Football: Wellington Phoenix go down in flames to Western Sydney Wanderers

Brendon Santalab of the Wanderers celebrates scoring while Andrew Durante dabs in frustration. Photo / Getty

Different coach, same substandard performance.

The Wellington Phoenix marked the first match of Chris Greenacre's third stint as caretaker coach with a 4-1 humiliation at Western Sydney last night.

Greenacre has taken over (at least temporarily) from the outgoing Darije Kalezic, and having worked with the club's younger players as reserve team coach, his starting 11 included 17-year-old Liberato Cacace and 19-year-old Sarpreet Singh.

They and their older team-mates at least held their hosts in the first half, with the score 1-1 at the break. The game was slow to get going, with Christopher Ikonomidis thumping his 32nd-minute free kick against the post in a rare moment of quality in the final third.

Brendon Santalab opened the scoring late in the first half with his 10th goal in 16 games against the Phoenix. Mark Bridge got in behind the Phoenix defence on the end of a long ball over the top, literally reducing Scott Galloway to a crawl and drawing Andrew Durante and Dylan Fox before squaring the ball to Santalab for a simple tap-in.

The timing was dreadful, conceding so close to halftime, but two minutes later, the Phoenix did something unexpected - they equalised. Durante won a header from a free kick, the ball fell to Roy Krishna and the rebound from his shot was buried in the top corner by Singh. But that ultimately proved the sole highlight of the night for the Nix.

Western Sydney stepped up a gear in the second half to run out comfortable winners. Top of Greenacre's to-do list for this week will be defending set pieces after Brendan Hamill scored from corners in the 68th and 78th minutes to swing the game the way of the Wanderers. The first saw him soar above Goran Paracki and Durante to head home; the second saw him left unmarked to sidefoot in a near-post flick-on.

The hosts netted another in the 90th minute after goalkeeper Tando Velaphi came charging out of his penalty area, leaving Ikonomidis to finish a three-on-one move which underlined why the Phoenix have the A-League's worst defence (46 goals conceded in 22 games).

The Phoenix welcome former coach Ernie Merrick back to Wellington when they host the Newcastle Jets on Saturday night, still needing four points from six games to avoid the statistic of worst team in the club's 10-year history.

Wanderers 4 (B. Santalab 40, B. Hamill 68, 78, C. Ikonomidis 90) Phoenix 1 (S. Singh 42).
Halftime: 1-1.