Perth Glory coach Dave Mitchell admitted he was slightly disappointed with his side's performance in its 1-0 loss to Melbourne on Saturday night, but felt his team could build on an impressive last 15 minutes.
The Glory appeared nervous during the early stages of the encounter as Melbourne bossed the midfield and took the lead through Michael Thwaite's 11th minute header.
The Perth team was pressured into making mistakes while in possession and Mitchell said a lot of the build-up play from defence was not particularly sharp, resulting in poor crosses to his international front pairing of Argentine Adrian Trinidad and Ivory Coast-born Eugene Dadi.
But Mitchell said, the lessons learned from the game and a solid finish, which saw the Glory set up three chances during the last 10 minutes, would hold his side in good stead for when the Hyundai A-League season began properly.
"We didn't play that well, we didn't have any threat," said Mitchell following the game.
"We didn't have anyone up front that could threaten in behind them and they sort of nullified any balls into our forwards' feet, so from that point of view they defended quite well against us and we didn't play out from the back as well as I'd like to."
"But we did (good) things, we learnt a lot tonight, it didn't mean anything the actual result, so there's a lot of positives from the negatives you could say," he said.
He said that Trinidad in his second match for the club and Dadi on debut had a tough night at the office against a well-drilled Melbourne defence that was missing skipper Kevin Muscat.
"I think the balls into the strikers weren't good tonight and again that was from us building out, we looked nervous the first 15, 20 minutes again and it wasn't as good as I would have liked," Mitchell said.
"We've got a couple of player who are probably a little more comfortable on the ball that were waiting to come into the team and from that, that will help us a little bit more for if for if we can have a bit more ball control in midfield then the ball into the strikers will be better."
"(With) Eugene, he was getting bundled off the ball a little bit and ... was looking for a couple of free kicks tonight that he probably should have, but didn't get. I think his game was a little indifferent but he's got to keep working and he'll be ok in the end."