It will be a grand final rematch at Etihad Stadium on Saturday with both teams losing a number of players which helped them to the top two last season.

Victory have lost key men Marco Rojas, Daniel Georgievski, Fahid Ben Khalfallah, Rashid Mahazi, Nick Ansell and Alan Baro.

Despite that Victory have secured the services of five players and welcome back Thomas Deng who was on loan to Dutch outfit Jong PSV.

Donachie had faith promoted youth players Josh Hope, Cameron McGilp and Pierce Waring could have a big involvement this season.

“You can’t bring young players in and then expect them to be up to professional standard straight away," Donachie said.

"You have to bring them in like we did for pre-season and get them up to that pace.

“That’s how you've got to build a team. I think that’s how we’ve created that depth, I think we do have a lot of young boys coming through like Josh who I think has come on in leaps and bounds.”

Victory will have to do without James Troisi and Mark Milligan due to the Australia-Syria game in Malaysia, while the Sky Blues have no players that are in the Socceroos squad.

Donachie said while he was disappointed with the outs and believes having Socceroos in the side makes the squad stronger.

“I saw a few articles with Arnie coming out shaping his squad about not having national team players in it,” he said.

“It’s a good thing to have national players in your squad, we’ll miss them for Round One but we have players that can come in and you want them in your squad.

"It brings training up, brings the standard up and it’ll make the club better.”