City squandered 1-0 lead after Tim Cahill opened the scoring (16’) before a Marco Rojas equaliser (24’) and late Besart Berisha winner (78’) earned the bragging rights for Victory.

City still finds itself third on the table with van’t Schip believing his team had made genuine progress with five wins from 11 games.

“I think we’re in a good place, you want to win every game but if you look at what we’ve done in the last six months, I think we’ve showed a way of playing that everybody is talking about,” Van’t Schip said.

“We’re happy that we have a real identity of how we are playing and that’s something that we want to improve and work on.

“We’ve had 11 new players come in and in tonight’s line up, we had eight or nine new players compared to last season.

“More than a half of the season still has to be played and we have a Cup, we have some young players coming into the team. I think they are all positive signs.

“We can talk about things that are not going well and the result was not what we wanted tonight, but if we look at the way that we are playing, improving and where we want to go to, I think we are on the right path.”

The Dutchman lamented a poor first half, however praised his team for creating chances early after the break.

And with the irony of Victory clinching the three points, van’t Schip wanted the judging to be done at the end of the season.

“There’s still a long way to go. We’ve had a few tough weeks behind us with a few big games but this one in the end was one too much,” he said.

“We talked about it (poor first half) at half time, I think the first half was a lot of transition from the start. It was going up and down, we went too long, too quick and second half we played much more of the game that we wanted to play.

“We had the ball and we started playing from the back, building up and getting in between. That’s where we controlled the game for a period. Unfortunately we didn’t score.

“We know Victory are strong in transition moments. Because we went long or we went direct too early, we played them into the game.

“We did a lot better in the second half and that’s the lesson we have to take out of this game, it’s something that we have to look at.”

City meets Perth Glory at home in a fortnight.