"They've never stopped believing" - How Arthur Diles helped bring Victory's season from ruin to the brink of glory
Six winless games after Patrick Kisnorbo quit the club, Victory's season looked done. Now they're in a grand final. In his own words, here's how Arthur Diles managed this remarkable turnaround.
It was January 18, and Ethan Alagich had just fired Adelaide United to a 3-2 win over Melbourne Victory in the latest iteration of the Original Rivalry. Six A-League Men games had now passed since Patrick Kisnorbo stunningly quit Victory on the eve of the Christmas Derby, and they hadn’t saluted in any of those fixtures. As travelling supporters made their way back to their hotels, they did so with their side sitting outside the top six for a third-straight round, their hopes that anything could be salvaged from a season that started with such promise rapidly diminishing. Arthur Diles was still interim then, with conspiracies swirling that he’d long agreed to take over as the permanent boss, but the lack of a win to hang the announcement off meant his title role was still nominally that of a caretaker. Discontent was in the air.
What a difference a few months can make.
Diles and Victory now stand on the precipice of a record-equalling fifth Australian title and, to make it all a bit sweeter, they’ve got a chance to do it against the same foe his tenure started with — crosstown rivals Melbourne City. It’s not the first Melburnian Derby in national league history – Western United and City met just a few years ago, while South Melbourne clashed with Melbourne Knights and Carlton SC in NSL deciders back in the 1990s – but it’s the first time these two will meet with it all on the line. 17,000 tickets were sold for the game even before the general public was able to get their hands on them and it’s now been confirmed the game is a sellout. Swan St will be rocking.
Victory, for their part, has lost just three times since that defeat to Adelaide, while picking up seven wins to finish inside the league’s top six. Few expected them to head out on the road and get past a Western Sydney side unbeaten in 12 games in the elimination final once there, but off the back of an inspired performance from Daniel Arzani, they did. Fewer expected them to get past the newly crowned premiers Auckland FC over two legs in the semifinals, and the number of believers shrank even further when they fell to a 1-0 defeat in the first leg in Melbourne. But then the A-Leagues’ resident villains spoiled the Kiwi fairytale with a 2-0 win.
Saying they’re a team playing with swagger – outside of maybe Arzani and Zinédine Machach’s – probably isn’t the right term. But they’re absolutely a team playing with confidence. Shown by Machach’s celebration with the injured Brendan Hamill’s shirt against Auckland, they’re a united group, too, while the way they’ve found a way to get the job done in recent weeks demonstrates a side playing for Diles.
And now they’re in a grand final. It’s a stage that felt almost like the minimum standard when you looked at the talent assembled they’d assembled in preseason, a view reinforced when the club’s decision-makers overlooked Kisnorbo’s history with City and banked on his championship-winning pedigree. But when that decision went south, anything more than a cameo appearance in the playoffs began to look almost unfathomable. Their coach, though, never stopped believing.
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“Those periods can work two ways,” Diles told JDL Media. “It can destroy you, or it can bring you together. Thankfully, for us, it's brought us together.
“They've never stopped believing, even during periods where we might not have won. Their attitude, their discipline, and their work ethic, on a day-to-day basis of training, never wavered and never changed. They were putting in work every day, and they were giving me every belief every day that this would turn the corner and the results would change. That's why I've always been confident in this group.
“My belief in this group is well beyond their own belief. I've said to them always on the way: just believe in yourself half as much as I believe in you, and you're a chance.
“I said to them on the very first day that maybe it's not a great thing for you that I know you better than maybe Patrick did, because Patrick came in new but I already knew their ability. I knew that togetherness and my expectations for them were probably higher because of that.
“I've held them accountable from day one to stick to that because we know the level that we can achieve and get to. We're just making sure that they worked hard every day, they stayed humble, and they stayed together. And they've done that.”
This belief and the turnaround in fortunes were built upon a crucial conversation with Diles’ leadership group soon after his appointment.
Brought into the club as an assistant coach under Tony Popovic, he had plenty of familiarity with the squad – it was a key reason the club’s brass felt he was best-placed to take over midseason – but none of them had ever played under him as a senior head coach. Indeed, having previously worked under Popovic and Arthur Papas across Australia and Greece, his sudden ascension to the main role was the first time he’d ever been placed in charge of a senior outfit – his previous professional head coaching experience coming as the youth boss during the heydays of Western Sydney Wanderers’ Y-League side.
Not every assistant is suited to making the leap to a full-time role and there are inevitably questions that hover over any that make that transition. So when the responsibility of taking over at Victory was suddenly thrust upon him, Diles knew he needed to act quickly and decisively to ensure that the dressing room’s leadership, the ones that had the potential to set the tone and make or break his tenure, were on board.
