The Newcastle Jets are the only side Melbourne City have not beaten this season and that was a statistic captain Steph Catley said the unbeaten competition leaders wanted to rectify at AAMI Park on Saturday.
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City are four points clear at the top of the W-League ladder after an emphatic 4-0 whitewash of Canberra United while the Jets' match last weekend was postponed due to poor air quality and now they face a must-win scenario in Melbourne to keep alive their finals hopes.
Newcastle are seventh on four points with five games to play. They have recorded just one win but have been in every match and are the only team to have taken points off City in a 1-1 opening round draw.
"You look at their team and they're playing with the confidence of a team who has nothing to lose and that can sometimes be hard to come up against," Catley said of the Jets.
"We've watched footage on them and we've watched them closely throughout the season and they're a good team. They have passages where they create some really good opportunities for themselves.
"I think Tara Andrews up front has been playing really well for them and she's capable of scoring a goal at any stage in the game, so I think there's things we definitely have to be careful of and the fact that we haven't got the win over them definitely motivates us to get a win this weekend."
City's defence is by far the best in the league with only three goals conceded in eight outings, the last of which was 400 minutes of football ago.
But last weekend they found "the last piece of the puzzle" in a flood of goals.
"At the moment things are going well. We're playing some really good football and obviously not conceding is massive," Catley said.
"I think the key to winning a championship is not conceding goals. But last week we started to score goals as well which was really important for us because we were struggling with that ... we were able to finish our chances and hopefully it can keep going from here."
The Jets have had a disrupted fortnight since last playing with Ash Wilson taking over from Craig Deans, who has stepped in as interim coach of the club's A-League side. But Jets striker Jenna Kingsley said they were ready for the tough assignment.
"Melbourne City are the top dogs at the moment and if you look at the draw, they've had one draw which was against us, so we're the only team to take points off them," Kingsley said. "I think we were unlucky not to get a win out of that [round-one] game and it was the first time we've got points out of them. We took confidence out of that and we have a very high belief that we can get a result. I think we frustrated them last time and hopefully we can do that again."
Retaining the ball and taking their chances will be key.
"If we give over cheap turnovers in the middle of the park they've got good enough players to make us pay, so we need to be really, really respectful of the ball and keep possession," Kingsley said.
