Far from battening down the hatches, Melbourne Victory coach Kevin Muscat has urged his players to be risk-takers in Saturday's Melbourne A-League derby.
The champions head into the contest as underdogs, an unlikely position for a side with every trophy available in the last year sitting in the club's AAMI Park office.
But if three away losses in the past fortnight has shaken the outside world's confidence in his side, Muscat says there's no lack of belief among his players.
"Certainly there's no confidence loss in the group," he asserted on Friday.
"Yes, it's foreign territory for us but that's the way the competition is.
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"We'll roll our sleeves up and go again."
Their horror fortnight - with losses in Auckland, Western Sydney and in Perth on Wednesday - is the first time Victory have lost three in a row without scoring.
Until Friday, Muscat maintained the torrid schedule was the "price of success" Victory was happy to pay, given the Perth trip was rescheduled due to their FFA Cup final win.
But the faintest cracks of pressure on the champion coach showed when he revealed the club unsuccessfully petitioned Football Federation Australia to play it during a 12-day break in January.
Either way, Muscat knows there will be no hiding from a failure in their home town.
City stand to go four points clear of Victory with a fourth-straight win.
Muscat's solution is to encourage his players to make like the Victory of their championship-winning campaign and roll the dice.
"At the moment is we're taking the easy option, trying to be safe and that's not the make up of the team, the team we want to be," he said.
"We're not taking the opportunity to play the ball forward, we're taking the opportunity to make those runs forward because it comes with a risk.
"We've got to out and take those risks because that's where we reap the most benefits."
There will be no mass change-up of players in response to the schedule or the losses.
Matthieu Delpierre will return at centre back after being spared the Perth match, with Daniel Georgievski to come back into the starting line-up.
Archie Thompson will be named as a substitute for his first match of the campaign.
