Melbourne City are reeling from their grand final humiliation but coach Rado Vidosic is confident his charges won’t be haunted by it going into next season.
The premiers copped a 6-1 hammering from Central Coast in Saturday night’s decider at CommBank Stadium.
It was their third loss in four consecutive grand final appearances and their heaviest defeat under Vidosic, who admitted he couldn't explain where things had really gone wrong, beyond the feeling that the Mariners had wanted the win more.
“I can't blame the players. What they've done this season for us has been unbelievable," he said.
"I'm so privileged to coach them and this is going to hurt us, but we are definitely going to learn from it and next season we'll try to come back and do it better."
The veteran mentor pointed to City's form after losing last year's grand final under Patrick Kisnorbo, as proof of his side's resilience.
"We lost the grand final last year and I think we started with five wins out of six and one draw," he said.
"It didn't affect us from losing last year so hopefully it will not affect us this year.
"We've got (Asian) Champions League to look forward to and then we've obviously got the start of the season."
Star attacker Mathew Leckie said there weren't any immediate discussions among the players post-match.
"There hasn't been really anything said. That's quite normal after a loss like that," he told reporters.
"The season's over and we're on the bad end of it. So it's just very quiet in there.
"We obviously have our time off now, we're on holiday and go back in and really all we can do is continue to work hard as we always do.
"We always want to get better and I think the past three years we've shown how good we can be."
Leckie and Maclaren could head into Socceroos camp in the next two weeks but for City, the off-season will come with significant change.
Skipper Scott Jamieson is retiring, Jordan Bos is bound for Belgium while Tom Glover, Marco Tilio and Aiden O’Neill are also likely off to Europe.
“If we turn over half the team, all the new players will look forward to this experience and all the old players will be hurting when they come back,” Vidosic said.
“I'm quite positive that everyone is going to give everything that they've got to correct this day in one year's time.”
