After several days of relentless heat – with temperatures reaching as high as 41 degrees – Saturday evening saw Melbourne’s stifling, simmering atmosphere finally break as a sunny day turned into a cool night. The conditions in the Victorian capital were perfect for football on 21 December, and – as 24,053 fans descended on AAMI Park for the 47th meeting of Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City – the night was about to erupt in an altogether different manifestation of suffocating, simmering heat...that of the Melbourne Derby. In the stands overlooking the green turf of AAMI Park? Navy-and-blue-clad Victory fans, pale blue-wearing City fans, and, I can write with complete certainty, at least one Wellington Phoenix fan – me.
The North Terrace unveil their Southern Cross-inspired tifo before the latest edition of the Melbourne Derby. (Image: The Sporting WALL)
Why is a Wellington Phoenix fan writing about a match between two of Victoria’s three A-Leagues teams, you ask? First, I live in Melbourne (and will have been here three years in January). Secondly, I love the A-League, and – thirdly, and most notably in the context of this piece – I simply can’t resist a derby.
Derbies – loosely, football’s parlance for a game between two teams from the same area – are traditionally tribalist, toxic tribulations. Think big, heavy challenges. Little, niggly challenges. Groups of players clustered around the referee, mid-pitch melees breaking out after one shirt pull or shoulder barge too many. Commentators constantly remind us that these games have “an extra edge” or proclaim that “there’s no love lost between these two sides”. Each is a well-worn trope; Saturday night proved why each is true.
But that fierceness of fandom that makes derbies such a staple in the calendar often means these games – and the reporting surrounding them – end up clouded by that antagonistic aura. As a fan of a different club, I wanted to take a step back and pen a piece unfiltered through the prism of partisanship or pride – in other words, to write about the Melbourne Derby as a (mostly) neutral party. And what a game it was for the neutrals, by the way.
Melbourne Victory came into the clash after winning all three home matches they had played in the 2024/25 A-League Men season; Melbourne City turned up after winning all four of their away ties in this campaign.
One of those records would have to end Saturday night: instead, both did, as Yonatan Cohen’s neat early strike was cancelled out when Roderick Miranda pounced on a six-yard-box scuffle – which came after City goalkeeper Patrick Beach flapped at a corner – to leave things all square.
Each side set up in variations of a 4-2-3-1 formation, but you could be forgiven for finding the midfield hard to spot as each side constantly found their strikers one-on-one with the goalkeeper in a riveting, end-to-end clash. Yet, though the Victory fans were in full voice, City struck first when Cohen controlled a lofted through ball from Steven Ugarkovic, taking two touches before stroking home a superb left-footed effort high into the top corner of Beach’s goal.
From there, the teams traded blows. Jordi Valadon should have squared the ledger after an intelligent Daniel Arzani cutback, and Beach made a brilliant save down low to his left to thwart Zinedine Machach’s long-range effort.
Soon, Beach would be called into action again after another speculative – but very much on target – effort from Ryan Teague; only moments earlier, Beach's opposite number, Jack Duncan, needed several bites at the cherry under pressure from two City players to hold a free-kick lofted into the area.
If any individual player looked the epitome of the nervousness of the derby, it was the two custodians; as the game progressed and the nervous energy became palpable, neither seemed wholly at ease.
City started the stronger after the break and – but for the scrambling last-ditch efforts of Duncan and his defence – could have been two or three up by the time interim Victory manager Arthur Diles introduced Nishan Velupillay and Bruno Fornaroli into the fray. The latter, in particular, set about immediately changing the game, and the Uruguayan’s shot soon forced a critical corner. Just as he did a week earlier in the dying moments of City’s clash with Auckland for the Black Knights’ equaliser, Beach lost the flight of the incoming ball, and Miranda duly smashed home following a brief scramble in the penalty area.
Then the tie began to grow frayed and tattered, with Victory smelling blood, and City determined to bounce back from what head coach Aurelio Vidmar would surely rue as a sloppy goal. Fornaroli came close with a curling effort, while City substitute Callum Talbot nearly immediately impacted the game with a rasping, raking drive, forcing a full-stretch Duncan to tip around his far post. Fornaroli had a glorious chance to win it in stoppage time, but much to the chagrin of his temporary boss Diles – who took charge in Victory's first game since former gaffer Patrick Kisnorbo's shock exit earlier in the week – the striker fluffed his lines.
