Muscat refused to “individiualise” the result and believed it was a poor performance all round by the team in the highly anticipated Melbourne derby.

Goalkeeper Lawrence Thomas was beaten by Socceroo legend Tim Cahill, whose wonder goal from 40 metres out opened the scoring in a dark day for the Big V.

“If you’re looking to blame someone, blame me, don’t blame Lawrence (Thomas) because I asked him to stay there,” Muscat told reporters post-game.

“I don’t want it to turn into a witch hunt and if you’re looking to blame someone go for me.

“I’m not going to sit here and name individuals, if anything I’ll take responsibility.”

The Victory boss also felt empathy for the supporters, a crowd of 43,188 turned out but the stands were empty for the final 20 minutes.

“A big turnout for our members and fans (and) it was the worst possible start we could’ve had" Muscat said.

"(City) set a standard real early, with a couple of challenges, nothing untoward, really strong and physical.

“We didn’t come to grips with it and then we concede a great goal and the biggest disappointment apart from the embarrassment of treating our fans with such a poor performance is we didn’t really recover.

“If anything we went into our shell and lost composure, lost confidence and from that point it became a really long night.”

Muscat believed Victory could not perform any worse and looked to bounce back against Adelaide United next Saturday.

He added that the Melbourne Derby rematch in the FFA Cup semi-final in nine days had no current relevance to the loss.

“Next game (against City) is irrelevant, tonight’s game will be treated in isolation, we’ve got a game in between that semi-final and what we saw tonight can’t happen again and it won’t happen again,” he said.

“It was so far from our normal standard is that I suggest there’s no reason to panic and I certainly won’t. We’ll get back to work on things and I suppose after that, it’s a big knock to the jaw tonight.

“Everyone involved in the football club will take a day to get over that but I won’t have anyone coming back to work on Monday thinking about what’s gone, we’ll be looking forward, we’ll prepare and plan to go across to Adelaide and I don’t think will be too difficult to improve on that performance tonight.”