Melbourne City head coach Aurelio Vidmar could not hide his disappointment after the team’s 3-1 defeat to rivals Melbourne Victory in the Melbourne Derby.
In a reunion with former Championship-winning boss Patrick Kisnorbo, City managed to pull a goal back via Andrew Nabbout in the second half but the damage was already done.
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“Horrendous, horrendous,” Vidmar said at the start of his post-match press conference.
“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.
“Definitely not us. We’ve trained hard for all of those things in pre-season and made a great fist of it last week.
“For the first 20-25 minutes tonight, that did not exist. If you can’t get up for a game like this, something is definitely wrong.
“We missed tackles, we were late to the ball, the one-on-one duels were horrendous and that’s where they got their joy from.”
City, who are now six matches without a win against Victory, suffered their first defeat of the season, having edged Newcastle Jets 1-0 in Round 1.
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Vidmar added: “We had a great week leading up to this, nice and calm like normal.
“To me they look up for it so obviously the prove is always in the pudding when you go out onto the pitch. Then you see the contrast of the first and second half, and that was more like us.
“But Christ, do we need to cop three goals before we actually turn up? We have a bit of work to do. I don’t’ want to see that again.”
“You have to be competitive. The league is going to be like that, it’s going to be very even. Everyone is going to beat everyone,” Vidmar added.
“But you need to turn up. You don’t need talent for that. No talent, you just need to compete. Compete first, get that right and usually your game follows.”
