All Whites quartet get deserved result

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ANDREW GORRIE/Dominion Post Zoom

Phoenix fans in yellow.

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The Phoenix's four exhausted All Whites were the toast of Wellington last night after they defied the pain barrier to help lead the club within one win of an A-League grand final.

Tony Lochhead, Leo Bertos, Tim Brown and Ben Sigmund all started for New Zealand in Thursday evening's international against Mexico in Los Angeles – and did the same in last night's thriller at Westpac Stadium.

The quartet all performed strongly; belying the fact they only touched down at Wellington Airport on Saturday morning.

Left-back Lochhead said it would take "a few days" to recover from playing a gruelling 210 combined minutes of top-level football.

"The legs are feeling pretty tired," Lochhead said.

"I was cramping up in the last 10 minutes of the Mexico game and I managed to hang in there for this game – 120 minutes is not ideal but we got the job done so it's fantastic."

Lochhead said it was a case of simply ignoring the physical pain but admitted it would have been nice if Paul Ifill had buried his gilt-edged chance deep into regular time.

"If you're thinking, `oh, I'm tired, I'm sore,' then you're going to play like that. It would have been nice if we could have put a few of those chances away earlier, but we won."

Lochhead said backing up was one of the hardest asks of his football career.

"It's a tough trip but coming back on business class made a big difference. You get a decent night's sleep and lie down completely. So that was huge for us. If we'd travelled back economy, it was pretty rough on the way over, so that was a nice bonus to have that."

Lochhead paid tribute to a fanatical, near capacity crowd of 32,792.

"That was awesome; to have a full house like that was huge. When we scored that goal to make it 2-1, it was just a fantastic feeling. You get goose bumps."

Winger Bertos, who was dynamic in the first half, said he was running on pure emotion.

"It wasn't really a problem getting up for this game, the adrenaline sort of took over," Bertos said.

"When you've got a crowd like that behind you, it just picks you up and you carry on."

Bertos was replaced by Daniel in the second half but would have liked to have continued.

"I didn't want to come off. I was enjoying myself out there and I wanted to stay to the end. But we've got a fantastic squad this year.

"You just look at the bench that we had out there and the players that came on, they make an impact."

- © Fairfax NZ News