In the end, a draw felt like the correct result and, given the remarkable extent of the parity between these sides historically – Victory has won 17, City have won 14, and 14 have ended in draws – was perhaps the most predictable, too. The point apiece leaves the two sides’ respective league positions unchanged, with Victory still ensconced in third with 17 points and City three behind on 14.
Watching football matches where the team you support isn’t involved is always interesting. The demands of life rarely permit me the time to do it, but it’s a genuine pleasure (especially when the games are this good).
But one of both the joys and the most oft-touted tropes of the A-League that “every team can beat each other" makes watching a game where my team aren’t involved – like this Melbourne Derby – all the more exciting because of its knock-on effects and consequences for the league at large. As a Wellington fan, there’s always been a little extra in games involving Victory, too.
Melbourne Victory has had some tremendous tussles with the Phoenix over the years, but only recently has the matchup taken on the more distinct forms of a genuine rivalry. What could always be relied upon to be a one-sided fixture – especially at AAMI Park – has tightened up dramatically in the last couple of years, culminating in the 2023/24 campaign, when the sides lined against each other an astonishing five times (three in the regular season; two in the Semi-Final). All but one – a Phoenix win secured in the final minutes of stoppage time – ended in draws: three 1-1s and a 0-0. Those games were suffocating strangleholds, as engrossing as they were hard to watch, so it was pleasant here to see it’s not just the Phoenix that brings such tight, reticent displays out of this Victory side.
It is fair to say, too, that all that recent history has – perhaps counterintuitively, given the heartbreaking nature of the Phoenix’s loss to the Victory in the second leg of the aforementioned Semi-Final in Wellington – given me a bit of a soft spot for Melbourne Victory. The club feels rooted in the local community, particularly in the Victorian city's Greek and Italian populations, in a way that feels genuine and authentic and grounded in the European traditions of football club support. Big games open with Victory shirt-clad violinist Evangeline Victoria – an apt moniker – playing string renditions of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" and Gala Rizatto's "Freed From Desire". There's an energy to it, an imagination, an identity.
Yet with any conversation around the fervour and furore with which most Melbourne Victory fans approach the in-stadium football experience comes the other, inevitable side of the coin – a nasty side from a minority that, particularly when Derby Day rolls around, never feels too far from the surface. Melbourne Victory does, of course, have a bit of a track record of this, and the long-standing flirtations with hooliganism from factions of its supporters became a full-blown romance when a fan hurled a metal bucket at the face of Tom Glover, then City’s goalkeeper, in December 2022’s edition of this very fixture. In a match that made headlines worldwide, many Victory fans invaded the pitch and ‘bucket man’, the thrower Alex Agelopoulos, was handed a three-month jail sentence.
For City's part, they perhaps represent the converse of this passionate yet perilous form of fandom. A club backed by a Gulf State and furnished with all the bells and whistles that well-heeled multi-club ownership provides, yet one that first lost its original name, and saw its identity subsumed into the colours, sponsors, and logo shape of its Manchester-based big brother. A club with a full trophy cabinet, but which – and this is to cast no aspersions at all on City – feels a safer, more "sanitised" version of its cross-town counterpart.
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You wouldn't have known it at Saturday night's derby. This leads me to the final cast member of the night's festivities – AAMI Park.
All good shows need a stage, and I have seen plenty to love at AAMI Park over the years (although, somehow, I am still yet to see a Phoenix win here since I moved to Melbourne in January 2022). The stadium, more literally known as 'Melbourne Rectangular Stadium', has a certain magic and magnetism I’ve always admired – and it was on full display on derby night (though I’m not sure I’ll ever come around to the seats decked out in varying shades of dull avocado green!) It may be a graveyard for the Wellington Phoenix – as, again, the league’s commentators are so fond of saying every time the Nix touch down in the Victorian capital – but wow…it is a special place to watch a game of football unfold.
And it's even better when the game itself is enthralling, which is undoubtedly an apt description for the latest edition of the Melbourne Derby.
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