While happy with the solidity his undermanned side showed whilst with the ball, Melbourne City youth coach Joe Palatsides was left to rue their lack of creativity in their 0-0 draw against Melbourne Victory.
The Mini-Melbourne Derby petered out into a dull affair at Lakeside Stadium and the City boss admitted the situation may have played its part in the low-key affair.
“I think derby’s are usually like that anyway. You want to have a lot of quality, but usually the emotions take hold of the game for the most part,” Palatsides said.
“I though we held possession well and we were the more dominant team. We probably didn’t get the chances we wanted at the end of each possession-based attack – then it just became a more Russian Roulette type game.
“Whoever was going to transition best was going to win and whoever made the bigger mistake was going to lose.
“At the end of the day, I think we’ve come away from home and got a point, so we’ve got to look at it from that angle and say, we haven’t played our best game – we get a result, that’s not too bad for us this week.”
The solidity in defence was one highlight to pick out, with a host of first choice defenders unavailable– Ross Archibald, Nick Symeoy and Matt Millar amongst those – and Palatsides had plenty of praise for the depth of his squad.
“Victory had a few players out, and we had a few too, so it was more a case of looking back and seeing what sort of depth we have as a youth squad and I’m quite happy to play the young boys who are train on’s,” the coach said.
“We play them every week anyway so I think it was a good experience for them. It’s good to see that even though we’ve got a few players missing, we can still play up to an acceptable level.”
He continued on with his analysis of the less experienced members of the youth squad, declaring it a matter of getting minutes on the pitch to see improvement in the train on players.
“Week by week, the experience is what makes them better players. We have good games, we have bad games and during the week, we’ll analyse what we didn’t do well and we’ll try and get better next week,” he said.
“We don’t expect to have a ready made team, we try to develop these players to become better so this’ll be a part of it; we made a couple of mistakes and we’ll try and correct it for next week.”