Speaking to reporters at Block Arcade in Melbourne on Tuesday, Melbourne Victory defender Sebastian Esposito expressed his relief with the team's important 2-1 win over Adelaide United last weekend, hailing it as a "massive reward for effort" after the club lost four of their first seven games of the 2025/26 A-League season.
"We've had a tough start to the season, so for us it was nice to get the monkey off the back," Esposito told the media.
"We're looking forward to the weekend and continuing our good form.
"We've been working very hard but the goals weren't falling in. Hopefully that's a sign of things to come."
Esposito insisted there was no panic amongst the squad and no dissatisfaction with head coach Arthur Diles, who has been under intensifying pressure from supporters frustrated with the dramatic slide from last season's runners-up.
"You can't do much if results aren't falling your way, so it's just about controlling what you can control," he explained.
"The weekend showed that if we just kept persisting with the quality that we've got that things are going to start falling our way.
"We know how much quality we've got as a squad and how good we performed at the weekend, but it means nothing if we can't go into this weekend and repeat our efforts. It's gonna be massive."
The 20-year-old identified the upcoming derby as his most anticipated game of the season from a personal standing, saying he had "grown up watching Christmas derbies as a kid".
Now without a win in four consecutive games against their Melbourne rivals, Victory are shooting for their first derby win since October 2024, and Esposito is confident they can improve upon their 2-0 home loss to City in November.
"We lost but we had a lot of positives and probably deserved more from the game.
"For us, it's going to be about repeating the amount of chances we were creating and hopefully get three points.
"We've got a lot more confidence going in off the back of a big win."
The Victory are still rooted to the bottom of the standings with just eight points from eight games, having scored only six goals.
Two of them came from under-fire Greek striker Nikos Vergos, who was on the verge of being dumped from the squad altogether after 17 consecutive appearances without a goal.
"Nikos has a lot of quality and we know his quality internally," Esposito said.
"It was good to see him score two especially."
City will host Victory at AAMI Park on Saturday night at 7:35pm local time.
