Saturday’s loss to Adelaide United felt like a carbon copy of the week prior, when Perth Glory fell 1-0 to Sydney FC. The pattern was almost identical: an early, preventable goal conceded followed by more than an hour of chasing the game against a deep, organised block.
This isn’t a new problem. If anything, it’s been thrown into sharper relief by Adam Griffiths’ desire to shift the Glory toward a more possession-oriented identity. That intention, in itself, isn’t an issue. What it has exposed, however, is a long-standing deficiency: Perth Glory have lacked the capacity, mechanisms and attacking clarity to turn sustained possession into meaningful output.
Put simply, under David Zdrilic or Alen Stajcic, it was rare to see the Glory dominate possession or territory. The approach was primarily transitional; cede the ball, then strike quickly. At times, it worked. Under Stajcic in the 2023/24 season, the Glory were dangerous on the counterattack and regularly found the net. At other times, particularly last season under Zdrilic, it led to momentum starvation and a scarcity of chances.
What’s become increasingly evident over the past 18 months is that when the Glory do have the ball, they often struggle to do anything of consequence with it, especially in attack. Matches where possession tilts in their favour frequently resemble sterile control rather than incision, and obviously, goals.
Saturday’s loss to Adelaide was a textbook example. The Reds needed just one moment, Craig Goodwin’s strike from the edge of the box, to secure all three points. Perth Glory, by contrast, recorded almost double Adelaide’s final-third entries and more than five times as many penalty-box entries, yet barely tested Josh Smits. Territory and volume meant little without quality.
The underlying data reinforces a broader pattern, and it’s one that predates Adam Griffiths. This is not a coaching issue in isolation; it’s an institutional one. Functionally, Perth Glory have been a poor attacking side for years. Under Griffiths, defeats have often followed a familiar script: heavy reliance on crosses and little variation in how chances are created. Against Adelaide, the Glory delivered 33 crosses, 26 occurring in the second half alone.
The issue, then, isn’t simply the absence of proven goalscorers like Adam Taggart or Jaiden Kucharski. It’s that the Glory consistently fail to create optimal shooting conditions, situations where shots are taken from high-value areas and genuinely test the goalkeeper. This season, Perth Glory are last in the A-League for their percentage of shots on target (23.7%), and third last for their conversion rate (6.1%). Those numbers are a symptom, not the disease.
That context is what made Griffiths’ recent comments to The West Australian particularly interesting. Asked which coaches influenced him most, he cited the “vertical”, possession-based, movement-heavy philosophies of Maurizio Sarri, Marcelo Bielsa, Luciano Spalletti and Jorge Sampaoli.
When I watch football as a coach, I don’t want to be bored. I want to watch football that excites me… That’s what I’m hoping to implement here at Perth.
Referencing those names doesn’t mean the Glory will suddenly resemble Sarri’s Napoli or Bielsa’s Leeds. But over time, it should signal an evolution in how possession is used; not just to control games, but to destabilise the opposition. It’s no coincidence that Newcastle, Sydney and Auckland sit among the league’s top scorers this season; they don’t just have the ball, they know how to weaponise it – particularly the Jets, who were outstanding against Sydney FC on Saturday.
Those sides also have the player profiles to execute those ideas. Expecting Griffiths to instantly transform Perth Glory’s attacking output is neither fair nor realistic, especially when considering the personnel available.
Against Adelaide, the front line featured Arion Sulemani, yet to score an A-League goal; Nicholas Pennington, not a natural winger or scorer; Trent Ostler, rarely a goal threat; and Tom Lawrence, who, despite an excellent month, cannot carry the attack alone.
Real cohesion and improvement won’t arrive until key attacking pieces – Taggart, Kucharski, Lachie Wales and Sebastian Despotovski – are consistently available. But tactically, it’s reasonable for fans to expect progress in how the Glory attack. Not overnight, but incrementally.
That means moving the ball through the thirds with greater purpose, combining quicker and cleaner around the box, and encouraging more forward movement to create overloads, angles and better shooting conditions. It means reducing predictability and finding alternatives beyond hopeful delivery from wide areas.
My sense is that Adam Griffiths’ early work has been about functionality rather than style. While interim, and only recently confirmed as the main man, there’s only so much that can be introduced at once. Expecting a fully formed, coherent game model under those circumstances was always unrealistic.
If the influences he’s referenced are to materialise, the coming weeks and months should bring clearer evidence of those principles taking shape. Griffiths is right, the team has a long way to go. But meaningful progression is essential, not just to fix a blunt attack, but to establish a balanced, sustainable game model capable of giving Perth Glory a genuine chance of playing finals football.
All images courtesy of Tom McCarthy.
