Here’s Joey Lynch’s match report
Goodnight!
Maty Ryan’s reaction
We’ve got great belief that we can win the tournament. Obviously there’s a process involved in doing that and we ticked another box today.
Syria are tenacious, they’re relentless and they leave it all out there. We expected a physical battle and for them to be quite direct. Thankfully we managed to deal with all those scenarios and get the win.
[On Australia’s performance with the ball] Football’s not easy. You’re not gonna get it right every single time. We probed a lot, had quite a few entries in the box and were probably unlucky not to put one or two more chances away. If it’s a 3-0 scoreline everyone looks at the game differently.
We got the job done. Defensively we were strong; we pride ourselves on that. [Was the fumble in the second half down to the face mask?] Nah not at all mate. I’ve made plenty of mistakes without a face mask. It’s just one of those things; the balls move around a little bit these days, but thankfully I did enough to keep it out. I didn’t execute it as well as I wanted to. Thankfully it didn’t hurt us in the end.
