Sydney FC’s 2016/2017 campaign starts this Saturday with the Sydney Derby at ANZ Stadium.

The Sky Blues have impressed in pre-season and Arnold is adamant there are no excuses from his team this year, after missing the finals last season and only scoring 36 goals in 27 games.

“There’s no excuses this year,” he said. “We’re playing a different style of football.

“We’ve been working hard on pressing higher up the field and being more energetic in midfield, when we get the ball more forward runs higher up.

“We’ve got some top quality players in the top half of the field and we have to use them.”

Western Sydney head into the derby with Sydney FC after being knocked out of the FFA Cup quarter-finals by Melbourne City and suffering a 2-0 loss to Newcastle.

They will also be without captain Nikolai Topor-Stanley after he was sent off against City.

Arnold said the cup defeat will have given Wanderers coach Tony Popovic more motivation with which to fuel his team.

“It gave Popa probably two weeks to work on it and fire them up,” he said.

“Sometimes you need a loss to get a kick up the backside. All we do is worry about ourselves.

“We’re working hard on a new style, an exciting style with some very, very good players in the front half of the field with top quality. We want to score goals.”

Arnold has been pleased with the contribution of foreign attackers Filip Holosko and Bobo in pre-season. The pair previously played up front together from 2008 to 2011 at Turkish club Beskitas.

“Sometimes it takes time for foreign players to settle,” Arnold said.

“Hard fields, weather and everything. There was on and off criticism of Filip last season but he still scored 10 goals, four assists as a right winger. When you look at the stats he was quite productive.

“You can see that he’s much fitter now, he’s stronger and more determined as the rest of the boys are. You can see a little bit the combination with Bobo and Filip from the Beskitas days. They know each other’s game.

“It’s a great group at the moment.”