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Mar 25, 2018   |  11:04AM AET

Muscat: Our final pass was missing

Muscat: Our final pass was missing

Melbourne Victory head coach Kevin Muscat lamented his side’s inability to find a final pass in its 1-0 loss to Perth Glory.

Victory dominated possession at nib Stadium on Sunday, but it was unable to find a way through against Perth.

Instead, a first-half header from Andy Keogh saw Glory end Victory’s five-match unbeaten run.

At a post-match news conference, Muscat was asked about his side’s performance and its finish to the campaign.

on the game…
“Right now, it’s just the emotion immediately after the game and the overriding emotion is (we were) just a little bit off. It was an enormous amount of effort in that first half after the first 10 or 15 minutes, where I think both teams couldn’t get a hold of the game, couldn’t get control, both teams passing the ball to each other, not too much was really built or orchestrated. I thought then we settled and we started getting on top and we started getting into some good areas, we started dragging their full-backs inside, isolating Tommy Deng with (Diego) Castro in that front third and he was getting a number of crosses into the box and something obviously we’d looked at, making Castro work defensively.

“A couple of decisions where you look to last week, whenever we had a chance to create an opportunity, good decisions were made and therefore it leads to goalscoring opportunities and we didn’t capitalise. Liam Reddy makes an unbelievable save off Leroy (George) off a well-worked set-piece and then you concede just before half-time. I wasn’t overly concerned because I thought we started to dominate, but to come in at half-time was a little bit of a kick in the backside for us and second half, albeit it was end to end, we just couldn’t find that final pass in Perth’s back third.

“Once they get the goal and they come in at half-time and the situation they’re in, they’re desperate and they defend very well with a lot of desperation and I just thought at any point if we get one, we’ll go on and win this with the amount of ascendancy we had, but it wasn’t to be.”

on the final games of the season…
“We’ve got a reason to be playing well, without doubt. We’ve got a reason. We’ve got things that we want to do, we’ve got a why – why we want to play well and why we want to pick up points – so once you’ve got that reason, you can start moving from there. Tonight, not from a lack of trying, it wasn’t to be for us, we came up against a Perth team that got themselves ahead in the game and defended extremely desperately.”