I had originally planned to pen a piece in the lead up to our first Asian Champions League match that in our third crack at the competition that we really needed to take this opportunity that we had worked so hard for last year and in the process sacrificed that campaign. Despite my best intentions it never found the light of day and therefore my attention now turns to the events that transpired on a cold and wet night last week in Osaka.

One of the themes that I planned to talk about in my now defunct piece was naivety. This was specifically in relation to our first ACL campaign and how it was sort of to be expected since that it was our first experience of such a campaign. But our first up performance in Group E indicated that disappointingly that that naivety is still very much prevalent.

When discussing naivety it is difficult to know where to start but considering that we conceded five goals, three of those in the first ten minutes, the defence seems like a good place to start. Three out of the five goals I could put down to some poor and naïve decision making. Decisions when made in the A-League may or may not cost you a goal but in the ACL when playing against a quality side like Gamba Osaka they certainly make you pay.

I'm not exactly sure what Matthew Kemp was doing (maybe he was channelling David Carney) for Gamba's third goal but running away from the player with the ball is just asking for trouble and very un-Kemp like. And what Adrian Leijer was doing for the fourth goal I shall never know, standing on the goal line whilst leaving Takahiro Futagawa completely unmarked to pick his spot beggared belief. I've got a sneaking suspicion that even I would have been able to score with that much time on my hands.

The naivety wasn't only confined to the players with some of the managerial decision making truly baffling. Playing three strikers away from home against probably the best team in the group was one of Merrick's worst decisions in a while. Whilst they did provide an attacking threat it left the midfield extremely light on both literally and figuratively.

The likes of Angulo, Pondeljak and Ferreira are hardly going to boss the midfield against the likes of Yasuhito Endo, Keun Ho Lee and company. Making a substitution after fifteen minutes was definitely warranted but surely the Victory would have been bettered served by sacrificing an attacker and bolstering the midfield. The match, along with those in the latter stages of the A-League, highlighted how much we miss the bit of bite that Grant Brebner provides in our midfield.

Whilst I might appear to be exuding a certain air of pessimism within my writing all is definitely not lost within for this ACL campaign and how both the team and management respond in our next encounter against Jeju United will very much shape our chances of progression from the group stages for the first ever time.