australia Cup triumph is a good start.