“The most important thing was the level of respect between the playing group and myself and the staff,” he explained. “I knew that once you had the respect of your playing group and your staff, then everything worked off the back of that. Cracks will appear regardless but if there's respect amongst the group, you can patch those cracks up and you can overcome them. That was the most important thing from the word go.
“I sat down with the leadership group and set out a few not rules but made some things pretty clear about respect and how they will see me from an assistant coach to a head coach.
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“I had that responsibility as the assistant here; Tony started me on that journey here. I was responsible for a lot of meetings, one-on-ones, and group discussions. So I'd already been in a position where I had to have some tough conversations with players or the playing group… and the fact that I had that relationship with the players and that responsibility helps, because you already have that certain level of mutual respect.
“I made it pretty clear how I wanted to work moving forward. And at the forefront of all that was respect and communication. I knew that if my communication was clear with them and we had a mutual respect, then everything else would flow off the back of that.
“It helps me with such a great change room and a tight-knit playing group. We have that mutual respect and they have that mutual respect. With that, you can go a long way. That's something that I've stuck by from day one, and thankfully, it's got us where we are today.”
The belief of the team gained, Diles could also count on the backing of Victory’s higher-ups. Upon his appointment, both managing director Caroline Carnegie and director of football John Didulica spoke of how Kisnorbo had been appointed as a solo act was because of the strong belief that was held in the pre-existing staff – “One of the reasons Patrick came in without an entourage, without his own coaches, without his own staff, was because we're very confident in the program that we're running and the direction that we're heading," Didulica told ESPN.
At the time, it felt like they almost had to say that, given how the Kisnorbo gamble had busted. But a victory, for lack of a better word, lap of the decision-makers’ own could also await on Saturday.
In the stands, Diles view that "You win [fans] over by winning games" has born out throughout the season, too, with the doubt that underlined much of the club’s fanbase view towards him simmering for much of the season giving way to celebrations of of ‘Big Arty Dil’ only really popping up in recent weeks.
“It is only human nature and natural that when you have a new coach that takes over in the circumstances in which Arthur did – all our members and fans' jobs who put their hard earned money into the club, are right to question whether the right decisions have been made,” Carnegie told JDL Media.
“Often they're making those comments without, perhaps full [insight] on the things that we can talk to them about. There was never in our minds a better candidate to take over than Arthur. Even on the weekend, with what Arthur did and the tactics that he used against Auckland. Some of the injuries that we had in play but also just the style that Auckland has, it’s shown he has a really bright future as a coach, and we're excited that we could get him at the start of that journey at Melbourne Victory.
“Absolutely, we [believed Diles could deliver a title]. Every decision we made, whether it was appointing Arthur, his assistant coach, or anyone who sat around him, was built around success. We know that's what our fans want and deserve, and that is what everyone at the club wants and deserves.
“Arthur's appointment was about how we best set ourselves up to end up in a grand final and to win the bloody grand final.
“Paddy leaving, that wasn't what we expected at the time, but the decisions that we made were made around how we made this season a success.”
On the eve of the finals series, Diles revealed that news articles that came out amidst that winless run predicting Victory would miss the playoffs had been printed out and taped to the walls of the dressing room. Doubt, perhaps real or perhaps manufactured, was being stoked to fuel his side’s fire. And in keeping with this trend, he was quick to claim the underdog status heading into Saturday.
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Set to play in their fifth grand final in six years, City come into the final after finishing second, possessing the best defence in the league and fielding a side packed with Socceroos from front to back. They've had to absorb adversity themselves – their rooms resembling something more approaching a casualty ward at times throughout the campaign – and come out the other side stronger. Marco Tilio is potentially the most in-form player in the country, and Mat Leckie, hunting his first ALM title, looms as a potential option off the bench. While Diles has been a senior coach for less than a season, Aurelio Vidmar possesses decades of experience in the dugout – coaching against Victory in a (losing) grand final back in 2009.
“The script the way it is, it's a Melbourne Derby in a final – what more could you ask for?” said Diles. “They've had a great season. They're an in-form team as well.
People wouldn't have called us an in-form team leading into the finals. All year, people think that we've been inconsistent. We're the team that's rocked up at every game where people probably thought, 'yeah, they can win, but we probably don't expect them to win' for their own various reasons. But we're there at the end and we've earned that. We've worked really hard for it, and we're really looking forward to it.
“My first game as an interim coach here was a derby. My very first final as a professional coach in the NYL was against Melbourne City as well. I've come full circle now, from a youth team to a first team, and it's the same opponent in the final one. That's something I look back on. It feels a little bit surreal as well.
“I can't wait to walk out on Saturday night with our fans. They're going wild. I know when our fans are there in numbers, the atmosphere is unrivalled here in Australia. We're at AAMI Park, I know with the away team, but I think in the stands will be the home team and I look forward to that. And I know the players can't wait for that. It's really exciting. We can't wait.”