Soccer: Time for Knights to deliver

At 7.45pm tonight the John Adshead-appointed embargo will be lifted and we will be allowed to assess how good this Knights side is.

Although most people have already formed an opinion, the Knights coach shrewdly asked during pre-season for six weeks' grace before judging his side because he assembled it later than most in the league.

The Knights have a record of four losses and one win from their five games, leaving them at the foot of the A-League table.

A win today against league leaders Adelaide United will go a long way to keeping the gathering wolves at bay for another week - wolves who have already bitten into the side because of the heavy foreign influence.

It would have been better, they argue, to have attempted to attract a handful of young All Whites back from Europe, which would then have helped the development of the national side.

Adshead, though, doesn't regret his approach that has seen only five Kiwis in the squad of 20. "I think what I did was right," he explained. "The experience of the players we brought here was right, I'm sure of that. If we had been where Adelaide is on the table, people wouldn't worry where they came from.

"If we had beaten Perth last week [when we went down 1-0], I would have said I'm happy with where the team is at. We're not that far off that six-week place we wanted to be. We would have liked two or three more points on the board to justify that."

Certainly the Knights have shown in patches they can more than compete with other sides in the league but they've been prone to too many lapses or not been able to convert pressure into goals.

Their record of three goals scored and 10 goals conceded goes a long way to highlighting that and only results will see them maintaining their healthy crowd average of 7382.

"I don't want to be bottom of the league," Adshead said when asked what the goal was for the next five weeks. "When we hit game 10, we don't want to be looking up at seven other clubs."

That quest starts in earnest today.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY