Melbourne Victory head coach Kevin Muscat says the lure of reaching a second straight Westfield FFA Cup Final will drive his players against City on Tuesday night.
While Victory is aiming to become the first club to win back-to-back Westfield FFA Cup titles, it must overcome City at AAMI Park for a place in the decider.
“There’s a huge amount at stake. There’s a spot at the big dance available and we want it to be us,” Muscat said at a joint press conference with City coach John van’t Schip on Monday.
“It (the Westfield FFA Cup) has been tremendous. It’s something we really need to embrace and push forward with.
“We’re the only code that can have such a competition in the country. There’s no doubt over its few years it’s grown dramatically.
“Hopefully tomorrow night goes down as another occasion that gives it another big boost.
“There’ll be a decent crowd that comes along and watches a really exciting game of football.”
Victory goes into the game confident after securing its first win of the Hyundai A-League season against Adelaide United on Saturday night.
It was an improved performance, but there is still plenty to work on according to the Victory boss.
“We’ve looked back on it and there are still improvements from that game,” Muscat said.
“We’re still working on a number of things, but I was pleased with the attitude. I was pleased with the way we started the game.”
According to van’t Schip, City is expecting a much improved Victory to the one it faced in Round 2 of the Hyundai A-League season.
“We know that there is going to be a different Victory out there tomorrow to the game we had a few days ago,” he said.
“As we know, every game is new and different. We played different Derbies the last few years, you win one and the next one it’s totally different.
“The only difference this time is that it’s over a very short period you play each other two times, so we just focus on what we have to do, what we want to do, the way that we want to play and that’s it.”
Tickets for the Melbourne Derby Semi Final are available here.
