After Craig Goodwin gave Adelaide the lead, a City side desperate to return to winning ways piled on the pressure.

City's two debutant strikers, Jamie Maclaren and Tottenham Hotspur loanee Shayon Harrison pressed tirelessly from the front.

Eventually, they got their reward when Luke Brattan capitalised on a tired Adelaide clearance, delivering a cross to Maclaren that the Socceroo backheeled into the net.

"It's a dream start," Maclaren said.

"(Brattan) should have played it earlier, but ultimately it was a great ball from Brattsy. Obviously scoring is great and it's been a tough week for us. To score in front of my family is amazing.

"I had a a difficult week before I came because I wasn't training. Of course, I know the player's faces but when you play together as a team it can be difficult to mould, but tonight it all came together.

"It was a bit nitty gritty but my job was to press hard and try to force mistakes, there are positives to take from it."

Adelaide defender Jordan Elsey lamented his team's inability to see out the win, as the under-pressure Reds failed to show their quality throughout the second half.

"We want to win the game and we didn't want to try and sit back but it worked that way, but we get the point and we stay above them in the table," Elsey said.

"We've played against them all numerous times so we knew what to do, yeah he scored against us but we move on.

"We will play the same, we didn't want to sit back but we dropped too deep, they came with a lot of pressure. But, we'll look at the video and work out what to do next time."

Never one to over-emphasise or criticise overtly, Warren Joyce backed his two new strikers' influence on the match.

"I thought we started slow," Joyce said.

"But then we worked out way into the game and created good chances. Probably the best of them all fell to Floran (Berenguer) but he missed the ball.

"We've played well the past few weeks and often got no points, but Shay (Harrison) did well, a good performance from (Maclaren), he's had a lot of jet lag and had to integrate into a new group, so they've done brilliantly.

"In Maclaren we signed a player for the future."