Glory breaks with the past but concerns loom over City
Perth’s drought-breaking win over Melbourne City at AAMI Park represented another major milestone in Glory's Summer of Love, but also rings out alarm bells for a suddenly miserly City unit.
It had been a long time since Perth Glory’s men beat Melbourne City at AAMI Park heading into Sunday evening. Nearly five years, or 1792 days to be precise, since goals from Daniel Stynes, Dane Ingham, and Nick D’Agostino cancelled out a Jamie Macalren and propelled a Richard Garcia-led side to a 3-1 win. In the intervening years since, the two had clashed seven times at the venue, and City had won six of those encounters, outscoring their opponents twenty goals to two over this period.
But those were all stats. Stats that Glory boss Adam Griffiths, shortly before diverging onto a soliloquy about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the power that human emotion holds, said his side hadn’t looked at heading into Sunday’s game. And they’re stats that can now be consigned to the dustbin of history after a hattrick from Tom Lawrence propelled the West Australians to another 3-1 win over City and up into seventh on the A-League Men table – only prevented from supplanting City in the playoff places by goal difference.
It maintained a remarkable turnaround at the Glory since the appointment of Griffiths, first as interim and now on a full-time basis until the end of the season. Back-to-back 1-0 defeats against Adelaide and Sydney had meant that there had been some stumbles and growing pains to dampen the good vibes and quirky press conferences that had greeted his ascension to the role following the sacking of David Zdrilic. However, this win over City, given the historical precedent, and especially coming on the road against the defending champions, more than brings those feelings back.
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This was an excellent win for Glory. It was just a few months ago, while the team was still under the charge of Zdrilic, admittedly, that they had come to Melbourne and been thoroughly pantsed by City, losing 4-0 and looking like they were nowhere close to the Eastern rivals. Yet flash forward, and it was now the hosts, especially in the first half, that didn’t appear to be anywhere close to their opponent’s level: left chasing shadows as Lawrence struck twice inside the opening 22 minutes to put his side in cruise control.
“Hunger,” Griffiths said post-game. “A lot of work. A clear message. Belief.
“They’re a very good ball possession team. They have very effective pocket players. We tried to stop that from happening, and we got them on a counter.”
Lawrence, as you might have gathered from the hattrick, was a massive part of this. He took a while to get going upon landing Down Under, as one might anticipate given his relatively late arrival in the preseason, and this represents the first time he’s played outside of Britain, but based on his recent form, one imagines he’s finding his sea legs. Indeed, the Welshman, still just 31 years old and arriving after eight goal involvements across all competitions for Rangers last season, looked a class above at AAMI Park, giving one of the league’s best defences fits to the extent that one wonders how on earth he’s ended up in Perth and not somewhere back home where, being realistic, he’d probably be able to demand a much larger pay packet.
“He’s a good human,” said Griffiths of the Welsh international. “He has a lot of talent, and the boys like him.”
Of course, as banner a night as this was for Perth, it was also one that will likely have alarm bells ringing at City. Because something has clearly changed since they defeated the West Australians 4-0 earlier in the season.
Now, as they prepare to turn their calendars to 2026, City hasn’t scored multiple goals in a game since they beat Johor Darul Ta’zim 2-0 in the Asian Champions League Elite back on November 25. They have only scored multiple goals twice this season, against Victory in the November 8 derby and in that 4-0 win against Perth on October 25. Aurelio Vidmar’s side entered Sunday evening without an open play goal in their last two games, and if not for Andrew Nabbout’s stoppage time striker, which, given that it came 3-0 down, was essentially only good for window dressing in the grand scheme of things, as well as pissing off Griffiths by denying him a clean sheet.
Withdrawn at halftime, Max Caputo’s hot start to the season has given way to something of a lean patch, with the striker failing to find the net in the entire month of December. However, up-and-down periods are to be expected from young players, and anyone laying the blame for the lean run of form at the 20-year-old’s feet has rocks in their head. What this lean run has shown, however, is that the Young Socceroos’ early-season form perhaps papered over the cracks of an attack that hasn’t been able to present a consistent threat beyond him; 19-year-old Kavian Rahmani the only other player with multiple league goals for the defending champions this season.
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Now, Vidmar is absolutely correct in his post-game analysis that most of the competition is struggling to score; the goals per game figure of 2.54 in 2025-26 is the lowest in the A-League Men’s history, coming off a campaign in which many of the attackers that helped the league score at the second-highest rate of 3.26 departed for overseas opportunities. But City has title aspirations and professes a commitment to a style of football that nominally has scoring lots of goals as one of its key components. Meaning that his challenge to score goals in this lean climate is one he needs to solve.
“Last year was very similar,” Vidmar reflected. “A lot of games we won 1-0, or we got a late goal to make it 2-0, so it probably wasn’t as highlighted as much. But now, when you’re not scoring, it becomes open to everyone.
“It’s clear we’re probably moving the ball way too slow, way too slow. In our last couple of games, every time we move the ball quickly, with fewer touches, we’re getting the ball into the box and trying to create something. But when you look at tonight, in the second half, we had guys who were committed to making forward runs, and then you expect the person on the ball to make the right decision at the right time, and we did create more of those moments in the second half. So we just have to get back into training and keep working on it.”
One of Vidmar’s major themes throughout the ups and injury-ravaged downs of his side’s title-winning campaign of last season was that, amidst all the adversity, there was a set of expectations, standards, and attitudes that never wavered. It was these, he said, that allowed the side to plug-and-play replacements, often very young replacements, and keep on trucking. But those were absent against the Glory in his view, especially in the first half, and after getting away with not demonstrating them at other times this season, their truancy came back to bite.
“We’re probably a little bit below, I would say. Definitely,” he said. “We’ve had moments this season already where they’re just not quite there, and we maybe have gotten away with it at times, but tonight we just didn’t get away with it.”