Of course the ladder never lies – well, only very occasionally – at season's end, and teams inevitably finish where they should.

But there are whole matches, halves and individual incidents within games that sometimes take on larger significance when the reckoning at the end of the campaign is made.

Sometimes it's a poor refereeing decision which disallows your team a goal; sometimes it's a wrong call that gives the opposition a penalty or allows them to score a dodgy winner.

Sometimes it's a catastrophic error by a defender which is punished accordingly; on other occasions it's a goalkeeping blunder which costs you the points.

And sometimes, it seems, it's simply not your night, an entire match in which you batter the opposition, create chance after chance and continually come up short. The opposition goalkeeper produces a stunning save. You hit the woodwork, you miss a hatful of chances, you are simply fated to not score.

That is the beauty of the game. Unlike any other, it's not a sport utterly dependent on territorial domination. In footy or the rugby codes if you have the ball twice as much as the opposition and attack incessantly you are going to win on almost every occasion.

Not so soccer, where territory is not necessarily king. Defending in depth, playing on the break, clogging up space and stopping your opposition from playing are also skills, even if they are hardly the ones that fans appreciate.

So while Victory has every right to feel frustrated, annoyed and disappointed at their failure to close the gap at the top of the table on Sydney and Melbourne City, some credit must go to their opponents Perth Glory who proved, with a large slice of luck, that there are many ways to skin a cat when three points are up for grabs.

Missing numerous key players – including former Socceroo Rhys Williams and last year's Johnny Warren medallist Diego Castro – Kenny Lowe's men dug in and put in a solid shift. Yes, they are physical, yes, they were defensive, but they were good enough to take the only real chance they had and organised and lucky enough to cling on for a point, a result their candid coach cheerfully admitted they didn't really deserve.

For Victory it's not all doom and gloom, despite what some of their more vociferous fans may think.

There is a touch of alarmism amongst supporters of the former champions, although that may have as much to do with the rise and rise of City – who won the FFA Cup Final on Wednesday night – as it has with the performances of Kevin Muscat's team.

Victory has not lost since their controversial defeat against Sydney in round 5 and will finish round 9 in the top four at the very least, with a game in hand on their rivals. They have also scored 17 goals in their eight matches, so are averaging better than two a game. There is not that much to be worried about really but perception counts for a great deal.

The evidence, on the Perth game anyway, is that Victory on its day is capable of creating multiple chances and playing some excellent football. It's just that there haven't been too many days when it has all clicked, when Fahid Ben Khalfallah, Besart Berisha, Marco Rojas and James Troisi all hit their groove together.

Rojas has had an interrupted start to the season, his appearances disrupted by All Whites call-ups for World Cup games and international friendlies.

Troisi damaged his shoulder in the opening round against Brisbane and missed several games. He is working his way into peak fitness now but his confidence would surely be lifted if he could score his first goal of the season: his keenness to get on the scoresheet is obvious from the number of shots he has in a game, especially from longer range.

The coach has also been vocal this season in his advocacy for striker Besart Berisha, whose game does not seem to have the sharpness of previous years although he was on hand to poach Victory's equaliser on Friday night after Dino Djulbic's horror mistake set him up from close range.

Berisha was for several seasons A-League's leading scorer, but his place at the top of the hit list has now been usurped by City skipper Bruno Fornaroli while Perth forward Andy Keogh is also proving his worth in the west on a regular basis.

Many were critical of the Albanian when he seemed to refuse to celebrate Marco Rojas' second goal in Victory's win over Newcastle when it looked like he was upset that the Kiwi winger took the chance himself rather than pass to Berisha.

Muscat, however, sticks up for a player who has, in his defence, been a great servant for Victory since switching from Brisbane. Coaches see games differently to fans and he argues that the work Berisha gets through creates space and chances for his team-mates and his reputation and ability always ensures that he takes the opposition's leading defender, and sometimes two of them, making life easier for others in the Victory attack.

That is all true, but Berisha himself would want to lift his scoring rate. This season he has hit the net five times, but two of them have been from the penalty spot.

Overall Victory could have recruited better in the off season, and if they have aspirations to be not just Australia's best team but one of Asia's they need to have a stronger squad with more depth.

Spanish centre back Alan Baros is not, on the evidence of what we have seen so far, a Matthieu Delpierre, but then it would have been almost impossible for Muscat to find a defender of the Frenchman's class and persuade him to leave Europe for the A-League.

He got lucky once, but that sort of lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, and after Delpierre's retirement any replacement was likely to be regarded as a stop gap or inferior.

Oliver Bozanic is being paid as a marquee man but looks more like a jobbing midfielder with each game that goes by. He cops a fair amount of criticism from the stands and in fan forums and it is all linked to his status on the club's payroll. If he was getting half or a third of his stipend then there wouldn't be so much expectation, and nowhere near the level of disappointment: this, don't forget, is a player who started in a World Cup game against Spain in Brazil barely two and a half years ago.

Muscat praised his contribution on Friday night although he substituted him with 17 minutes remaining, replacing him with another squad player who does a job but offers little excitement in Rashid Mahazi. He, however, is not costing the club a pretty penny and knows that his main role is to fill in when first teamers are suspended or injured.

On the plus side Lawrence Thomas has shown remarkable patience and dedication and is now cementing his spot as the team's number one goalkeeper and looks like becoming a permanent fixture for a long time, while the redoubtable Leigh Broxham continues to offer sterling service in midfield or at the back in any position Muscat chooses to use him.

In addition Fahid Ben Khalfallah, in the past two games, is showing signs of the form that made him such an explosive new signing in Victory's last championship season, 2014-15. The Frenchman is getting on in years and doesn't have long to go at the top level of the game, and it would be a fitting tribute to his own ability, and to Victory, if he could maintain that level of performance through to the end of the season.

There is improvement to come, and Victory will need to lift to get itself into a top two position: but there are still 18 regular season matches remaining, and plenty to play for. Muscat's men will play worse than they did against Perth on Friday night and win other games by three or four goals as the season unfolds.