Victory finished last on the table in both the 2015/16 and 2016/17 W-League seasons, but have shown significant improvement in the current campaign.

Victory have retained a number of players from the past two seasons including Laura Spiranovic, Annabel Martin, MelindaJ Barbieri and Gulcan Koca.

Victory are coming off a 2-1 loss to Sydney FC at home last week which put them out of the finals race.

Hopkins admitted it was difficult to motivate the players without having consistent victories to back it up.

“I think there are lot of players that are scarred from the last two seasons and were scarred a lot worse than they actually thought,” Hopkins said.

“Things have moved on, but still there’s a bit of a shadow over the last couple of years, so we have to do something to remove that.

“It’s hard when you try and tell these players how good they are, but if they don’t believe in themselves, when everyone is so positive around them, I don’t know. It makes it very, very difficult.”

Hopkins gets booked in the Sydney FC match.

Victory are sitting seventh on the table as they go into their last game against bottom-placed Adelaide United on Friday night.

Hopkins still found positives after the loss to the Sky Blues who are currently championship contenders.

“Belief is a massive thing with a lot of the players here, I said to the girls after last week’s game that Sydney will be very close to winning the championship, if not winning it,” he said.

“To put in a 45 minutes like we did against them, I felt we dominated the second-half as much as they dominated the first, but 45 minutes just isn’t good enough.

“I think individual players and the team in general, belief comes from succeeding and we’ve definitely moved on from last year.

“The team is better and we’ve got one win more than last year at the moment going into the last game.”