Gold Coast boss Miron Bleiberg says his side deserved to lose after Newcastle produced a dramatic penalty shoot-out win in their Hyundai A-League final at Skilled Park on Saturday night.
When a scoreless 120 minutes couldn't separate the sides, the match moved onto penalties and after a miss from Kristian Rees kept the Jets alive, the stage was set for goalkeeper Ben Kennedy, who dived the right way to save Zenon Caravella's spot-kick.
A disappointed Bleiberg was the first to concede defeat after the match last night, giving credit to Newcastle's determined approach.
"If you look at it in the balance of power it might surprise you, but I think we deserved to be on the losing side," he said.
"Not because of what happened on the field, but I think for Newcastle to come to the Gold Coast and play against a full team in full shape, and with the quality they had on the field."
"In the end to hold us for nil-nil maybe they deserved it, they fought like mad dogs."
Capping off a night Gold Coast would rather forget was the astonishingly low crowd. Just 4,109 people came through the turnstiles, the worst crowd ever seen for a Hyundai A-League finals match.
Adelaide United and Queensland Roar (now Brisbane) previously held the record with 8,472 turning out at Hindmarsh Stadium.
Admitting that the club may have started off on the wrong foot by setting ticket prices high early in the season, Bleiberg said that Gold Coast United would need time to develop its market.
"When we started Gold Coast United and Clive Palmer started to charge $30 because he said we were better than the Gold Coast Titans who charge $25, already people that were used to going to the football and paying nothing all of sudden had to pay $30 without knowing the product and it didn't work well," he said.
"Then the FFA took over and they charged $20 but it could be that the damage had already been done."
"I believe that people this year membership wise, they didn't know what to expect, but I think after what we showed this year the membership will double."
"It takes time to educate, there is no doubt that if we went to the next round then the crowd would have doubled, but we will learn from it and we’ll do our job next year, but that is it, it's a tough market."
On the flip-side Newcastle coach Branko Culina was full of praise for his custodian Kennedy and said the Jets would continue to ride their luck throughout the finals series.
"The longer the game went on the more we felt we could get something out of it," Culina said.
"The idea was to hold them out in the first half and then we always knew that the pressure would be on them and not us."
"You know we rode our luck, this man here (Ben Kennedy) had a super game and credit to him, he was absolutely superb."
"Again you need that bit of luck, Gold Coast probably ran out of ideas for most parts of the game and maybe we caught them at the right time because they were a bit down on form."
Given the underdog tag earlier in the week, Culina admitted that finishing sixth suited the Jets and hinted that there was more to come from his side