In his third year as Rangers coach, his first visit to Gisborne started with uncertainty. He was without the two players he would normally play up front. One was injured and the other suspended after being sent off.
That left Leo Taylor as a lone striker, but with midfield reinforcements arriving fast and late, which meant they were hard to pick up.
Taylor scored his side’s first, second and fourth goals, and made the third.
“He came to us a couple of years ago as a striker but, with his technical ability and fitness, he is versatile, so we’ve used him in a range of positions,” Coleman said.
“In the first couple of games (this season) he played as left wingback. Today he has made it hard to put him back in defence.”
Rangers arrived at Childers Road Reserve with only one substitute, but it was enough.
“Defence is something we try to emphasise,” Coleman said.
“In all our games this season, we’ve played all right and defended well.
“We moved up into the Federation League this year but we haven’t massively added to our squad. We knew it would be a challenge.”
Thistle coach Tam Cramer was disappointed with his team’s showing.
“We conceded four very soft goals,” he said.
“We looked flat from the start. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.”
If Thistle can take anything from this game, it is that on a bad day against a committed, workmanlike side, they were still in with a chance of sharing the points until the final whistle.
They had their problems with player fitness, too. Midfield flank player Matt Hills was injured, Matt McVey was carrying an injury and did not come on till midway through the second half, right midfielder Sam Hotas had a tight hamstring before the game and came off when McVey (for Travis White) and Ruben Garcia came on, leftback Ziggy West-Hill had just recovered from a bout with Covid, and Isaac Bush was having his first game since his return from overseas.
The Jags have it in them to do better than this, though. They played with a back three – Jirah Wanoa in the middle, West-Hill on the left and Te Kani Wirepa-Hei on the right – but the difference was that Junior Jimmy was not there. He was in midfield, filling in for McVey.
In the 3-2 victory over Whanganui Athletic the week before, Jimmy had played alongside Wanoa. They effectively had a back three of two centrebacks and a fullback, Kaden Manderson on the left. Their flank midfielders needed to do better defensively, but they scraped to victory because the defensive core was strong. The centrebacks covered for each other and were well supported by defensive midfielder Cory Thomson.
Thomson – on the back of a solid performance in the first two-thirds of the game – moved back into defence midway through the second half and helped steady the backline.
Thistle started with Manderson on the left flank, Hotas on the right, and David Salmon and Jimmy in the middle. White played as a deep-lying striker, with Jimmy Somerton leading the attack.
New Plymouth Rangers played less football from the back than Thistle, but moved the ball effectively when it was on.
They lacked tall timber – probably a factor in their conceding two headed goals – but fullbacks Toby Stratton and Oisin Ammundsen and centrebacks Hamish Pittams and skipper Devan Leggett covered each other well and were decisive when clearing danger.
Sixteen-year-old holding midfielders Zavier Brown and Gabriel Marsden played like veterans, linking defence and attack.
Rangers had three players roaming the midfield with an eye to breaking forward – Jaron Yoshimura, Niall Leggett and 15-year-old Lewis Cumberledge. They were the support act to striker Taylor, who ran himself into the ground.
Taylor put Rangers ahead in the third minute, breaking away from the defence and slotting the ball past keeper Mitchell Stewart-Hill.
Somerton almost equalised a minute later when he hit the bar with a right-footed shot from 15 metres.
An equaliser came in the 15th minute after good play down Thistle’s right flank. Wirepa-Hei played the ball to Hotas, who headed towards the byline and crossed to the near post, where Salmon came steaming in late for a good one-touch finish.
Taylor struck again in the 24th minute, catching the defence unawares when he latched on to a long pass from Rangers’ left flank through the middle.
The Jags suffered a hammer blow in the first minute of the second spell when Taylor gathered the ball on the left, got past a defender and cut the ball back for Yoshimura, arriving late and finishing the move from 12 metres.
In the 52nd minute, Thistle came back into it. Somerton played the ball wide to Manderson, whose cross found Thomson rising high beyond the far post to head the ball down and across keeper Riley Peters into the corner of the goal.
A minute later some aerial ping-pong ended with the ball being headed infield, Rangers winning the loose ball and playing it forward to Taylor, heading across the field at full speed and holding off chasing defenders to make it 4-2.
The changes came from then on. Shai Avni came on for West-Hill and Thomson moved into the backline. Seven minutes later McVey and Garcia came on, and Bush came on in the latter stages for Wirepa-Hei.
Thistle gave themselves a show when Somerton and Jimmy combined down the left in the 74th minute and Jimmy sent over a tempting cross for Garcia to rise unmarked at the far post to nod it in to make it 4-3.
The Jags did their best to apply pressure, forcing Peters to make two good punched clearances, but Rangers boxed clever to see out the distance for the win.
Palmerston North referee Russell Jones kept things moving, pausing only for substitutions and to show the yellow card to Taylor for delaying the restart of play and Wanoa for a reckless challenge.
Thistle remain sixth in the nine-team league, with Rangers two points behind them with a game in hand.
