Arthur Diles has delivered an honest review of his team’s Isuzu UTE A-League Final Series Elimination Final exit.
Melbourne Victory’s performance against Sydney FC would have been sufficient to win many a game of football, but at AAMI Park on Saturday night, it agonisingly ended their hopes of Championship glory.
The Boys in Blue kept the visiting goalkeeper, Harrison Devenish-Meares, who won player of the match, busy in both halves, and were twice denied a shot at him from 12 yards, with a shirt pull on Jason Davidson left unpunished and an awarded penalty overturned.
Then, to add insult to injury, Sky Blues substitute Patrick Wood landed a suckerpunch, coming off the bench to hit an 80th-minute winner, as he profited from a defensive error.
Speaking during his post-match press conference, Diles talked about how fine margins cost Victory at the business end of 2025/26.
“I don’t think the best team won, but that’s football; it happens. The best team doesn’t always win. I thought we were the better team tonight, without discrediting them – I just thought we dominated.
“When their ‘keeper gets man of the match, and he keeps them in the game, and we fall short in the 18-yard boxes. In the end, we’ve made one mistake.
“I’ve always said finals football, it’s about the team that makes the least amount of mistakes, and then wins both boxes, and that’s where we fall short tonight.”
Diles went on to explain how, once the dust of disappointment settles, his next steps will be to conduct an assessment of the campaign, which concluded in the Club’s 15th ALM Finals series appearance.
“We’ll make sure we do a thorough process in evaluating our season that’s just gone. When you look at everything as a whole, you want to be a team that’s defensively strong and offensively strong.
“I think we’re in the top four of goals for and goals against. It shows that we’ve done a lot of good things this year. Could we have done better? Of course, we could have, and we should have.”
Watch Diles’ full press conference below.
