Melbourne Victory head coach Jeff Hopkins is hoping his team can find greater consistency next season.
Despite being competitive in every game in 2017-18, Victory finished in a disappointing seventh on the table.
It claimed wins over City, Canberra United and Adelaide United, and also pushed the likes of Brisbane Roar and Sydney FC.
Hopkins said his team had improved on last season, but it needed to be more consistent in 2018-19.
“We have made improvements. We have moved forward in a number of areas, but most probably again looking at the season as a whole, I think it’s still a disappointment,” he said.
“I think we were a little bit better than our league position showed, but again I can see how we weren’t two or three places higher because probably what we didn’t have was consistency, not just from game to game but within the games as well.
“At times we played some really good football and scored some great goals, but also in between that, there was some real poor lapses of concentration and quality as well.
“Overall, I’m pleased with some of the progress that we’ve made, but overall it’s more of a disappointment.”
A youthful Victory managed to give game time and experience to the likes of Kyra Cooney-Cross (16), Melina Ayres (18), Annabel Martin (19) and Angela Beard (20).
Hopkins said that should hold Victory in good stead moving forward.
“If you look at the young players we brought through this year and gave more experience to and looked towards building something more permanent for the future, that was great,” he said.
“We had Annabel Martin play another full season, Angela Beard is still only around that 20-21 years of age, you look at Melina Ayres came through, Kyra Cooney-Cross. There were a lot of really promising performances from those guys so that was one area I was really pleased with.
“Our international players, I think we recruited quite well, they never let us down, they gave us some real quality and things off the field, our training base was better, at a more central location for the players, just a few things, the professionalism of the whole group was much better this year.
“We made some real progress which over time we’ll start to see, but I guess the disappointing thing was it’s a performance-based industry and results-based and we didn’t get the results that we hoped for at the beginning of the season.”
