‘Horrendous’ City lick their wounds after first half capitulation in Melbourne Derby

Melbourne City boss Aurelio Vidmar was scathing in his review of his side’s performance on Saturday night, where a rush of three early goals from Victory condemned them to derby defeat at AAMI Park.

Victory came out of the blocks hard with the intensity and drive to match the demands of a local derby – City did not.

“We weren’t even close to the football for the first 20 minutes. Every duel we lost. We weren’t competitive. We weren’t moving quickly,” Vidmar said.

“We missed tackles, we were late to the ball. The duels, the one on one duels were horrendous, and that’s where they got their joy from.

“That is definitely not us. We’ve trained hard for all those things through the preseason and also made a great fist of it last week.

“For the first 20, 25 minutes tonight, that did not exist and if you can’t get up for a game like this, there’s something definitely wrong.

“The contrast of the first and the second half, that was more like us. But, Christ, do we need to cop three goals before we actually turn up? So, we have a little bit of work to do in that regard.

“You have to be competitive. You are one percent off your game, it doesn’t matter who you play, and the league is going to be like that.

“It’s going to be very even, everyone is going to beat everyone, but you need to turn up.

“You don’t need any talent for that. No talent. You just need to compete. Compete first, get that right, and generally your game follows.

“I don’t want to see that again.”

Losing duels and giving away costly turnovers in midfield made life very hard for City in the early portion of the contest.

By having both fullbacks push high up the field in build up, with Talbot into the wide right area and Behich inverting in midfield, City gain extra numbers to work the ball through the centre of the park.

The trade off of playing this way is that you are forfeiting a solid rest defence, so when Samuel Souprayen lost his aerial duel to Zidedine Machach in transition, it took just one well placed pass from Nikos Vergos to release Nishan Vellupilay in behind, with Aziz Behich unable to catch him due to more aggressive starting position.

That was the process for both of the first two Victory goals. Exploit the weaknesses in the City system, then win your duel.

Reno Piscopo was able to do the same against Kai Trewin, after Callum Talbot was dragged out wide to cover the overlapping run of Kasey Bos for Victory’s second.

Another duel lost in a dangerous position – another goal.

Patrick Beach’s error for the third was a moment that Vidmar admitted he knew was a risk of playing a young goalkeeper, but one that be backs Beach to learn from.

“We play a certain way, the goalkeepers need to be very good with their feet, that’s our philosophy and [the error] doesn’t surprise me to be honest,” he said.

“I knew at some stage that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, it happened in one of the biggest games.

“I think what you’ll find with Beachy is he’s a pretty confident kid. Sometimes you can get overconfident and he can do that sometimes.

“It’s like a striker, if you get in front of goal and you miss one, alright, the big players or the ones that are always on, they’ll go back to the well a second time and a third time and a fourth time.

“Yes, he made a mistake. Yes, it cost us a goal. But he will learn from that, and I expect him to get back into the well.

“So, nothing’s going to change from our perspective of the way we want to do things, and he’ll have to just get better.”

City will have to recover quickly, before another Victorian derby of sorts when they take on Western United in round three.