Despite a good run of form, and expectations of a large parochial crowd for the do-or-die encounter, the WA team head into the match knowing they were defeated by Heart 2-1 at home earlier in the season.

Heart have struggled for wins in the latter part of the season but did enough to make the top six in only their second year in the A-League and Thompson has downplayed any notion the young side will be overawed by the big occasion.

“It’ll be a tough game," Thompson told the official Football Federation Australia website. "We're going to be in Perth, they’re going to have 15-20,000 people there, so they have pressure on them. But we’ve beaten Perth in Perth before so I don’t see why we can’t get a result.

“I don’t think there’s pressure (on us). We’ve scraped into the finals over the last couple of weeks - 10 weeks ago we were sitting second or third, and had a bad run and were fighting it out with a couple of other teams. But we knew if we ever got in the finals that we’ve beaten the top sides and there’s no reason why we can’t give it a good shake."

The midfielder is also confident Heart's squad of talented youngsters has what it takes to overcome the predatory threat of Glory striker, Shane Smeltz, who knocked four past Melbourne Victory the week before.

“Smeltzy’s a quality player but I don’t think you go into a game just worrying about him – we’ll worry about us and we believe we can be better," Thompson said.

“Our strengths are having a lot of sharp young players and mobility in the midfield and upfront, so we’d like to think we can catch teams on the counter, but if we have to sit back and absorb a bit of pressure we can do that too.

“The last month hasn’t been too fantastic but we haven’t been losing - we’ve been finding ways to grind out a result and along the way we had a good result against central coast and Brisbane.

"It’s a final and I know it’s a cliché but anything can happen. Our away form’s better than our home form anyway, so it doesn’t worry us.

“It’s easy to say let’s play without fear but when you go to the game, you don’t want to make mistakes. And we do have a young side and there’ll be a few boys that might be feeling a bit nervous.

“But a lot of those boys have played 15-20 games this year so it’s not like they’re just getting broken in. We knew if we got into the six, on our day we’re a top side and we can only worry about us.

“Everyone’s right, we’ve got 23 players training for the first time in a long time. We’re looking forward to it, we’re going to lap it up and we’ve got something to show.”