Glory were dubbed predictable by City coach Michael Valkanis on Saturday but the visitors were able to carry out their counter-attacking threat with the game sealed at the half hour mark.

Lowe said he felt confident when he saw City’s starting XI leave Luke Brattan on the bench before he came on for Ruon Tongyik at half-time.

“I was glad to see Brattan not there and (Osama) Malik there, no disrespect to Malik but Brattan gets on the ball, he causes problems, got craft and guile so that was an interesting situation,” Lowe said.

“Therefore, Timmy (Cahill) is not a natural midfielder and he’s finding himself in that situation quite a lot, so really you’ve only got to take care of (Neil) Kilkenny from a creative perspective to a certain extent because we executed.

 “The crazy thing is they changed their shape which was a massive compliment to us to counter our strength which is counter-attack, but we got two counter-goals.

“At the end of the day, if you’ve got quality – whether it’s a delivery from a corner, free kick or through ball, it’s very difficult to counter that and that’s what we’ve got.”

Glory will now face Sydney FC on Saturday and Lowe said they could be camping in Melbourne as they anticipated a clash with Victory in the semi-final.

The Englishman joked about smashing beers before the semi, but made his message loud and clear – all credit goes to his men.

“I think it shows how good we were, it wasn’t how poor they were,” he said. “For them not to have a shot… it wasn’t because they weren’t trying or anything like that, it was because of our quality defensively.

“We didn’t allow them to turn up, they’re getting on the ball, looking for a pass, there wasn’t a pass and they were playing sharing balls.

“They had a lot of long balls that didn’t quite get there. They didn’t have that crafting guile that they’d normally have in the middle of the park.

“We’re decent, if you look at the form, the last 10 games going into this one, we’ve lost two and that was against Victory and Sydney. We’ve played Brisbane Roar, Western Sydney Wanderers, and Adelaide United. We’ve done really well.”