After nearly 12 months of talking about change, Melbourne Victory still look like a poorer version of the championship winning teams of years past.
Saturday's Melbourne Derby was played between two teams under enormous pressure and given those circumstances, neither the result or the nature of the game should have surprised anyone.
Players under pressure, revert to type, and with their finals hopes slipping away, Victory slipped into a poor impersonation of the style which won them success in the past.
The issue is not about application, the issue is about that many of the same players, five and three years hence, unable to replicate what they did back then.
The traditional Victory philosophy, built by dual championship winning coach Ernie Merrick, was about team accountability, positional smarts and rapid ball movement when attacking. It was built on the notion of controlling tempo, then adding increased pace when necessary to break things open.
It was also about targeted and usually controlled physicality, led by the most imposing player in the domestic game, Kevin Muscat.
The post-Merrick era under Mehmet Durakovic was hailed as a changing of the Victory way. The brand of football the former Socceroo wanted his men to play was more akin to that played by Brisbane Roar, than that by the two championship winning Melbourne sides of 2007 and 2009.
The problem was that neither Durakovic, nor his short-lived football director Francis Awaritefe, was never the right type of personality to lead such a dramatic cultural change. Any expert of workplace culture will tell you that the most effective way to facilitate cultural change is by changing personnel.
Victory's 2011-12 squad still features six players, Archie Thompson, Danny Allsopp, Rody Vargas, Adrian Leijer, Grant Brebner, Leigh Broxham, from the 2006-07 championship winning squad and another four who played a major role in the Grand Final success in 2009
Durakovic's regime of change was based on hopes that Harry Kewell would help reform dressing room culture. Similar to Durakovic, Kewell never had the strength of personality to play that circuit breaker role. In the end, he became part of the same culture.
Durakovic's inability to inflict change of the dressing room left the Victory in a state of confused identity, and was the reason in the end, the likable coach had to go.
Jim Magilton has been given a short time to address this, but despite an obvious force of personality and a brutally honest approach to his players, judging by Saturday's match, he still has considerable ground to make up.
The first half of the derby was as poor as the Victory have played in a very long time. They were not only beaten but were completely absent in midfield, while the only chances they created came from mistakes from the Heart.
Clearly given a dose of home truth from their Northern Irish manager at the break, they came out with a lot more purpose and direction. But while they began to create chances, their two most influential players in Kewell and Thompson, remained largely absent.
As mentioned earlier, in the past, Victory have successfully used a burst of aggression in order to try and break the resolve of the opposition. On Saturday, with Heart seemingly holding back the Victory surge, Grant Brebner attempted to become the circuit-breaker - or 'do a Muscat' as it is commonly known.
But the result was