After being bundled out of the A-League finals race, the Central Coast Mariners now have the Asian Champions League on the horizon. The Mariners lost their two-legged minor semi-final clash with the Queensland Roar, going down 2-0 and 2-1 (4-1 on aggregate) and losing the chance to redeem themselves for last season's Grand Final loss to the Newcastle Jets.

Now Lawrie McKinna's side can look forward to the Asian Champions League which kicks off in less than a month.

"We'll be sitting down tomorrow to start our planning for the AFC Champions League and there's not going to be a lot of down time," said McKinna.

"We've got a big four months ahead of us now and now that we're out of the Finals Series, we'll look at our options.

"We'll freshen the boys up a bit, after the last few weeks their heads will be down a bit, but there's no use dwelling on it, we have to get over our last five weeks and take the positives out of the last 35 minutes from tonight and move forward."